On the Trustee’s Side: Trust As Relational Capital - Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model - page 296

So, the relationship between trust and reputation is more dialectic: trust of community
members in Y indirectly contributes to Y 's reputation; and reputation contributes to their
individual and diffuse trust in Y . Moreover, reputation is not just a mental object, a piece of
information we use for evaluating Y , but is an emergent sociological phenomenon, beyond the
individual mind.
10.5 Conclusions
As we said, individual trust capital (relational capital) and collective trust capital should not
only be disentangled, but their relations are quite complicated and even conflicting. In fact,
since the individual is in competition with the other individuals, he is in a better position when
trust is not uniformly distributed (everybody trusts everybody), but when he enjoys some form
of concentration of trust (an oligopoly position in the trust network); while the collective social
capital could do better with a generalized trust among the members of the collectivity. Agents
compete and invest to cumulate their individual 'trust capital' (or 'relational capital'), even by
showing their superiority and the low trustworthiness and ability of the competitors, or even
by propagating false information about the others and a bad reputation (Conte and Paolucci,
2002).
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