On the Trustee’s Side: Trust As Relational Capital - Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model - page 275

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On the Trustee's Side:
Trust As Relational Capital

In most of the current approaches to trust, the focus of the analysis is on the trustor and on the
ways to evaluate the trustworthiness of possible trustees. In fact, there are not many studies
and analyses about the model of being trusted . But trust can be viewed at the same time as
an instrument both for an agent selecting the right partners in order to achieve its own goals
(the trustor's point of view), and for an agent to be selected from other potential partners (the
point of view of the trustee) in order to establish a cooperation/collaboration with them and
to take advantage of the accumulated trust. In the other chapters of this topic we have focused
our attention on the first point of view.
In this chapter 1 we will analyze trust as the agents' relational capital . Starting from the
classical dependence network (in which needs , goals , abilities and resources are distributed
among the agents) with potential partners, we introduce the analysis of what it means for an
agent to be trusted and how this condition could be strategically used by him to achieve his
own goals, that is, why it represents a form of power.
The idea of taking the trustee's point of view is especially important if we consider the
amount of studies in social science that connect trust with social capital related issues. Our
socio-cognitive model of trust (see previous chapters) is about the cognitive ingredients for
trusting something or somebody, and how trust affects decisions, which are the sources and the
basis for trusting, and so on; we do not model what it means to be trusted (with the exception
of the work on trust dynamics (Chapter 6) in which the focus is also on the reciprocation and
potential influences on the trustworthiness) and why it is important.
Here we address this point, analyzing what it means for trust to represent a strategic resource
for agents who are trusted, proposing a model of ' trust as a capital ' for individuals.

1 We thank Francesca Marzo for her precious contribution on the first reflections on this topic.