The social mechanisms of trust

Abstract

In the last decades, problems of trust and cooperation in general have received much attention from scholars working in various scientific disciplines. In particular, research in the field of analytical sociology has focused on the emergence of trust in embedded settings investigating the individual decisions of the actors involved. These studies have lead to the identification of three social mechanisms affecting trust in embedded settings: Control, learning, and imitation. In this paper, I review the main theoretical models underlying these mechanisms, discuss the link between these models and a number of prominent definitions of trust found in the literature, and review the experimental research on these mechanisms.