Affective Trust and the Role of Social Norms in Constructing Faith in Others.

Abstract

This dissertation introduces the concept of affective trust to complement the extant notions of particular and general trust in political science. While particular trust comes to explain how people generate localized expectations of others that vary across different contexts, general trust accounts for one’s default context-invariant expectation that others will act cooperatively. This project comes to explain trust in the intermediate case, in which our expectations vary across contexts, even though we lack individuated information regarding a specific agent. I argue that affective trust is a warm expectation that others are likely to act cooperatively, generated in light of social norms or institutional regularities. Social norms are the right kind of contextual feature to generate trust, since they construct both conditional preferences to act as well as first and higher order expectations that others can be expected to conform too, eliciting blame and reactive attitudes when this sort of expectation is upset. I build this account over four substantive chapters. In the first I use Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man to demonstrate the shortcomings of extant understandings of trust, while also indicating the need to rely on social conventions in order to construct trust. The second chapter offers a conceptual analysis, building conceptual intuitions by using a series of simple 2 by 2 games that come to identify trust squarely in situations of motivational uncertainty. The third chapter looks toward traditional political theory to claim that affective trust has political efficacy. Building on the recent literature on sentimental political theory, I claim that trust is the sort of epistemic feature that can explain political motivations. Using Smith, Machiavelli, and Hobbes I show the distinctly political character affective trust can take. Finally, in the fourth chapter I reflect on interviews I conducted with U.S. Christian Missionaries serving abroad to illustrate and demonstrate the plausibility of this theory. These individuals operate in environments where they lack information about the people to whom they reach out. I find that the identification of and with social norms facilitates their ability to trust others and is resonant with their experience of faith in God.