Definitions of Trust: From Conceptual Components to the General Core - Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model - page 2

This theoretical framework:
should take inspiration from and further analyze the common-sense notion of trust (as
captured by natural languages), as well as the intuitive notions frequently used in the social
sciences, but
should also define a technical scientific construct for a precise characterization of trust in
cognitive and social theory, while at the same time
accounting for precise relationships with the most important current definitions of trust, in
order to show what they all have in common, regardless of their different terminological
formulations.

We believe this generalization and systematization to be both possible and necessary. In this
chapter, we will start identifying the most recurrent and important features in trust definitions,
to describe them and explain their hidden connections and gaps. This will be instrumental
to a twofold purpose: on the one hand, we will show how our layered definition and quite
sophisticated model can account for those features of trust that appear to be most fundamental;
on the other hand, we will discuss why other aspects of current definitions of trust are just
local, i.e. relevant only for a very specific problem or within a restricted domain. In this
analysis, we will take as initial inspiration Castaldo's content analysis of trust definitions
(Castaldo, 2002).
This critical effort will serve both to clarify the distinctive features of our own perspective
on trust, and to highlight the most serious limitations of dominant current approaches.

1.1 A Content Analysis
In dealing with the current 'theoretical negligence' and conceptual confusion in trust defini-
tions, Castaldo (Castaldo, 2002) applied a more descriptive and empirical approach, rather
different but partially complementary to our own. Castaldo performed a content analysis of
72 definitions of trust (818 terms; 273 different terms), as employed in the following domains:
Management (46%), Marketing (24%), Psychology (18%), and Sociology (12%). The survey
covered the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, as described in Table 1.1:

Table 1.1 Number of trust definitions in different periods

Year Definitions Fraction

1960-69 4 (5.6%)

1970-79 5 (7.0%)

1980-89 19 (26.4%)

1990-99 44 (51.0%)

Total 72 (100.0%)

This table is from Castaldo. For more sophisticated data
and comments, based on cluster analysis, see (Castaldo,
2002).
Source: Reproduced with kind permission of C 2002

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