Social Cognitive Trust Model

The literature of small group dynamics is replete with studies emanating from small group experimentalists interested in the subject matter of trust. Trust and trusting relationships have been explored more notably by researchers utilizing small group network communications paradigm (Mackenzie, 1978). Because of the salience of trust to interpersonal and intergroup functioning activities aimed at realizing social group objectives, network communication researchers have focused on a set of variables. There are notions of personalities that are prone to easily trusting others. Self-esteem, self-concept, and self-efficacy do matter (Homans, 1974). There are individual attributes predisposing persons to cautious trusting. The situation or transaction linking parties in a social exchange may also condition the structure of trust manifest from such parties. Experiences gained by social intimates in working together have been known to constrain the texture of trust between them. There exists a natural tendency for a party once trusted to a positive avail, to be readily accorded more trust in future (Frey & Feld, 2002). There exists a social cost to trusting ventures, when a social transaction involving trust has a material cost impact, questions of how such cost is shared will arise. And pose challenges to fair exchange. In business transactions, parties expecting certain considerations from a contracted deal may often insist that all reasonable effort should be exerted to avert disappointment. In formal business relationships, individuals occupying organizational positions as agents will often have to relate to other agents in the regular course of business. The persons and parties engaging in trusting situations are not doing so in a cultural vacuum. Social mutual awareness, perceptual variations, historical antecedents, social learning, and episodes of intellectual experiences dove-tail into social cognitions of trust.