Reconsidering the Empirical Measurement of Trust towards Unknown Others

Ákos Bodor, Zoltán Grünhut, Dávid Erát and Márk Hegedüs ()
Additional contact information
Ákos Bodor: Institute for Regional Studies, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, 7621 Pécs, Hungary
Zoltán Grünhut: Institute for Regional Studies, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, 7621 Pécs, Hungary
Dávid Erát: Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Pécs, 7624 Pécs, Hungary
Márk Hegedüs: Institute for Regional Studies, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, 7621 Pécs, Hungary

Social Sciences, 2023, vol. 12, issue 10, 1-18

Abstract: Trust towards unknown others is a fundamental issue in trust research. Actually, it can be said that this problematization is a generative source for the whole scientific framing of trust, regardless of its specific perspective, whether it is a psychological, situational, institutional or structural-cultural interpretation. This means that the notion of ‘generalized trust’ is definitely a core concept and a reference point for all research agendas in the field of trust studies. However, this status of the notion is heavily criticized both from a theoretical and empirical point of view. The current paper tries to contribute to these academic discourses by proposing an extended reading of the concept of trust towards unknown others. By doing this, the paper suggests that the focus cannot be only on the aspect of how one perceives others’ trustworthiness, which is measured by the so-called ‘standard trust variable’; it should also be considered how the given agent relates herself/himself to other people’s otherness. Therefore, the argument simply claims that trusting people in general means being open to others’ otherness. If this link cannot be explored, then trust in unknown others is constrained and limited. Using data obtained from the last two rounds of the European Social Survey, the paper presents a 31-country-based comparative statistical analysis realized on both macro- and micro-levels in order to find out whether the above-described theoretical linkage is verifiable or not.

Keywords: trust towards unknown others; otherness; standard trust variable; European Social Survey; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/10/583/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/10/583/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:12:y:2023:i:10:p:583-:d:1265365

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().