Toward A Multiscale Account of Trust

Trust is a coordinating mechanism for much of the natural world; however, accounts of trust are largely confined to the individual human scale. We outline an account of trust that is applicable to human and non-human agents at individual and collective scales. It defines trust as a strategy to mitigate uncertainties inherent to coordinating with other agents by heuristically assuming those uncertainties to be low, based on a wager on their predictability, benevolence, and compatibility. Trust is predicated on the risk of betrayal, a belief updating so costly that it makes the successful allocation of trust and distrust critical. Successful trust allocation saves energy otherwise spent on monitoring, verification, and control. Such affordances also expand the knowledge and agency of trustors and encourage interdependence and specialization, facilitating collective world-modeling and coalescence into agents at new scales of complexity. Hence, any agent’s coordinated behavior may rely on trust-like mechanisms within and between its constituent subsystems. Trust may also emerge between different scales of organization, such as between individuals and institutions. We synthesize trust’s allostatic, phenomenological, and informational properties in a multiscale fashion. On the basis of this account, we suggest work in cognitive science, biology, and anthropology to improve our understanding of wide ranging phenomena including therapeutic alliance, placebo, and social cohesion. A multiscale study of trust may reveal the scale-invariant means by which trust enables living systems, from individuals to societies, to emerge and flourish or to fracture and collapse.