Trust

The aim of this paper is to put forward an ethical framework for the conceptualization and development of ethics audits, here understood as a catalyst for company dialogue and in general, for management of ethics in the company. Ethics auditing is understood as the opportunity and agreement to devise a system to inform on ethical corporate behavior. This system essentially aims to increase the transparency and credibility of the company's commitment to ethics. At the same time, the process of elaborating this system allows us to introduce the moral dimension into company actions and decisions, thereby completing a key dimension of the production, maintenance and development of trust capital. To this end, the following four steps are taken. First, we analyze the relation between ethics auditing and trust as a basic moral resource in the dialogue between the company and its various stakeholders. Second, we examine the social balance sheet as a precursor to ethics auditing and focus on what prevents it from going further. Third, we attempt to reconstruct the basic moral assumptions underlying the company's social responsibility from the discourse ethics approach. Finally, we present a methodological framework from which to carry out our proposal, which embraces two basic theoretical perspectives: stakeholder theory and the values derived from discourse ethics as a normative framework.

"In recent years new applications emerged on the Web which received the labels Web2.0 or social software. In many of these applications people are engaged in epistemic activities, such as the dissemination, organization or creation of knowledge. The goal of this thesis is to analyze the epistemological relevance of such epistemic social software. Because communication and interaction between multiple agents seems to be the key to understand the epistemic processes within such systems, social epistemology, the philosophical discipline exploring the ways and the extent to which knowledge is social, was chosen as a theoretical framework. However, none of the existing comprehensive social epistemologies delivers a sufficient framework to analyze epistemic social software. Therefore, I have developed a new socio-epistemological framework to analyze epistemic social software which is rooted in socio-epistemological discourse, but amends it with insights from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS).

My framework is founded on a tripartite classification of socio-technical epistemic system based on the mechanisms they employ to close socio-epistemic processes. These three mechanisms are integration, aggregation and selection. With this classification I do not aim at reducing the differences between systems to their mechanisms of closure. However, I argue that the classification based on this indicator is heuristically fruitful. Systems employing different mechanisms of closure depend on different social, technical and epistemic prerequisites, have different strengths and weaknesses and are optimal for different epistemic tasks. My model puts a fact into the focus that has been neglected so far in social epistemology: the technical and its relationship to the social and the epistemic. Since most epistemic practices are nowadays pervaded by technologies, such a consideration of the role of technologies in these practices seems to be indispensable for any social epistemology that aims at being not only normatively appropriate, but also empirically adequate."

The thesis explores potential challenges and opportunities for blockchains and International Relations (IR). The thesis also explores how IR can help understand blockchains as new conceptual phenomena. The thesis broadly questions: what do blockchains mean for IR? And, what does IR mean for blockchains? Institutions and power are taken to be significant for the exploration because they represent crucial IR concepts. Blockchains are explored as regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutions and as compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive power. Blockchains are argued to provide challenges and opportunities for discipline of IR and the practice of international relations. IR can understand blockchains through the concepts of institutions and power.

Erikson's ideas on basic trust are reviewed, along with a briefer review of Winnicott's thoughts on the importance of trust for the psychoanalytic process.  I seek to answer the following questions about mistrust by patients in their analysts.  (1) What is mistrust?  Is it a developmental arrest or deficit?  Or is it more accurately understood as a defense against intimacy and vulnerability.  (2) Is there a special relationship between mistrust and trauma? (3) When and to what degree is mistrust normal or healthy? (4) What personality types or clinical syndromes are prone to mistrust? (5) How problematic is mistrust for a psychoanalytic process?  Is trust a prerequisite for psychoanalytic treatment.  Can mistrust be analyzed, or can trust be earned?

The paper aims to investigate the theoretical assumption that the value system (according to the Schwartz model) is associated with compliance with recommendations to combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the theoretical assumption, persons whose value system emphasizes social focus and whose values are self-transcendence and conservation will comply with measures to a greater extent. On the other hand, people whose value system is focused on personal focus and whose values self-direction and openness to change will be less compliant with measures for combating the spread of the virus. The research was conducted in three Southeastern European countries – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia using a survey of 1024 students. The Schwartz scale on basic human values was used as a research instrument. The research was conducted at the very beginning of the pandemic (March and April 2020). The results of the hierarchical regression showed that the values of openn...

Trust is a key factor in the development of collective action, and thus in the performance of communities, institutions and society. Seminal scholarship has greatly valued the social virtues of trust and to a lesser degree those of caution. Consequently, scholars have expressed concerns regarding the socialist ‘legacy of distrust’, which have negatively influenced processes of democracy and development in the post-socialist states. While quantitative measurements of trust have become standard in cross-national surveys, in depth qualitative research has remained exceptional but helpful. By employing a mixed-method design of cross-national analysis of secondary data and qualitative examination of 69 in-depth interviews in a post-‘socialist city’, this paper investigates the determinants of (dis)-trust in post-socialist Romania. The analysis draws attention to the entwined social and rational origin of trust and distrust. Findings show that institutional trust has risen from practically zero due to better public management and freedom to express opinions. However, institutional trust has remained low due to perceptions of widespread bribery and favouritism – not necessarily experienced but reinforced through social learning and the media – and to a general discontent with some institutions, particularly the police, the political elite and the judiciary. Conversely, interpersonal trust has been rapidly declining though it had not entirely vanished and has remained generally confined to families and bounded groups. By growing social distrust, people have reacted to the increasing social inequality during the post-socialist transition and its associated figures of the insular individualist and predatory capitalist. This does not invalidate the thesis of socialist ‘legacy of distrust’, but significantly adds to it. Data quantification suggests that the effect of increasing social inequality during transition is six times stronger than the effect of persistent communist legacies on current levels of social distrust. This has important policy implications, which are outlined in this paper.

This paper investigates how large multinational corporations use multimodal meaning-making resources to communicate a trustworthy corporate identity. It combines insights from Forceville’s work on pictorial and multimodal metaphor (Forceville 1996, 2002; Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, 2009) and key features of Fuoli and Paradis’ (2014) model of trust-repair discourse to examine the discursive dynamics of trust- building in a corpus of promotional corporate videos produced by some of the world’s largest corporations. The analysis shows that multimodal metaphors are deployed as key persuasive devices to promote three fundamental attributes of the companies’ trustworthiness, i.e. ability, integrity and benevolence.

This paper sheds some light on how trustworthiness is constructed through multimodal resources in corporate discourse and contributes to our understanding of the discursive dynamics of trust, which is still limited and fragmentary (Fuoli and Paradis, 2014; Linell and Keselman, 2011). But the study also carries implications for cognitive linguistic theory, in particular for conceptual metaphor theory. Three theoretical issues requiring further discussion are highlighted: (i) the distinction between conventional and novel metaphor and the question of ‘deliberateness’ (Steen, 2008), (ii) the usefulness of the notion of metaphor scenario (Musolff, 2006) as a descriptive tool in the realm of multimodal discourse, and (iii) the adequacy of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) model versus Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 1996, 1998; Grady et al. 1999) for describing novel multimodal metaphors and accounting for the evaluative function they can perform in persuasive multimodal discourse.

Keywords: pictorial and multimodal metaphor, conceptual metaphor theory, blending, trust, corporate multimodal discourse

•“We have to question the integrity of the White Paper proposals… both in terms of whether the promised economic and social benefits really will flow from these plans and the extent to which it is really markets rather than students who are now being placed at the heart of the system.

Since anonymous agents can spread misinformation with impunity, many people advocate for greater accountability for internet speech. This paper provides a veritistic argument that accountability mechanisms can cause significant epistemic problems for internet encyclopedias and social media communities. I show that accountability mechanisms can undermine both the dissemination of true beliefs and the detection of error. Drawing on social psychology and behavioral economics, I suggest alternative mechanisms for increasing the trustworthiness of internet communication.

High-tech products (such as smartphones, notebooks, and tablets) have been characterized as being increasingly similar between brands, having too many slightly different choices, and providing complex information. In buying these products, many consumers fi nd it diffi cult to differentiate between brands, evaluate over alternatives, and make a good purchase decision. Such situation is known as consumer confusion phenomenon. Previous studies have revealed that consumer confusion is becoming a problem for both consumers and marketers. However, the topic still needs further examination, especially in the context of a developing country. The present study aims to examine consumers ’ general tendency to become confused and its effect on word of mouth, trust and consumer satisfaction. The product context is smartphones, while the sample consists of 150 university students who had experiences in using or buying smartphones. Nine research hypotheses were tested using multiple regression an...

Successful business-to-business (B2B) data exchanges can help firms improve interorganizational cooperation and operational practices, thereby increasing competitive advantage. However, data exchange quality and trust are not assured. Further, although researchers have examined how trust in the exchange partner relates to data exchange system success, both trust and distrust may be important to consider. Using two-factor theory and trust theory, we examine the differential impacts of information quality, system quality, and service outcome quality on trusting and distrusting beliefs. We also study whether trusting and distrusting beliefs have differential influences on relationship commitment and perceived risk. Results from a laboratory experiment show that information quality, a process (i.e., motivating) factor, more strongly influences trusting beliefs than distrusting beliefs, whereas service outcome quality, an outcome (i.e., hygiene) factor, more strongly influences distrusting beliefs. Also, while trusting beliefs has a significantly stronger influence on relationship commitment, trusting and distrusting beliefs have equivalent effects on perceived risk. Implications and ways to expand this research are discussed.

Trust is critical for social life, and yet it is alarmingly fragile. It is easily damaged and difficult to repair. Philosophers studying trust have often noted that basic kind of trust needs to be in place in order for social life to be possible. Although philosophers have suggested that basic trust must exist, they have not tried to describe in explicit terms what this basic trust looks like, or how it comes to be. In this article I will identify and describe a basic form of trust that I call recognition trust. It is a latent expectation we have in others to respect our moral status as persons. By conceptualizing recognition trust, I can explain why trust is not just a useful tool for social cooperation: having our personhood recognized is necessary for living a minimally decent human life, and trust is a necessary element of recognition. First, I motivate the need for conceptualizing a basic form of trust by looking at cases of moral injury and our inherent vulnerability. Such injuries involve the betrayal of an expectation we have in others to recognize us as persons with moral status. Second, I dig deeper into this basic human need of recognition that is thwarted in moral injuries. I argue that fulfilling this basic need requires a particular kind of trust that others will not morally injure us. Third, I give shape to recognition trust by describing its core features, showing why it is a candidate for basic trust. Finally, I defend my concept of recognition trust against a pair of objections.

Although e-retailing in India has witnessed vast advancement, consumers' worries regarding ethical issue continue to rise. Intense competition, easy switching of consumers from one website to another and the thrust to get the larger pie of online market make the e-retailers indulge in unethical business activities. The lack of physical interaction between the buyer and the seller in the online environment makes it even more challenging. Thus, this study addresses the ethical issues in Indian perspective and examines its impact on online consumers repurchase intention through online trust. This study uses the determinants of CPEOR model (reliability, security, privacy and non-deception) and SPSS-21 is used to test the hypotheses. The results show that all the ethical attributes have direct significant positive impact on online trust. Furthermore, online trust has significant positive impact on repurchase intention.

This paper aims to explain the effect of the banking customer experience on trust and the effect of the latter on customer loyalty,
thus complementing previous research where it is suggested to clearly explore the nomological network of the constructs that
act as mediators in the relationship between customer experience and customer loyalty. The sample consisted of 1231 users
of the bank in Cuenca-Ecuador who are part of the generation known as millennials, a segment of interest due to their great
attachment to technology and purchasing behavior. The structural equations model and PLS (Partial Least Square) software
were used for data analysis. The results show that there is a significant effect of customer experience on trust in banking and
in turn a similar effect between customer trust and loyalty. Furthermore, it is confirmed that trust represents a variable that
precedes loyalty. The behaviors of millennials as they are knowledgeable about technology and experts in using the Internet to
search and purchase products, show a relationship between the variables that are part of the proposed model that is applied in
the banking sector.

The development of the joint-stock company in the nineteenth century challenged the foundations on which business had hitherto been based. Given the scale of company operations, it was unlikely that investors would have direct contact with boards of directors. Companies therefore developed mechanisms to foster trust in the new impersonal economy. This chapter identifies a tension between new forms of trust formation (usually involving ‘objective’ statistics enshrined in balance sheets and financial reports), and old ones (faith in the character of the gentlemen behind a business). Focusing on a case study of a major fraud, this chapter argues that investors tended to rely on the perceived character of the directors. In exposing the unreliability of these traditional processes of trust formation, the scandal prompted the state to attempt to improve access to objective data on companies, and this chapter ends by examining the reasons for the failure of these reforms.

Published in: Tom Crook, Glen O'Hara (eds), Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800-2000 (Routledge, 2011).

Reciprocal altruism is common in humans (Niamir-Fuller, 1998, Gurven, 2004), however, its evolution is paradoxical; theoretically the more one is trusted, the better the outcomes from oneshot prisoner's dilemmas, although for individuals the best outcomes are when trust is not reciprocated. Most real life games are not oneshot, but iterated where trust develops through past actions (Cárdenas and Ostrom, 2004). Furthermore, in social-ecological systems outcomes are driven by biophysical context. In rangelands, our focus, low levels ...

Ecosystem service provision in agriculture may require cooperation between farmers. Trust fosters cooperation in many economic and social interactions and is important to the success of traditional agricultural cooperatives. Little is known about how trust affects farmers' willingness to cooperate to provide an ecosystem service, what types of trust are most important, and under what conditions trust may matter. In this study, we present results of a survey of Missouri crop farmers exploring the role trust plays in farmers' stated willingness to cooperate to control pests. We find that most farmers say they are willing to cooperate, and most farmers are willing to trust others. However, we find little evidence that trust positively influences farmers' willingness to cooperate to control pests. Instead, we find that trust may only matter under certain conditions, such as when participants' farms are dissimilar, and that other determinants, such as the perceived benefit of cooperation and environmental concern, are more important than trust to farmers who are contemplating cooperation to control pests.

The first to advance a theory of the neuroticism of society was K. Horney. Her work is the foundation for a discussion of the concept of normality, in opposition to which the meaning of neuroticism is established, and which is viewed as a sketch of contemporary western culture. This neuroticism is expressed not only in specific activities of individuals, but is also present in patterns composing culture. The mechanisms of individual and community functioning presented in the article are compared to the issue of shaping interpersonal relations, where a visible fall in trust and social engagement by individuals can be discerned. These two factors have a negative influence on the process of communication. Additionally, the individuals taking part in it draw on cultural patterns which are immersed in neuroticism. This all leads to increasing difficulty in engaging in an act of deep communication with another person, and in turn to the impoverishment of interpersonal relations