Trust and suspicion

Whenever philosophers, poets, statesmen, or theologians have written about man's relationship to his fellow man, to nature, or to animals, the phenomena of and faith and responsibility and irresponsibility, have been discussed. The significance of the phenomena of and suspicion in human life is attested to not only by past preoccupations but also by current concerns. Discussion of such problems as the armaments race, mental illness, the hidden persuaders, and juvenile delinquency frequently employ such terms as trust, suspicion, betrayal, faith. Past preoccupations and current concerns make it apparent that the concept of trust and its related concepts are vital to the understanding both of social life and of personality development. Yet an examination of a half-dozen or more of the leading textbooks in social psychology (e.g., texts by Cartwright and Zander, Homans, Krech and Crutchfield, Lewin, Lindsey, Newcomb) reveals that the word trust does not appear in any of their indexes. So far as we know, the research summarized in this paper represents the first attempt to investigate experimentally the phenomena of trust.