Deliberate Trust and Intuitive Faith: A Dual-process Model of Reliance

• In Event: 221 - Regular Session. Sociological Theory: Calculation, Cognition, Choice, and Motive

Abstract

In this paper, we provide a reconciliation between approaches to the study of trust that distinguish between “rational” calculation and that of irrational “affective” or normative motivations by drawing on dual process theory from social and cognitive psychology. We highlight three problematic conflations of previous attempts to develop process based typologies of trust: (1) between conscious decision-making and calculation, (3) between affect and intuitive processing, and (3) the final conflation between intuitive judgment and ignorance of facts or objective conditions. We argue that the notion “reliance” can be used as a higher order category of which different kinds of “trust” which we refer to as “deliberate trust” and “intuitive faith” are subtypes. We develop the implications of our argument around three registers: (1) the problem of ontological versus phenomenological uncertainty, (2) the role of intuitive faith in late modern societies, and (3) the problematic status of conscious deliberation as the “modal” form of trust in contemporary treatments on the subject. We conclude with a juxtaposition of our dual-process model of reliance with a classical approach to the subject taken from economic sociology: Granovetter’s (1985) “structural embeddedness” solution to the problems of trust and malfeasance. In all, our argument shows how applying a dual-process model to all forms of reliance can move trust research forward, while providing sound footing for a key sociological insight: that reliance on the routine social order is both the cognitive default and based on substantial practical evidence.

Author

• Dustin S. Stoltz, University of Notre Dame