Research on Trust

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Trust is one of the most studied concepts in the social sciences. It has been examined by psychologists, economists, sociologists, neuroscientists, political scientists, and organizational researchers, each asking a different question and finding a different piece of the answer. The breadth of that inquiry is itself part of the point. Trust is not a soft idea. It is a foundational condition of human cooperation, and the research treating it as such goes back decades.

A Brief History

Serious academic study of trust accelerated in the 1970s and grew significantly through the 1980s and 1990s. Early researchers focused primarily on trust as an individual psychological trait, asking whether some people were simply more disposed to trust than others. In early research scholars associated trust and distrust with an individual's expression of confidence in the intentions and motives of others.

Two landmark publications shaped the field's direction in the late 1980s and 1990s. Diego Gambetta's 1988 edited volume Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relatio ns and Frances Fukuyama's 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity both brought trust into conversation with economics, social capital, and civic life. A number of themes in these two volumes set the agenda for subsequent research, including efforts to understand the linkages between trust and economic development.

Robert Putnam's work on declining civic participation further widened the frame, connecting individual trust to the health of communities and democratic institutions. For Putnam, the core claim was one of the demise of social capital, which included declining social trust.

The most influential model in organizational trust research came in 1995, when Roger Mayer, James Davis, and F. David Schoorman published An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust in th e Academy of Management Review. Prior approaches to studying trust are considered, including characteristics of the trustor, the trustee, and the role of risk. A definition of trust and a model of its antecedents and outcomes are presented, which integrate research from multiple disciplines and differentiate trust from similar constructs. Making good their framework identifying ability, integrity, and benevolence as the three components of trustworthiness remains among the most cit ed in the field and maps closely to the transactional and relational trust distinction used in this work.

The Diversity of Fields

No single discipline can claim to have covered this topic in its entirety. The field of trust research is truly interdisciplinary, with regular contributions from researchers across all the sciences, especially psychology, political science, anthropology, sociology, management science, and, more recently, neurobiology, behavioral economics, and even computer science. Each field offers a unique perspective, and each perspective has resulted in significant, theoretically important contributions to the field.

A few of the most relevant fields for organizational and leadership contexts:

Psychology has examined how trust forms between individuals, how it is affected by personality and prior experience, and how it is repaired after violation. Julian Rotter's work in the 1970s on generalized trust as a personality disposition remains foundational.

Organizational Behaviour produced the Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman model referenced above, along with a substantial body of research on how trust affects performance, cooperation, knowledge sharing, and organizational outcomes. Trust profoundly shapes organisational, group, and dyadic outcomes.

Neuroscience and Biochemistry added a biological layer. Research by Kosfeld and colleagues in 2005 identified oxytocin as a neurochemical driver of trust behaviour, demonstrating that the willingness to trust others has measurable biological correlates.

Economics approached trust through game theory and behavioural experiments. Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe's 1995 investment game studies demonstrated that trust and reciprocity function as behavioural instincts, not merely calculated strategies

Sociology and Political Science examined trust at the institutional and community level, asking why some societies and organizations are more trusting than others and what the downstream consequences are for democratic participation, civic life, and collective action.

Important Recent Additions

Psychological Safety. The closest adjacent construct to relational trust in current research is psychological safety, defined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson as the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In a 1999 study of team learning, Edmondson formally defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In practical terms, that means a team climate characterized by trust, respect, and mutual understanding, where people feel comfortable being themselves. Her subsequent research, including Google's Project Aristotle which identified psychological safety as the top predictor of team performance, has made this one of the most practically influential areas of trust-adjacent research in the last two decades. Edmondson's book The Fearless Organization is the most accessible entry point. Psychological safety is centrally tied to learning behavior, while trust lowers transactions costs and reduces the need to monitor behaviour. They are related but distinct, and understanding the difference matters for leaders.

Trust in Remote and Hybrid Work. The shift to distributed work accelerated questions about how trust forms and is maintained without physical proximity. The shift toward remote and hybrid work arrangements presents unique challenges for building psychological safety. Without casual hallway conversations and in-person social cues, leaders must work more intentionally to create connection and invite participation. Dr Richard Chambers The research consensus is that relational trust, built on care and genuine connection, becomes more important, not less, when people work at a distance. Carelessness is also more costly in distributed environments, where small signals of inattention are amplified.

Institutional Trust Decline. Multiple long-running surveys including Edelman's annual Trust Barometer and the World Values Survey have documented sustained declines in trust in institutions across many countries over the past two decades. This decline has downstream effects inside organizations, particularly in mission-driven sectors where staff expect organizational values to be enacted, not merely stated. When institutional trust erodes externally, the pressure on internal relational trust increases.

What the Research Agrees On

Across decades and disciplines, several findings have held consistently. Trust is built through patterns of behaviour, not declarations of intent. It is easier to lose than to build. The components of trustworthiness, ability, integrity, and care, are each necessary but not individually sufficient. Trust has measurable effects on cooperation, performance, and resilience. And the presence or absence of trust shapes how people interpret ambiguous information, which means it affects decision-making in ways that are often invisible until something goes wrong.

What the Research Leaves Open

Despite decades of interdisciplinary research on trust, the literature remains fragmented and balkanized with little consensus regarding its origins. NYU Abu Dhabi Trust is notoriously difficult to measure reliably. Most studies rely on self-reported survey data, which captures perception but not always behaviour. Context matters enormously, and findings from one sector or culture do not always transfer cleanly to another. Mission-driven sectors in particular, including not-for-profits, healthcare, education, and government, are understudied relative to corporate environments. That gap is where much of the applied work in this practice sits.

Key Concepts

Trust

Community

Care

Belonging

Research on Trust

A Brief History

The Diversity of Fields

Important Recent Additions

What the Research Agrees On

Further Reading