Authors: Sandro Castaldo
One common feature of studies on trust is the variety of the construct’s typologies and the lack of a clear and generally agreed definition of the concept. This failure of alignment has been responsible for a lot of ?communication? problems among scholars. Often, when they suppose they are referring to the same construct, they are in reality dealing with very different concepts and types of trust. Academic comparison thus becomes sterile, and this causes different (and sometimes conflicting) interpretations. For these reasons and for further knowledge developments it is useful to order and clarify the polyhedral nature of trust. To fully appreciate the increasing complexity of trust literature, a review of the major research areas has been carried out. This makes it possible to understand the conceptual pitfalls of the construct, and the dimensions used to define the various trust typologies. The paper analyses: (1) the conceptual nature of the construct (expectation, belief, willingness, confidence or attitude) (2) its different dimensions (cognitive, emotional and behavioral aspects) (3) different trust typologies (target- content- and strength-based).
Journal: ( – )
Web Address:
Publish Year: 2003
Conference: Lugano, Switzerland (2003)