The Importance Of Trust

In our everyday life, we come across different types of people, situations, events, and environments. The interactions between the individuals depend on implicit under- standing of relationship across society. This implicit understanding between individ- uals is based on the confidence that the individuals can gather and emanate during the relationships, the personal and professional connections bonding the individuals, societies, cultures, and a host of other factors. When I meet a new car mechanic, I feel confident to give him the responsibilities of repairing my car based on my personal interactions or hunch about his abilities, his credentials, the company he represents, and a host of other factors. In other words, my decision to ask for

However, I may not have enough trust in him repairing my computer and so on. Each individual, in general, carry some amount of

33prejudices based on past experiences or history which are generally used to determine the trustworthiness of a person the individual is interacting with.

4.1

Definition of Trust

Trust is a fascinating subject, and social scientists have researched into the concept and developed theories around it. One of the most popular definitions of trust was coined by Deutsch which states that, “(a) an individual is confronted with an am- biguous path, a path that can lead to an event perceived to be beneficial or to an event perceived to be harmful; (b) he perceives that the occurrence of these events is contin- gent on the behavior of another person; and (c) he perceives the strength of a harmful event to be greater than the strength of a beneficial event. If he chooses to take an ambiguous path with such properties, he makes a trusting choice; else he makes a distrustful choice.[2]”

This definition was further extended again by Deutsch later in 1973, where he defined trust as confidence that an individual will find, what is desired from

Reputation as defined in

Merriam-Webster is “Overall quality or character as seen or judged by people in gen- eral.” The concepts of reputation and trust are therefore closely related. Reputation is the metric generally used by individuals based on word-of-mouth, or past history to determine the trustworthiness of a person or things. The inter-relation between trust and reputation is widely exploited in day-to-day activities. Students looking for higher educations rely on institute rankings to determine the quality of the institute, or in other words the rankings of the institute determine the trust the students can put on the quality of education the institute will provide. In this case, the reputation is determined by the rank of the institute. However, this is not at all straightforward in all cases. When I read an article on the Internet, I base my judgment on a host of different criteria: the credentials of the authors who had written the article, the conference or journal where the article has been published, and so on. Therefore, determining the reputation of some system or individual may be based on a host