Trust in Social Interaction: From Dyads to Civilizations

Abstract

Human trust can be construed as a heuristic wager on the predictability and benevolence of others, within a compatible worldview. A leap of faith across gaps in information. Generally, we posit that trust constitutes a functional bridge between individual and group homeostasis, by helping minimize energy consumed in continuously monitoring the behavior of others and verifying their assertions, thus reducing group complexity and facilitating coordination. Indeed, we argue that trust is crucial to the formation and maintenance of collective entities. However, the wager that trust represents in the face of uncertainty leaves the possibility of misallocated trust, which can result in maladaptive outcomes for both individuals and groups. More specifically, trust can be thought of as a scale-invariant property of minimizing prediction error within ascending levels of social hierarchy ranging from individual brains to dyads, groups and societies, and ultimately civilizations. This framework permits us to examine trust from multiple perspectives at once, relating homeostasis, subjective affect and predictive processing/active inference at the individual level, with complexity and homeostasis at the collective level. We propose trust as a paradigmatic instance of an intrinsically dialectical phenomenon bridging individual and collective levels of organization, one that can be observed in daily experience and empirically studied in the real world. Here, we suggest collective psychophysiology as a promising paradigm for studying the multiscale dynamics of trust. We conclude with discussing how our integrative approach could help shine light on not only the bright but also the dark sides of trust.

Interpersonal attunement in social interactions: from collective psychophysiology to inter- personalized psychiatry and beyond

“…All of these instances of interpersonal attunement can be thought of as facilitating human communication, collaboration and eventually trust-based social relationships, by virtue of locally decreasing interpersonal complexity [ 7 , 14 ], while providing new tools of self-regulation at the individual level. Indeed, from developmental psychology to social neuroscience and psychiatry, an increasing number of findings have demonstrated the critical role of interpersonal coordination in the development and maintenance of our social—and even individual—abilities.…”

“…In other words, by engaging in sensory-motor couplings with others in social interactions, we have our bodily structures mutually transformed beyond the here and now [ 20 , 30 ]. Second, such structures, arguably, unfold within nested time and space scales, from biology and cognition all the way up to society [ 14 , 31 , 32 ]. That is, these multi-scale dynamics encompass bottom-up and top-down processes, even outside the skull of individuals, and thus solving such dialectic requires accepting the complementary nature of reduction and emergence [ 33 ].…”

Blockchain governance and trust: A multi-sector thematic systematic review and exploration of future research directions

“…Many research papers conclude that trust is the root of all social interactions [ 10 , 11 ]. Trust is based on three factors [ 12 ].…”