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SOCIAL TRUST Toward a Cosmopolitan Society TIMOTHY C. EARLE and GEORGE T. CVETKOVICH PRAEGER Westport, Connecticut London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Earle, Timothy C. Social trust : toward a cosmopolitan society / Timothy C. Earle and George T. Cvetkovich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-94845-5 (alk. paper) 1. Social psychology. 2. Trust (Psychology). I. Cvetkovich, George. II. Title. HM251.EI8 1995 302--dc20 94-45265 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1995 by Timothy C. Earle and George T. Cvetkovich All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-45265 ISBN: 0-275-94845-5 First published in 1995 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America ∞ + ™ The ⃝paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 As images of time were shifting and the horror of stagnation in the tomb was taking deeper root, the shore, that place of longing where the elements converge, offered the sight of the restless sea to all those who feared the miasma and sought out the foam instead. Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea I am seeking a knowledge that is finally adult, a balanced wisdom, a certain forgetfulness of death. It is not a bad thing to place oneself on the verge of my picture, where wildness begins, and where knowledge begins. Places of transition are always fecund. Michel Serres, Literature and the Exact Sciences Contents PREFACE xi PART I SOCIAL TRUST: PAST Chapter 1 Social Trust: An Introduction 3 Chapter 2 Social Trust: Traditional Interpretations 21 Chapter 3 Complexity and Social Trust 33 P ART II SOCIAL TRUST: PRESENT Chapter 4 Strategies for Simplicity, One, High Resource Demand, Individual Focus 45 Chapter 5 Strategies for Simplicity, Two, High Resource Demand, Community Focus 57 Chapter 6 Strategies for Simplicity, Three, Low Resource Demand, Individual Focus 69 Chapter 7 Strategies for Simplicity, Four, Low Resource Demand, Community Focus 85 P ART III SOCIAL TRUST: FUTURE Chapter 8 Social Trust Based on Cultural Values 105 Chapter 9 Narrative, Human Life, and Social Trust 127 Chapter 10 Social Trust: Moving from a Pluralistic to a Cosmopolitan Society 143 NOTES 159 REFERENCES 193 INDEX 211 Preface Our friend and colleague, Jacques Lochard, suggested this classic case of social trust. A man walks along a seashore. He sees a disturbance among the grains of sand spread before him. The man is Robinson Crusoe, and he sees the form in the sand as the print of a human foot. A single print. Of a single foot. Since Crusoe had long thought of himself as the sole human inhabitant of "his" island, the print, though singular, was significant. It wasn't, he was certain, his own. And social trust enters here. Crusoe must decide if the footprint is a sign of good or a sign of evil. He must decide, in other words, if the footprint was made by someone like him--someone similar and friendly to him--or was made by someone different from and antagonistic to him. Robinson Crusoe's choice was this: he could decide that the footprint was made by a friend, or he could decide that the footprint was made by an enemy. The choice was between similarity and difference. Between trust and distrust. According to Defoe, Crusoe made the latter decision. He chose distrust. He fortified his positions, and he prepared to defend himself. Why? On the evidence available to him, a simple disturbance-- perhaps a human footprint--in the sand, Crusoe could as well have decided that rescue, at long last, was at hand! But no. Crusoe decided that his enemy--someone different from him, not his rescuer--had unsettled the sand. And in choosing distrust over trust, Crusoe chose his past over his future. Crusoe's adventurous past was burdened by bad experiences with other people. His future, of course, was unknown. Crusoe chose to make his future like his past. And his past ruled his future for many years. Until he was presented with an opportunity to change his mind. And he did. He decided that Friday, escaping from his captors, was like him-- that Friday was a man he could trust. From then on, Crusoe's future was free from his past--he could make of it, try to at least, what he pleased. The story of Robinson Crusoe tells us this about social trust: it is based on cultural similarity. We trust people we take to be similar to us. And similarity is a matter of imagination, narration, and persuasion--not of evidence and ar- gument. We create similarities when we want to move into the future; we uncover differences when we prefer to stick with the past. Like Robinson Crusoe, we can choose to move forward or backward; we can enter the future or remain in the past. The struggle between the past and the future is a central theme of our book. It consists of three parts: Part I on the past, Part II on the present, and Part III on the future of social trust. In the course of this story, from the past to the future, we come to distinguish two forms of social trust--pluralistic and cosmopolitan. Pluralistic social trust occurs within groups and is based on existing values. Rooted in the past, pluralistic social trust tends toward singularity and stasis. Cosmopolitan social trust is an across-group phenomenon and is based on emerging values. Open to the future, cosmopolitan social trust favors multiplicity and change. Pluralistic and cosmopolitan social trust support opposing ways of life. This struggle--between past and future, singular and multiple, stasis and change, pluralistic and cosmopolitan social trust--is endless, a part of life. As Richard Rorty might say, there are connoisseurs of the past and connoisseurs of the future. In this book, we try to identify ourselves as the latter. And our story of social trust is the story of gradual movement from the pluralistic to the cosmopolitan. We have been very fortunate in the development of our understanding of social trust to have benefited from discussions with and comments from a number of colleagues and friends. Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, Robin Gregory, Karl Dake, Tim McDaniels, Roger Kasperson, and Ray Badard were all generous with their ideas and encouragement. Our major intellectual debts are owed, on a general level, to Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, who together express the brilliant multiplicity of cosmopolitanism. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Decision, Risk and Management Science and Ethics and Values Studies programs of the National Science Foundation. Finally, there are two persons without whom this book could not have been written. Jacques Lochard, our model cosmopolitan, and Bo Earle, from whom one of us (T.C.E.) learned all he knows about trust. We thank them, cosmopolitans all! Timothy C. Earle George T. Cvetkovich Spring, 1995 SOCIAL TRUST Part I SOCIAL TRUST: PAST In "Part I, Social Trust: Past," we present an account of the ways people have, up until the present time, thought and talked about and dealt with social trust. There are three chapters. In Chapter 1, we begin by describing the recent growth of interest in social trust, particularly in the field of environmental risk management. We then outline the history of social trust, from ancient to modern times. Finally, we describe the pioneering empirical studies of trust in mid-twentieth-centuryAmerica. In Chapter 2, we describe the interpretations of social trust that have traditionally dominated public discourse on the subject in America, and we show the relations of those traditional accounts to American democratic culture. In Chapter 3, we suggest an alternative interpretation of social trust as a strategy for the reduction of cognitive complexity. This description provides the context in which social trust is compared with its functional equivalents--other complexity-reducing strategies--in Part II. -1-