The Creation of Social Trust

Abstract

The literature on social capital, especially in political science, attaches great importance to social or generalized trust. Some authors consider that the notion of social trust represents the greatest contribution of the social capital school to the political culture research paradigm (Stolle, 2000). Social trust seems to be very important for the social capital research program, because many of the positive externalities associated with social capital are largely linked to the presence of social trust. The associations in Putnam’s civic Italy make democracy work because they create social trust, trust in unknown people. Mothers can let their children play in the streets of Jerusalem because, unlike in Detroit, they believe that their neighbors, even if unknown, are trustworthy people (Coleman, 1990: 303).1 In this chapter, I deal with the problems of the creation of social trust and propose different means of creating this particular expectation about unknown people’s trustworthiness. However, before beginning the analysis of the formation of social trust, it would be convenient to remember in which sense social trust is related to social capital. As we have seen in chapter 2, trust is not in itself social capital. Social capital is the information derived from the membership in social networks, like a voluntary association, and the obligations of reciprocity derived from relations of trust.