Axioms of Trust—The Foundation of All Things
Trust is a social construct that is arguably the most significant factor for the survival of intelligent life. Its outputs, competition, and cooperation are ubiquitous across all social species.
Defining axioms of a conceptual space better helps us negotiate the construct of trust, which is becoming ever more convoluted through the mediation of technology—partner selection, distributed consensus, and most notably, scientific, statistical correlation.
As social beings striving to create intelligent life with bits instead of atoms, we must think of our intelligent technologies as social technologies. Developing new systems and ecosystems expands social constructs that include trust. Addressing more complex constructs like innovation, inclusion, or democracy must first be built on similar axioms within conceptual spaces.
Trust can be categorized into the five following functional categories placed within two groups:
Predictive Confidence - subjective computational functions
Mental Models
Risk Assessment
Reward Assessment
Valence - introspective functions
Emotional State
Social Memory
With the addition of a third group, accuracy, we can measure the objective placement of confidence and valence. With these three axioms of trust—confidence (C), valence (V), and accuracy (A), where each has respective gradients of high (+), low (-), and neutral— regions can also be identified where one can find five different flavors of trust:
Trust - willingness to make oneself vulnerable and maintain the subjective probability the trustee’s behavioral outcome will result in positive utility. (+C, +V, +A)
Distrust - the willingness to not make oneself vulnerable and maintain the subjective probability the trustee’s behavioral outcome will result in negative utility. (+C, -V, +A)
Mistrust - is a measure of misplaced Trust, where the trustor’s mental model has low accuracy. (+C, +V, -A)
MisDistrust - is a measure of misplaced Distrust. (+C, -V, -A)
Untrust - is the unwillingness to make decisions about vulnerability. (-/+C, neutral V, -/+A)
These ideas are founded on a meta-study I previously conducted on the social neuroscience of trust and related game theoretic experiments.