Trust, Control and Autonomy: A Dialectic Relationship - Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model - page 192

7.1.5 Relying on Control and Bonds Requires Additional Trust:
Three Party Trust
To our account of trust one might object that we overstate the importance of trust in social
actions such as contracting, and organizations; since everything is based on delegation and del-
egation presupposes enough trust. In fact, it might be argued - within the duality framework -
that people put contracts in place precisely because they do not trust the agents they delegate
tasks to. Since there is no trust people want to be protected by the contract . The key in these
cases would not be trust but the ability of some authority to assess contract violations and
to punish the violators. Analogously, in organizations people would not rely on trust but on
authorization, permission, obligations and so forth.
In our view (Castelfranchi and Falcone, 1998) this opposition is fallacious: it seems that
trust is only relative to the character or friendliness, etc. of the trustee. In fact, in these cases
(control, contracts, organizations) we are just dealing with a more complex and specific kind
of trust. But trust is always crucial.
As Emile Durkheim claims 'A contract is not sufficient by itself, but is only possible because
of the regulation of contracts, which is of social origin' ((Durkheim, 1893) p. 162), and this
social background includes trust, social conventions and trust in them, and in people respecting
them, the authorities, the laws, the contracts (see Chapter 9).
We put control in place only because we believe that the trustee will not avoid or trick
monitoring, will accept possible interventions, will be positively influenced by control. We
put a contract in place only because we believe that the trustee will not violate the contract,
etc. These beliefs are nothing but trust .
Moreover, when true contracts and norms are there, this control-based confidence requires
also that X trusts some authority or its own ability to monitor and to sanction Y , see (Castel-
franchi and Falcone, 1998). X must also trust procedures and means for control (or the agent
delegated to this task).
To be absolutely clear, we consider this level of trust as a three party relationship :itisa
relation between the client X , the contractor Y and the authority A . And there are three trust

A

X's Trust in (fear of) A

Y's Fear of (Trust in) A

X Y

X's Trust in Y

Figure 7.4 Three party relationships among Trustor, Trustee and Authority