Misplaced Trust Research Articles

Misplaced trust?

Misplaced trust?

Climate change and water policy in Australia's irrigation areas: a lost opportunity for a partnership model of governance

That climate change mitigation strategies may disproportionately affect rural people and communities is evidenced by the introduction of water mitigation policies in Australia. The significant consequences of water policy for irrigation farming families and communities in Australia's Murray–Darling Basin – the food bowl of Australia – are outlined. This policy emerges from a hierarchical model of governance and has resulted in uneven and perverse outcomes for people in rural areas. Lack of attention to metagovernance and a misplaced trust in the water market has left rural people and communities vulnerable to significant stress and disaffection, impacting on their resilience and adaptability to change. A partnership model of governance is suggested to guide climate change mitigation policies to ensure that the capacity of rural people and communities to adapt to significant change is enhanced rather than eroded.

Special Tasks and Sacred Secrets on Soviet Atomic Espionage

A careful review of the depiction of Soviet atomic espionage provided in Pavel Sudoplatov's Special Tasks and Sacred Secrets by Jerrold and Leona Schecter demonstrates how faulty memories, Soviet intelligence agency disinformation, sloppy citations, misplaced trust in documents provided by unidentified sources under unexplained circumstances, and egregious lapses in logic and judgment can lead to conclusions unsupported by evidence. The accounts of Soviet atomic espionage in both books are neither reliable nor credible. In particular, the assertions that Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard consciously cooperated with and assisted Soviet atomic intelligence are without credibility.

Misplaced trust? Gaping flaws in drug registration and licensing

Misplaced trust? Gaping flaws in drug registration and licensing

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines: A Misplaced Trust in Mechanical Justice

In 1984 the Sentencing Reform Act was passed, ending fully discretionary sentencing by judges and allowing for the creation of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines ("FSG" or "Guidelines"). This Note proposes that the Guidelines failed not only because they ran afoul of the Sixth Amendment, as determined by the Supreme Court in 2005, but also because they lacked a clear underlying purpose, had a misplaced trust in uniformity, and were born of political compromise. Moreover, the effect of the FSG was to blindly shunt discretionary decisions from judges, who are supposed to be neutral parties, to prosecutors, who are necessarily partisan. This Note argues that such a shift ignores not only the underpinnings of our adversarial system, but also the prosecutor's role in the executive branch. This Note further argues that a return to indeterminate sentencing coupled with guidelines for parole boards would solve this problem, realigning the power between the branches and creating transparency in the federal sentencing system.

Trust, Staking, and Expectations

Trust is a kind of risky reliance on another person. Social scientists have offered two basic accounts of trust: predictive expectation accounts and staking (betting) accounts. Predictive expectation accounts identify trust with a judgment that performance is likely. Staking accounts identify trust with a judgment that reliance on the person's performance is worthwhile. I argue (1) that these two views of trust are different, (2) that the staking account is preferable to the predictive expectation account on grounds of intuitive adequacy and coherence with plausible explanations of action; and (3) that there are counterexamples to both accounts. I then set forward an additional necessary condition on trust (added to the staking view), according to which trust implies a moral expectation. When A trusts B to do x, A ascribes to B an obligation to do x, and holds B to this obligation. This Moral Expectation view throws new light on some of the consequences of misplaced trust. I use the example of physicians’ defensive behavior/defensive medicine to illustrate this final point.

From the Editor-in-Chief’s Desk: Employers and Employees Thinking About Trust

Events in recent days have focused my attention on the need for trust in organizations. There is no need to give an example; you all know what I mean. It has become a routine and unpleasant expectation of employees and employers alike in modern workplaces that members of the organizations where we work cannot always be trusted. The organizational literature has included the construct of trust for decades, such is the level of concern (e.g., Deutsch 1958; Lewis and Weigert 1985; Nelson and Cooprider 1996; Burke et al. 2007). Some categorically state there is no universally accepted definition of trust (Rousseau et al. 1998). Others distinguish dimensions of trust, identifying trust as including cognitive, emotional, and behavioral outcomes (Lewis and Weigert 1985). Others perceive trust in terms of optimistic expectations of the behavior of others (Deutsch 1958), and still others claim that trust underlies the sharing and transference of vital knowledge (Nelson and Cooprider 1996). Trust has also been characterized as a trait, an emergent state, and a process (Burke et al. 2007). There is little doubt about the agreement among scholars on the presence of trust in effective and successful organizations. High-profile examples of trust working its magic can be found in Lee Iacocca’s spectacular turnaround of Chrysler. The trust that key stakeholders placed in him enabled him to facilitate his political skills, reputation, and different ways of operating to turn the company around. Conversely, and even more public, are the spectacular results of misplaced trust, misguided trust, and undeserved trust: Enron and a myriad of others like it have burned shareholders and employees badly by garnering their trust and abusing it (Burke et al. 2007). Recognition of the importance of trust has revealed that the presence of trust can lead to many valued organizational outcomes: increased performance, sometimes astonishingly so; collaborative successes; enhanced communication; satisfaction with leadership; decreased staff turnover; improved team work; and enhanced organizational performance, stability, and success (Burke et al. 2007). What I see as the key constituent elements of a consideration of trust, especially as it relates to the dynamic and complex negotiation between employees and employers, are those features of trust that so many scholars agree Employ Respons Rights J (2008) 20:223–226 DOI 10.1007/s10672-008-9092-0

The Risks of Being Chairman in the Age of Turbulence

The Risks of Being Chairman in the Age of Turbulence

Trust rules: how to tell the good guys from the bad guys in work and life

Whom can you trust? It's not an easy question to answer, yet it couldn't be more important to try. Hook up with the wrong crowd, and there goes a career-or worse. As scholar Linda Stroh argues, trust is a prerequisite for effective management, and it contributes directly to personal success. To find out how to tell the good guys from the bad guys, Stroh interviewed over three hundred businesspeople. The result is a thorough and invaluable compendium of lively stories, lessons learned in the trenches, and practical tools and principles. Readers will learn how to identify the trustworthy at work and in their personal lives-giving their careers a boost and helping them sleep better at night. That's because having trustworthy people around us makes organizational life much easier and less stressful. Yet, since ancient times, people have pondered the issue of trust. How do we decide who to let into our inner circle? To what degree do trusting relationships impact our performance at work? What are the consequences of misplaced trust? Must trust be unconditional? Taking these questions out of the realm of the philosophers, Linda Stroh draws from her extensive research to highlight common themes and the hard-won lessons learned from experience. She then distills their thoughts and experiences into practical tools and techniques for assessing trustworthiness-including your own-and applying these tools in a variety of situations. Integrating insights from management and psychology, Stroh shows readers how to pay attention to red flags in relationships and ultimately develop a network of trustworthy people that will help them succeed in business and beyond. Combining rigorous primary research with practical application, and using engaging stories and insights throughout, this book will help general readers, professors and students, and professionals alike attain their goals more quickly and with greater satisfaction.

Beyond informed consent: the therapeutic misconception and trust

The therapeutic misconception has been seen as presenting an ethical problem because failure to distinguish the aims of research participation from those receiving ordinary treatment may seriously undermine the informed...

Gender and trust in medicine: Vulnerabilities, abuses, and remedies

Trust is taken to be one of the foundational values in the doctor–patient relationship, facilitating access to the benefits of health care and providing a guarantee against possible harms. Despite this foundational role, some doctors betray the trust of their patients. Trusting involves granting discretionary powers and makes the truster vulnerable to the trustee. Patients trust medical practitioners to act with goodwill and to act competently. Some patients carry pre-existing vulnerabilities, for reasons such as gender, poverty, age, ethnicity, or disability, and these vulnerabilities can be exacerbated when such patients extend their trust to a doctor. Gender stereotypes reduce women’s ability to challenge and thereby assess their doctor’s competency. In addition, women are more likely to be distrusted by their doctors and have their experiences of medical symptoms discounted. In this paper, we analyze two extreme examples of breaches of medical trust that exploited the vulnerability of women in the health care system: the “unfortunate experiment” at the National Women’s Hospital in New Zealand and the Harold Shipman murders of elderly patients in the United Kingdom, examining the potential role of gender in the outcomes with regard to trust. Major breaches of medical trust such as these typically lead to government inquiries, revisions of ethical guidelines, and substantive policy change in an effort to re-establish public and patient trust. We argue that the medical profession has an ethical obligation to put mechanisms in place to protect vulnerable patients from abuses of trust, to monitor colleagues’ competence, and to be prepared to blow the whistle to protect patients who are not in a position to recognize misplaced trust. Such mechanisms will act disproportionately to reduce harm to women as patients.

The Case for Fairness of Trust Management

All trust management systems must take into account the possibility of error: of misplaced trust. Therefore, regardless of whether it uses reputation or not, is centralized or distributed, a trust management system must be evaluated with consideration for the consequences of misplaced or abused trust. Thus, the issue of fairness has always been implicitly considered in the design and evaluation of trust management systems. This paper attempts to show that an implicit consideration, using the utilitarian paradigm of maximizing the sum of agents' utilities, is insufficient. Two case studies presented in the paper concern the design of a new reputation systems that uses implicit and emphasized negative feedbacks, and the evaluation of reputation systems' robustness to discrimination. The case studies demonstrate that considering fairness explicitly leads to different trust management system design and evaluation. Trust management systems can realize a goal of system fairness, identified with distributional fairness of agents' utilities. The realization of this goal can be achieved in a laboratory setting when all other factors that affect utilities can be excluded, and where the system can be tested using modeled adversaries. Taking the fairness of agent behavior explicitly into account when building trust or distrust can help to realize the goal of fairness of trust management systems.

In Good Company: Problematic Sources and Biblical Historicity

Advocates of robust biblical historicity often express concern that critics of this view act from partisan purposes, and should instead treat biblical testimony as innocent until and unless it can be demonstrated otherwise—virtually an impossible task in light of the exiguity of the evidence. These claims are seldom undergirded by a canvas of extra-biblical materials and even then, never beyond the ancient Near East. This article draws a small sample of examples from a variety of times and places to argue that the incidence of error, fraud, and misplaced trust is well beyond the point that would justify this deferential treatment. It urges those who would too readily accept the reliability of the biblical account of early Israel to canvass more widely before committing themselves.

The end of Misplaced Trust

After 84 episodes, we will no longer have a weekly instalment about the colourful characters and shenanigans going on in Murkton Moor in our soap opera Misplaced Trust. Its writer and creator, Nicola Sharp, shares her experiences with Rhona MacDonald

Information Processing Moderators of the Effectiveness of Trust-Based Governance in Interfirm R&D Collaboration

It is generally assumed that improved outcomes accompany the use of trust as a governance mechanism in an interfirm relationship. Briefly, trust is a social lubricant that reduces the friction costs of existing trade and/or serves to increase the scope of trade. In contrast to this universalistic view, we posit that the performance of trust-based governance is contingent on the ability of trading partners to “read” each other and learn about counterpart behavior. These information-processing abilities allow firms to assess partner trustworthiness better, which reduces the risk of misplaced trust. The increased efficacy of communication and learning from one another also enables them to better capitalize from the adaptation and revision possibilities uncovered through trust-based governance during the task-execution phase. Given the central role of these cognitive requirements, we assess these contingent effects with data from a knowledge-intensive task setting. Using a sample of 129 firms that have engaged outside contractors on client-sponsored R&D projects, we find strong support for our thesis. Specifically, we find that trust-based governance has a larger positive impact on task performance when the client is more skilled at understanding the outsourced tasks at hand, the task itself requires skills that are relatively more readily taught (less tacit), and the task itself is organized in parallel with work being done at the contractor as well as the client. As a corollary, we also find that firms adopt trust-based governance to a greater extent as these information-processing abilities increase, as well as with the colocation of the contractor and client. Suggestions for engineering trust-based governance are offered.

The Critical Resource Theory of Fiduciary Duty

This Article proposes a new theory to unify the law of duty. The prevailing view holds that law is atomistic, arising for varied reasons in established categories of cases (such as trustee-beneficiary and director-shareholder) and ad hoc in relationships where one person trusts another and becomes vulnerable to harm as a result. By contrast, the critical resource theory of duty holds that every relationship properly designated as fiduciary conforms to the following pattern: one party (the fiduciary) acts on behalf of another party (the beneficiary) while exercising discretion with respect to a critical resource belonging to the beneficiary. Relying on insights from the property rights theory of the firm, this critical resource theory holds that the primary purpose of the law of duty is to combat opportunism within relationships that fit this pattern. The beneficiary initially protects against opportunism through self-help denying or threatening to deny the access to the critical resource that is an essential platform for opportunistic behavior in these settings. Fiduciary law supplements self-help by depriving the of the benefits from opportunism. By requiring the existence of a critical resource at the core of all relationships, the critical resource theory assists courts in differentiating relationships from relationships in which harm is caused merely by misplaced trust. The critical resource theory also justifies the varying intensity of duties across relationships: Where self-help is effective, constraints are relatively weak, and where self-help is weak, constraints are relatively intense. Three additional implications of the critical resource theory of duty are also developed: (1) The critical resource theory implies that duty and the contractual obligation of good faith and fair dealing are close cousins, both imposing loyalty obligations of varying intensity to combat opportunism; (2) the critical resource theory affirms the capacity of parties in a relationship to contract out of duties; and (3) the critical resource theory explains why restitution is the usual remedy for a breach of duty.

Afghan Women: Recovering, Rebuilding

The United States' foreign policy in Afghanistan has a long history of misguided plans and misplaced trust—a fact that has contributed to the destruction of the social and physical infrastructure of Afghan society. Afghans contend that after having fought as U.S. allies against the Soviet Union—with the price of more than two million dead—the United States swiftly walked away at the end of that bloody, twenty-three-year conflict. The toll of the war on Afghan society reflected in current statistics is so staggering as to be practically unimaginable: 12 million women living in abject poverty, 1 million people handicapped from land mine explosions, an average life expectancy of forty years (lower for women), a mortality rate of 25.7 percent for children under five years old, and an illiteracy rate of 64 percent. These horrific indicators place Afghanistan among the most destitute countries in the world in terms of human development.

Is there a moral duty for doctors to trust patients?

In this paper I argue that it is morally important for doctors to trust patients. Doctors' trust of patients lays the foundation for medical relationships which support the exercise of...

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness

On the attitude of trust

In On Certainty, the emphasis is on the solitary individual as subject of knowledge. The importance of our dependence on others, however, is brought out in Wittgenstein's remarks about trust. In this paper, the role and nature of trust are discussed, the grammar of trust being contrasted with that of reliance. It is shown that to speak of trust is to speak of a fundamental attitude of one person towards others, an attitude which, unlike reliance, is not to be explained, or assessed, by an appeal to reasons. It is, rather, because we have such a fundamental readiness to accept what we are taught by others that we can come to develop an understanding of reasons. The idea that believing something without evidence is always a weakness is shown to be a philosophical prejudice. Trust is always for something we can rightfully demand from others: misplaced trust, accordingly, is not a shortcoming on the part of the trustful person, but of the person in whom the trust was placed. The destruction of trust is a tragedy of life; in Culture and Value, Wittgenstein suggests a connection between distrust and madness.