The Role of a Culture of Trust and Well-Being Economy for Democracies of Complex Knowledge Society Responding to the Challenges of Today’s Technological Super-Cycle

Trust is studied based on the idea that it is a topic whose importance can be said to date back to the emergence of Man, but whose analysis by scientists is relatively recent: This article records the contribution of various social sciences to the development of the construct ‘trust’, seeking to arrive at a unified conceptualization of the concept, organizing the phenomenon of trust into two essential dimensions: trust as an attitude, a dimension in which the cognitive process has a more emotional support; and a dimension more based on measurable perceptive indicators, more operationalizable and less affected by emotional factors. The study of these two dimensions of the concept is carried out on two levels: bibliographical research of the most significant authors who have attempted to define the concept, in the various perspectives from which it can be approached; questionnaire research, to characterize the representation of the concept of trust and its socioeconomic and cultural impact, by a sample of subjects of various ages, backgrounds and professions, with privileged preparation on the subject. The expected result is to outline the facets of the trust construct, to make the concept operational for the study of relational contexts at the individual, organizational and societal levels as a whole, in a context of response to the expansion of AI systems in various productive activities.