Trust as a social emotion
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5902/2179378693794Keywords:
Trust, Emotion, Society, Cooperation, Reasons for actionAbstract
The development of trusting relations is one of the central aspects of human sociality. Trust makes it possible for people to count on and cooperate with each other, creating the conditions for people to achieve goods and promote their interests and well-being. Yet, justifying trust can be a vexing task. This paper offers a proposal on the nature of trust and its possible justification that aims to combine both cognitive and emotional aspects into a unified account, seeking to reconcile two opposing tendencies in the literature, namely, rationalist and emotional views. Trust should be understood as a normative relation of a special sort and a combination of restricted rationality and emotional “amplification”. More specifically, it involves a complex two-level social emotion that plays a dual role: it partly responds to the truster’s available evidence about the trustworthiness of others, but also goes beyond this evidence by expressing a form of optimism that never eliminates vulnerability and risk. Thus, trust is a kind of practical optimism and openness cultivated within social environments. As such, the only possible justification for trust will be ultimately “subjective”.
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