Trusting Trust in the Context of Higher Education: The Potential Limits of the Trust Concept

Abstract

There is a convincing body of empirical evidence supporting the benefits of trust. A number of recent publications have paid a great deal of attention to possible negative consequences of the trusting process, but there has been little interdisciplinary focus on the potentially unconstructive aspects of the trusting process between learners and teaching authorities. The authors argue here that unmonitored student trust in a teacher's expertise in the context of higher education might sabotage the use and development of higher cognitive skills (for example, the ability for critical thinking), and that the direct consequence of this is a further amplification of the existing asymmetrical distribution of power which exists between students and teaching stuff. In the first part of the article, the authors briefly review the literature on trust and specifically focus on contributions emphasizing its potentially negative consequences. In the second part, the authors present arguments which support the idea that excessive trust limits students' abilities to think critically. The limitations of the present analysis are discussed and areas of potential future research on this topic are outlined. The article concludes by stating that there are sufficient grounds to pursue this idea further in terms of theoretical and empirical research.