Trust and Sociability: On the Limits of Confidence and Role Expectations

Abstract

A bstract Trust is distinguished from confidence in that the latter rests on knowledge or predictability of the alter's actions, while trust is necessary to maintain interaction in the absence of such knowledge. While confidence may have many different bases, trust is a preeminently modern phenomenon, resting, ultimately on the self‐regulating, autonomous individual. It emerges concomitantly with the moral privileging of the private realm and of individual conscience. Contemporary developments associated with late or postmodern culture and society are however calling into question this model of the individual and with it the potential for trust to exist beyond the realm of regulations and constraints. V ladimir I lych L enin is said to have remarked: “ Vertraun ist gut, Kontrol noch besser ”–trust is good, but control is much better. In this saying we find what I think is a distinction critical to any preliminary understanding of trust‐that is, the distinction between trust and confidence ( control in Lenin's terms). Control or confidence is what you have when you know what to expect in a situation; trust is what you need to maintain interaction if you do not. 1