The anxieties of the 1950s intensified as the Cold War heated up. JFK ’s election promised a New Frontier, and then his assassination extinguished that flame. On the one hand, the civil rights, Chicano (El Movimiento), women’s, student democracy, labor union, environmental, and public interest movements of the 1960s promoted a robust government response in which Congress passed hundreds of new laws to address the concerns raised by the movements. LBJ’s Great Society also included an array of social program that addressed the extraordinary level of poverty in the country. On the other hand, the Vietnam War significantly dampened the hopes for a Great Society as tensions arose between those for and against our continued presence in Vietnam, weakened trust in government. The political movements added to this lack of trust when they supported legal procedures to make sure that government did its job. As faith in government receded, and the reaction to the extraordinary expansion of government intensified, the table was set for a new allegiance to a market economy.

Chapter 6 points out that people’s searching for information plays an important role in understanding different forms of distrust. People especially tend to be oriented toward what authorities think of them, in part because authorities have power over people and can exclude them from important groups or grant them permission to become full-fledged members of those groups. Furthermore, how institutions evaluate someone conveys important symbolic information whether they are viewed as a valuable member of society. In turn, when someone assesses or suspects that their views are not taken seriously into consideration, this increases the chances of distrust in the social institutions at hand, and the people representing those institutions. Processing information about what happens in society in an abstract way tends to facilitate the formation of distrusting attitudes. A central theme of this book is that fairness and justice are taking place where the individual meets the group. That is, whether your group (including your community and society) treats you in a fair way reflects how the group and important members of the group think of you. Experiencing concrete instances of unfair treatment has special significance and increases the chances of judgments of distrust to develop and flourish.

Racially fearful White Americans regularly call 911 at the first sign of a “suspicious” Black person in their predominantly White space, be it a neighborhood, country club, or exclusive academic institution. These calls are met in force by armed government agents all too ready to enforce the color line.

Determining whom to trust and whom not to trust has been critical since the early days of ancient civilizations. However, with the increasing use of digital technologies, trust situations have changed. We communicate less face-to-face. Rather, we communicate with other people over the Internet (e.g., Facebook) or we interact with technological artifacts (e.g., chatbots on the Internet or autonomous vehicles). This trend towards digitalization has major implications. It affects both the role of trust and how we should conceptualize trust and trustworthiness. In this chapter, insights on phenomena related to trust in a digital world are reviewed. This review integrates findings from various levels of analysis, including behavioral and neurophysiological. The structure of this chapter is based on four different scenarios of trust in a digital world that were developed by the author. Scenario A describes a technology-free situation of human-human interaction. Scenario B outlines a situation of computer-mediated human-human interaction. Scenario C denotes a situation of direct human-technology interaction. Scenario D refers to a situation of computer-mediated human-technology interaction. The common denominator of all situations is that a human acts in the role of trustor, while the role of trustee can be either another human or a technological artifact.

Many different scientific disciplines have come to some type of agreement as to how trust and distrust are similar to one another and how they are different. Elucidating the mechanisms involved in trust and distrust holds the important potential of improving the way people communicate with one another and are able to work effectively within groups. In this chapter, scientific literature on what constitutes trust and distrust will be summarized and reviewed. This research shows that while trust and distrust are opposite to one another in some respects, trust and distrust also each include a set of unique social, cognitive, and emotional attributes. Furthermore, this chapter seeks to develop a cohesive model of the neurobiological basis for trust vs. distrust. Lastly, this chapter will explore several open questions and directions for future research will be discussed.

This chapter offers a broad reflection on the difficulties and challenges that the notion of trust presents for judges. After a historical excursion, it demonstrates how basing the operation of an area of law on trust is likely to clash with a rich and powerful bundle of ideas and historical experience at national level. This epilogue invites us to consider a shift in paradigm from law based on trust to trust based on law: ‘Seen this way, trust is not a pre-requisite for the law, but rather something that the law and social interaction generate. Trust becomes the end destination, not the starting point.’

This chapter focuses on the crucial issue of building trust both ways, and the need for many of the intermediaries to behave in a Janus-faced fashion. They have to play up their commitment to the funders and global actors in certain settings while then playing down their global connections in local settings where there is a distrust of foreign connections. As in the previous chapter, this illustrates that the use of intermediaries’ foreign capital is not solely to their benefit, as the value of their capital is affected by the existing distrust of foreign interests. The chapter concludes that trust building and relationship building can be seen as prerequisites for successful rule of law assistance and are the focus of much donor effort. However, because foreign actors cannot supply prior proof of trust, it is the known actors, such as intermediaries, who instead take on the role of trust builders.

This chapter introduces two concepts to understand the dynamics at the Juba Peace Talks between the Lord’s Resistance Army/Movement (LRA/M) and the Government of Uganda. For the LRA/M, the main way of approaching the talks was through a mechanism of ‘connect/disconnect’. The LRA/M progressed by alternating its levels of engagement and kept control by maintaining a fluid, often a vague process. Progress and change came through reaching out in certain moments; control was maintained by pulling back in others. In contrast, international actors supporting the Juba Peace Talks function on a mechanism of ‘galvanic surges’: To continue support to the talks needed continuously developing momentum and consensus to remain committed to the peace talks. Running in parallel, the two approaches created a syncopated rhythm. Profound misinterpretation occurred in moments when external momentum hit a period of lesser LRA/M engagement; at other times, strong LRA/M engagement did not coincide with external momentum. The two operational modes mismatched and thus outside support and reassurances for the process were withdrawn just when the LRA/M had entered a time of adjustment.

This chapter uses the dynamics in the Juba Peace Talks between the Lord’s Resistance Army/Movement (LRA/M) and the Government of Uganda to unpack distrust as a characteristic of the conflict system in Uganda. Internally, distrust acted as a control mechanism for the LRA/M. Externally, it contributed significantly to the LRA/M’s failure to establish itself as a reliable negotiation partner. The struggle for recognition translated into having to pull together an unwieldy fabric of internal interests with often contradictory motivations. The Juba Peace Talks confirmed the workings of the ‘system’ LRA/M that continues to function on its internal trust and distrust between actors of the LRA and the LRM, as well as in collaboration with the government as all groups continuously infiltrate each other. This permanent playing-off of loyalties and betrayals in a system is a crucial reason why the conflict has continued for so long. Unable to get a peace deal signed, the conflict system of LRA/M and Government of Uganda emerged from the Juba Talks internally strengthened. This meant that the Juba Talks had served to confirm beliefs and the conviction that it was correct to act on them, rather than transform a conflict.

The rule of law is about the law’s ruling. Law rules when it provides protection and recourse against the arbitrary exercise of power through the distinctive instrumentalities of law. But law can rule in a political community only when its official and lay members take responsibility for holding each other accountable under the law. An ethos of fidelity is fundamental to the vitality of the rule of law. However, it is often argued that a practice of accountability generates a culture of suspicion and distrust: accountability drives out trust. The demand for accountability stems from and publicly expresses distrust. But, then, if accountability is at the heart of the rule of law, and distrust is the condition and consequence of accountability, we cannot look to the rule of law to underwrite a robust program of controlling the exercise of ruling power. This the “trust challenge” to the rule of law. In this paper, I argue that the trust challenge can be met, that accountability does not depend on or express distrust. On the contrary, I argue, accountability is a key component of trust-supporting moral and social relationships. Fidelity and trust are compatible and mutually supporting.

Political (Dis)Trust and Fiduciary Government analyzes the relationship between two key ideas in modern political thought: political trust and fiduciary government. The chapter begins with fiduciary government. Miller distinguishes ‘thick’ from ‘thin’ variants on the idea of fiduciary government. Thick variants place substantial normative weight on the idea, claiming, for example, that it solves the problem of political authority and provides an independent normative basis for the recognition of specific legal rights. Thin variants make much more modest claims. Miller’s own thin account, deployed here, suggests that fiduciary government articulates conditions under which the conduct of government can be understood as truly representative. By comparison with this thin conception of fiduciary government, an understanding of political trust as a particularized (or focused) and objective (or manifest) form of trust shown (or withheld) by citizens in public officials does distinct work. Briefly: it illuminates understanding of the political conditions and activity on which fiduciary government depends. That said, Miller also notes that ideals of fiduciary government and of political trust, where instantiated, dovetail: demands of fiduciary government enable public officials to prove trustworthy in ways that promote political trust, while also creating space for constructive forms of political distrust.

Many young men are frustrated because they feel they are not taken seriously. Many argue forcefully that they want the opportunity to express themselves and be valued as individuals, as well as being given the opportunity to contribute to national development. Indeed, what is the point of the government allocating such a large portion of the budget on education if the youthful population is not going to be heeded and encouraged? If this does not occur then the result will be a waste of the Kingdom’s considerable human capital. Furthermore, if decision-makers believe that young people are in no position to participate in the socio-political and economic processes, then young Saudis will feel that they are being neither listened to nor taken seriously. In contrast, and frustratingly, a young Saudi can get his message across to a global audience through the social media networks that are so widely used. In Saudi Arabia this sense of marginalization can have serious ramifications. Young men bored and frustrated can start getting into fights and driving recklessly or joyriding. This sense of marginalization and boredom is also a contributing factor in increased substance abuse and mental health issues.

In most of the literature, trust is treated as a binary concept: either you trust or you do not trust. Here, the authors argue that this is wrong. Whereas the opposite of knowledge is ignorance, i.e. the absence of knowledge, the opposite of trust (a positive expectation) is not simply the absence of this positive expectation but a negative expectation (distrust). In between trust and distrust there is yet a third option: the suspension of trust (mistrust). To disregard this distinction has serious consequences: opinion polls ask people whether they trust doctors or not. If people answer ‘no’, it remains unclear whether they have suspended their trust or whether they harbour negative expectations. Belief-in, hope, reliance, and confidence are often used interchangeably with trust. This intermingling leads to misunderstanding, as several examples illustrate. Hence, it is mandatory that we distinguish these terms. As the authors demonstrate, this can be achieved by using pattern-based definitions of these related concepts. The chapter ends with a closer look at the role that these four often-conflated concepts play in the patient–physician relationship in separate subsections.