I outline a number of parallels between trust and distrust, emphasising the significance of situations in which both trust and distrust would be an imposition upon the (dis)trustee. I develop an account of both trust and distrust in terms of commitment, and argue that this enables us to understand the nature of trustworthiness. Note that this article is available open access on the journal website.

Distrust in scientific experts can be surprisingly stubborn, persisting despite evidence supporting the experts’ views, demonstrations of their competence, or displays of good will. This stubborn distrust is often viewed as a manifestation of irrationality. By contrast, this article proposes a logic of “status distrust”: low-status individuals are objectively vulnerable to collective decision-making, and can justifiably distrust high-status scientific experts if they are not confident that the experts do not have their best interests at heart. In (...) phenomena of status distrust, social status is thus an indicator of distrust, and this has wider implications for the literatures on trust in science and on expert communication. (shrink)

This paper offers a comprehensive account of distrust that can accommodate the main variants of distrust in terms of their targets: other individuals and different types of group agents and their members. In doing so, the paper not only carves out the distinct nature of distrust vis-à-vis trust but also addresses the much-neglected issue of the aim of distrust. Against reviewing standard alternatives, I propose a novel definition of interpersonal distrust as a meta-stance on trust: (...) Distrust is a reactive attitude to the attitude of trust, whose aim is to modulate one’s prospective reactive attitudes and prepare for the affective harm of betrayal that one would suffer if one would not have so prepared. Regarding variants of distrust, I distinguish (a) ordinary interpersonal distrust, (b) ordinary distrust towards groups and their members, and (c) “deep” distrust towards group agents that engage in dehumanization. Whereas ordinary group- and member-directed distrust can be conceptualized by a suitably specified version of the reactive attitude account, we need an altogether different account for the extreme, but rather common type of corporate distrust that involves potential dehumanization of the distruster. Here, I introduce my concept of “deep distrust” and point to its epistemic and political aims, namely to detect and alert others to looming dehumanization. I close by fathoming institutional reformist strategies to forfeit occasions for deep distrust and raise a puzzle for future research on the link between distrust and dehumanization. (shrink)

Background: The importance of trust between patients and healthcare personnel is emphasised in nurses’ and physicians’ ethical codes. Trust is crucial for an effective healthcare personnel–patient relationship and thus for treatment and treatment outcomes. Cultural and linguistic differences may make building a trusting and positive relationship with ethnic minority patients particularly challenging. Although there is a great deal of research on cultural competence, there is a conspicuous lack of focus on the concepts of trust and distrust concerning ethnic minority (...) patients, particularly in relation to the concept of ‘othering’. Aim: To study which factors help build trust or create distrust in encounters between healthcare professionals and hospitalised ethnic minority patients, as well as study the dynamic complexities inherent within the process of ‘othering’. Research design: Qualitative design, in-depth interviews and hermeneutic analysis. Participants and research context: The interviewees were 10 immigrant patients (six women and four men – eight Asians, two Africans – ages 32–85 years) recruited from a south-eastern Norwegian hospital. Ethical considerations: Study approval was obtained from the hospital’s Privacy Ombudsman for Research and the hospital’s leadership. Participation was voluntary and participants signed an informed consent form. Conclusion: Distrust and othering may be caused by differences in belief systems, values, perceptions, expectations, and style of expression and behaviour. Othering is a reciprocal phenomenon in minority ethnic patient–healthcare personnel encounters, and it influences trust building negatively. Besides demonstrating general professional skill and competence, healthcare personnel require cultural competence to create trust. (shrink)

Paradigmatic echo chambers are widely thought to be epistemically unhealthy communities, but there is little agreement about what, exactly, makes them epistemically unhealthy. C. Thi Nguyen argues that echo chambers manipulate members into distrusting outsiders by preparing them for criticism in advance, a form of preemptive distrust. I argue that this kind of trust manipulation is neither necessary nor sufficient to identify the problem with echo chambers. Instead, I argue that the problem is that they exhibit a different kind (...) of trust manipulation: nihilistic distrust. The problem stems from two related issues. First, echo chambers exhibit asymmetrical trust relationships within the group, in which authority figures are highly trusted and critics are distrusted. This distrust is reactive rather than preemptive and is not directed at outsiders as such, so it is not best understood in the terms provided by Nguyen’s account. Second, by distrusting criticism, authorities in an echo chamber abandon the norm of being open to learning from one’s mistakes. By prioritizing the internal power dynamics of the group over their own epistemic standards, echo chambers exhibit a kind of epistemic nihilism. (shrink)

Human oversight has become a key mechanism for the governance of artificial intelligence (“AI”). Human overseers are supposed to increase the accuracy and safety of AI systems, uphold human values, and build trust in the technology. Empirical research suggests, however, that humans are not reliable in fulfilling their oversight tasks. They may be lacking in competence or be harmfully incentivised. This creates a challenge for human oversight to be effective. In addressing this challenge, this article aims to make three contributions. (...) First, it surveys the emerging laws of oversight, most importantly the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (“AIA”). It will be shown that while the AIA is concerned with the competence of human overseers, it does not provide much guidance on how to achieve effective oversight and leaves oversight obligations for AI developers underdefined. Second, this article presents a novel taxonomy of human oversight roles, differentiated along whether human intervention is constitutive to, or corrective of a decision made or supported by an AI. The taxonomy allows to propose suggestions for improving effectiveness tailored to the type of oversight in question. Third, drawing on scholarship within democratic theory, this article formulates six normative principles which institutionalise distrust in human oversight of AI. The institutionalisation of distrust has historically been practised in democratic governance. Applied for the first time to AI governance, the principles anticipate the fallibility of human overseers and seek to mitigate them at the level of institutional design. They aim to directly increase the trustworthiness of human oversight and to indirectly inspire well-placed trust in AI governance. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the role of affective feedback loops in creating and sustaining trust and distrust. Some emotions, such as fear and contempt, drive out trust; others, such as esteem and empathy, drive out distrust. The mechanism here is causal, but not merely causal: affective looping works through changing how the agent interprets the words, deeds, and motives of the other, thus making trust or distrust appear justified. Looping influences not only dyadic trust, but also (...) climates, and networks of trust and distrust. Not all trust-entrenching looping is virtuous, nor all distrust-entrenching looping vicious, but distrust looping is a powerful way to justify xenophobic public policy. I explore options for remedy. (shrink)

The measure of trust that people vest in their fellow citizens or institutions depends on three factors: the `reflected trustworthiness' of the target as estimated by themselves in a more or less rational manner, the attitude of `basic trustfulness' deriving from socialization, and the `culture of trust' pervading their society and normatively encouraging the trusting orientation. The author presents a model of a structural context conducive for the emergence of the culture of trust, and then argues that democratic organization contributes (...) to trust-generating conditions, such as normative certainty, transparency, stability, and accountability. This influence is found to be doubly paradoxical. First, democracy breeds the culture of trust by institutionalizing distrust at many levels of democratic organization. And second, the strongest influence of democracy on the culture of trust may be expected when the institutionalized distrust remains a resource used sparingly and only when there appear significant breaches of trust. (shrink)

When are we obligated to believe someone? To what extent are people authorities about their own experiences? What kind of harm might we enact when we doubt? Questions like these lie at the heart of many debates in social and feminist epistemology, and they’re the driving issue behind a key conceptual framework in these debates—gaslighting. But while the concept of gaslighting has provided fruitful insight, it's also proven somewhat difficult to adjudicate, and seems prone to over-application. In what follows, I (...) argue that Katherine Hawley's theory of trust can provide a useful alternative lens for looking at contested testimony. To do this, I focus on a particularly complex—but increasingly popular—application of gaslighting: the physician/patient relationship, and the idea of ‘medical gaslighting’. I argue that, even though patients can experience harm when they are disbelieved, there are nevertheless good reasons for physicians not to trust patients about at least some of their own narratives. (shrink)

We use the hierarchical nature of Bayesian perceptual inference to explain a fundamental aspect of the temporality of experience, namely the phenomenology of temporal flow. The explanation says that the sense of temporal flow in conscious perception stems from probabilistic inference that the present cannot be trusted. The account begins by describing hierarchical inference under the notion of prediction error minimization, and exemplifies distrust of the present within bistable visual perception and action initiation. Distrust of the present is (...) then discussed in relation to previous research on temporal phenomenology. Finally, we discuss how there may be individual differences in the experience of temporal flow, in particular along the autism spectrum. The resulting view is that the sense of temporal flow in conscious perception results from an internal, inferential process. (shrink)

The activity of reason-giving plays an important role in our intellectual lives. Some philosophers, however, have expressed a deep distrust of this activity. This chapter examines the grounds for such distrust and argues that it deserves a far more serious hearing than it is typically given. There are important cases in which the very activity of reason giving should be called into question, but the kinds of challenges to reason giving which are most concerning are, it is argued, (...) ones which do not lead to a fundamental breakdown of rationality. Rather, it is argued, there are ways in which the challenges to reason giving can be adequately met. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a rapidly increasing role in clinical care. Many of these systems, for instance, deep learning-based applications using multilayered Artificial Neural Nets, exhibit epistemic opacity in the sense that they preclude comprehensive human understanding. In consequence, voices from industry, policymakers, and research have suggested trust as an attitude for engaging with clinical AI systems. Yet, in the philosophical and ethical literature on medical AI, the notion of trust remains fiercely debated. Trust skeptics hold that talking about trust (...) in nonhuman agents constitutes a category error and worry about the concept being misused for ethics washing. Proponents of trust have responded to these worries from various angles, disentangling different concepts and aspects of trust in AI, potentially organized in layers or dimensions. Given the substantial disagreements across these accounts of trust and the important worries about ethics washing, we embrace a diverging strategy here. Instead of aiming for a positive definition of the elements and nature of trust in AI, we proceed ex negativo, that is we look at cases where trust or distrust are misplaced. Comparing these instances with trust expedited in doctor–patient relationships, we systematize these instances and propose a taxonomy of both misplaced trust and distrust. By inverting the perspective and focusing on negative examples, we develop an account that provides useful ethical constraints for decisions in clinical as well as regulatory contexts and that highlights how we should not engage with medical AI. (shrink)

This Case Study describes a patient with oliguric kidney failure who denied his need for hemodialysis even when experiencing symptoms of volume overload. Although any adequate analysis of the case will address a hotly debated issue in clinical ethics, namely, whether denying a diagnosis or prognosis renders a patient incapable of medical decision-making, the focus of this article is elsewhere. Specifically, I raise the concern that no matter which answer we provide to the prior question, the circumstances in which it (...) arises constitute a form of second-order injustice when patient disbelief is a result of justified distrust of medical providers. (shrink)

The springboard for this paper is the nature of the negation relation between the notions of trust and distrust. In order to explore this relation, an analysis of full trust is offered. An investigation follows of the ways in which this “end-concept” of full trust can be negated. In particular, the sense in which distrust is the negation of trust is focused on. An asymmetry is pointed to, between ‘not-to-trust’ and ‘not-to-distrust’. This asymmetry helps explain the existence (...) of a gap between trust and distrust: the possibility of being suspended between the two. Since both trust and distrust require reasons, the question that relates to this gap is what if there are no reasons, or at any rate no sufficient reasons, either way. This kind of situation, of being suspended between two poles without a sufficient reason to opt for any one of them, paradigmatically calls for a presumption. (shrink)

First, we explain the conception of trustworthiness that we employ. We model trustworthiness as a relation among a trustor, a trustee, and a field of trust defined and delimited by its scope. In addition, both potential trustors and potential trustees are modeled as being more or less reliable in signaling either their willingness to trust or their willingness to prove trustworthy in various fields in relation to various other agents. Second, following Alfano (forthcoming) we argue that the social scale of (...) a potential trust relationship partly determines both explanatory and normative aspects of the relation. Most of the philosophical literature focuses on dyadic trust between a pair of agents (Baier 1986, Jones 1996, Jones 2012, McGeer 2008, Pettit 1995), but there are also small communities of trust (Alfano forthcoming) and trust in large institutions (Potter 2002, Govier 1997, Townley & Garfield 2013, Hardin 2002). The mechanisms that induce people to extend their trust vary depending on the size of the community in question, and the ways in which trustworthiness can be established and trusting warranted vary with these mechanisms. Mechanisms that work in dyads and small communities are often unavailable in the context of trusting an institution or branch of government. Establishing trust on this larger social scale therefore requires new or modified mechanisms. In the third section of the paper, we recommend three policies that – we argue – tend to make institutions more trustworthy and to reliably signal that trustworthiness to the public. First, they should ensure that their decision-making processes are as open and transparent as possible. Second, they should make efforts to engage stakeholders in dialogue with decision-makers such as managers, members of the C-Suite, and highly-placed policy-makers. Third, they should foster diversity – gender, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic background, disability, etc. – in their workforce at all levels, but especially in management and positions of power. We conclude by discussing the warrant for distrust in institutions that do not adopt these policies, which we contend is especially pertinent for people who belong to groups that have historically faced (and in many cases still do face) oppression. (shrink)

BackgroundPatient skepticism concerning medical innovations can have major consequences for current public health and may threaten future progress, which greatly relies on clinical research.The primary objective of this study is to determine the variables associated with patient acceptation or refusal to participate in clinical research. Specifically, we sought to evaluate if distrust in pharmaceutical companies and associated psychosocial factors could represent a recruitment bias in clinical trials and thus threaten the applicability of their results.MethodsThis prospective, multicenter survey consisted in (...) the administration of a self-questionnaire to patients during a pulmonology consultation. The 1025 questionnaires distributed collected demographics, socio-professional and basic health literacy characteristics. Patients were asked to rank their level of trust for pharmaceutical companies and indicate their willingness to participate in different categories of research.Logistic regression was used to determine factors contributing to “trust” versus “distrust” group membership and willingness to participate in each category of research.ResultsOne thousand patients completed the survey, corresponding to a response rate of 97.5%. Data from 838 patients were analyzed in this study.48.3% of respondents declared that they trusted pharmaceutical companies, while 35.5% declared distrust. Being female, inactive in the employment market, and not-knowing the name of one’s disease are factors related to declared distrust. Distrust-group membership is associated with unwillingness to participate in certain categories of trials such as pre-marketing and industry-sponsored trials.ConclusionDistrust in pharmaceutical companies is associated with a specific patient profile and with refusal to participate in certain subcategories of trials. This potential recruitment bias may explain the under-representation of certain categories of patients such as women in pre-marketing drug trials. (shrink)

I explore Baier, Held, Okin, Code, Noddings, and Eisler on trust and distrust. This reveals a need for reflection on the analysis, ethics, and dynamics of trust and distrust-especially the distinction between trusting and taking for granted, the feasibility of choosing greater trust, and the possibility of moving from situations of warranted distrust to trust. It is impossible to overcome the need for trust through surveillance, recourse to contracts, or legal institutions.

There is a growing body of scholarship on how AI technology can undermine democratic institutions. I present a novel contribution to this literature by accounting for how and why algorithms for engagement optimisation may undermine the necessary conditions for Rawlsian justice. For Rawls’s political theory, the ability to form bonds of trust with fellow citizens is an essential condition for citizens to develop their sense of justice, and their sense of justice is necessary for attaining justice. Recommendation algorithms may amplify (...) the space given to hateful, violent, extremist, false, and discriminatory content, I argue. If this is the case, online social media content could undermine the development of mutual trust between citizens, which is necessary for a sense of justice. If citizens can only trust their like-minded members and distrust their fellow citizens, then the possibility of Rawlsian reciprocity in liberal society may not be realised. The lack of reciprocity is a concern as liberal political systems could be inherently unstable, given that affectionate ties needed for mutual cooperation may be undermined. (shrink)

Trust makes cooperation possible. It enables us to learn from others and at a distance. It makes democratic deliberation possible. But it also makes us vulnerable: when we place our trust in another’s word, we are liable to be deceived—sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. Our evolved mechanisms for deciding whom to trust and whom to distrust mostly rely on face-to-face interactions with people whose reputation we can both access and influence. Online, these mechanisms are largely useless, and the institutions that (...) might supplant them need to have their own trustworthiness verified. Currently, those institutions are mostly corporations such as Facebook and Twitter, which have checkered track records at best. To make matters worse, the social media sector is a natural monopoly, and companies like Facebook have shown that they are willing to use their market power unscrupulously. For these reasons, we argue that social media should be treated like other natural monopolies: it should either be nationalized, highly regulated, or broken up through antitrust legal actions. (shrink)

_Distrust characterizes much of the current political discourse in the United States today._ It shapes our feelings about teachers, schools, and policies. In _Distrust and Educational Change_, Katherine Schultz argues that distrust—and the failure to recognize and address it—significantly contributes to the failure of policies meant to improve educational systems. The strategies the United States has chosen to enact reform engender distrust, and in so doing, undermine the conditions that enable meaningful educational change. In situations in which (...) class='Hi'>distrust—rather than trust—predominates, teachers and principals are reluctant to transform their educational practice. Through a set of illustrative stories_,_ Schultz analyzes the role of distrust in the failure of educational change and transformation. By creating a taxonomy that includes three kinds of distrust—relational, structural, and contextual—she suggests ways to analyze, understand, and discuss the impact of distrust on schools, districts, and large-scale educational processes. She concludes by offering concrete recommendations for addressing distrust in classrooms, schools, and districts; discusses the roles played by teachers, principals, parents, and students in building trust; and points to schools and programs where distrust has been acknowledged and repaired successfully. By creating spaces that honor human dignity, Schultz argues, it is possible to replace a culture of systemic distrust built over time. (shrink)

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. This thought-provoking book argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerfulcomputers. Using a wide (...) range of entertaining examples, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society's growing distrust of science, and ultimately provides constructive suggestions for restoring the credibility of the scientific community. (shrink)

This paper aims to deflate the idea that democracy would be in essence a privileged locus of civic trust. Three claims are defended: (1) there is nothing specific to democracy regarding the affirmation that trust is required for social cooperation; (2) democracy, when conceived discursively, depends on guarded epistemic trust and; (3) popular control may require, in some contexts, institutions that express and foster distrust towards a specific section of the population. The conclusion to be drawn is that the (...) appropriateness of trust for the achievement of popular control over government depends on a contextual and realist assessment. (shrink)

This essay describes the microhistorical process whereby different groups of scientific actors came to claim that a new fundamental particle had been discovered at CERN. Particular attention is paid to the role of trust, and of distrust, in the directorate's planning of the experimental program and in their interpretation and promotion of its first results. Distrust demanded independent replication; it also influenced the way in which the CERN director general managed the credibility of the results for the world's (...) press, turning a plausible but not yet widely accepted hypothesis into an undisputed fact. Produced and circulated in a context that included physicists, funding agencies, governments, and national power blocs, the discovery of the bosons by physicists in Europe challenged American domination of the field and shaped U.S. accelerator policy for the 1990s. (shrink)

This essay investigates an underappreciated way in which trust and testimonial injustice are closely connected. Credibility deficit and credibility excess cases both (in their own distinctive ways) contribute to a speaker’s being harmed in her capacity a knower. But moreover, as we will show—by using the tools of a performance-theoretic framework—both credibility deficit and credibility excess cases also feature incompetent trusting on the part of the hearer. That is, credibility deficit and excess cases are shown to manifest qualities of thinkers (...) that are inconducive to trust’s being reliably fulfilled. What this implies is an interesting result about testimonial injustice: to the extent that we want to mitigate against testimonial injustice—one promising way to do so will be to target incompetent trusting of the sort that underlies it. We conclude by outlining and defending what we take to be a promising substantive version of such a mitigation strategy, one which is centred around the cultivation of higher-order trusting competences. (shrink)

In our interactions with science, we are often vulnerable; we do not have complete control of the situation and there is a risk that we, or those we love, might be harmed. This is not an emotionall...

This paper compares two recent public debates in the Netherlands: the debate initiated by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the position of Muslim women on the one hand, and discussions regarding the situation of female sex workers since the legalization of Dutch prostitution in 2000 on the other. It is argued that liberal public policies should not always be guided by the unconditional respect for the autonomy of (adult) citizens, but that it sometimes seems wiser to adopt an attitude of sympathetic (...) distrust regarding practices of which one has good reasons to suspect that they are harmful to the women involved. (shrink)

The importance of research on the notion of trust has grown considerably in the social sciences over the last three decades. Much has been said about the decline of political trust in democracies and intense debates have occurred about the nature and complexity of the relationship between trust and democracy. Political trust is usually understood as trust in political institutions (including trust in political actors that inhabit the institutions), trust between citizens, and to a lesser extent, trust between groups. However, (...) the literature on trust has given no special attention to the issue of trust between minority and majority nations in multinational democracies – countries that are not only multicultural but also constitutional associations containing two or more nations or peoples whose members claim to be self-governing and have the right of self-determination. This volume, part of the work of the Groupe de recherche sur les sociétés plurinationales (GRSP), is a comparative study of trust, distrust, and mistrust in multinational democracies, centring on Canada, Belgium, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Beliefs, attitudes, practices, and relations of trust, distrust, and mistrust are studied as situated, interacting, and coexisting phenomena that change over time and space. Contributors include Dario Castiglione (Exeter), Jérôme Couture (INRS-UCS), Kris Deschouwer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jean Leclair (Montréal), Patti Tamara Lenard (Ottawa), Niels Morsink (Antwerp), Geneviève Nootens (Chicoutimi), Darren O’Toole (Ottawa), Alexandre Pelletier (Toronto), Réjean Pelletier (Laval), Philip Resnick (UBC), David Robichaud (Ottawa), Peter Russell (Toronto), Richard Simeon (Toronto), Dave Sinardet (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and Jeremy Webber (Victoria). (shrink)

While the coexistence of trust and distrust has been acknowledged in previous literature, the understanding of their connection with organisational culture is limited. This study examines how trust and distrust construct the unity and fragmentation of organisational culture. Productive working relationships can be characterised by high trust, but strong ties and high trust may also account for false organisational unity. This study shows that trust and distrust can co-exist and distrust may even increase trust in particular (...) situations. Moreover, we describe how the cognitive and affective components of trust and distrust relate to the unity and fragmentation of organisational culture. We present an empirical case study of a company where tension and distrust between top management, middle management and shop stewards affected the organisational culture. The study contributes to earlier research by discussing trust as a multidimensional and dynamic phenomenon. The study shows how the affective and cognitive components of trust and distrust constitute the unity and fragmentation of organisational culture. We propose that if an organisation is willing to improve its ethics, it should rely on fragmentation rather than unity. (shrink)

Medical distrust is often the result of social injustices, discrimination, systemic racism, and the repeated experience of epistemic injustices. Signaling medical trustworthiness in this context requires not only demonstrating competence and caring but grappling with the source of distrust rooted in experience. While we should be wary of framing every unmediatable conflict as an issue of distrust, which may simplify a complex human experience to an identity-based response, we argue that a community-engaged intersectional approach to mediation can (...) address conflicts rooted in distrust and is fundamentally aligned with Nancy Dubler’s legacy of addressing power differentials. We present a case where traditional tools of mediation—including addressing informational and emotional gaps—were insufficient at reaching a “principled resolution.” In this case, the distance between the family member’s and the medical team’s understanding of the facts was so profound that it could not be overcome. Far from being irrational or unreasonable, this outcome was a direct response to the perpetual unequal access to epistemic authority experienced by this Black family. Mediators often belong to social groups with more power, and this bias can impact mediation practices, communication norms, and assumptions about conflict. Inclusive mediation models rooted in conflict theory can build on Nancy Dubler’s classical work. We argue that bioethicists must engage in risky conversations with local communities to “collaboratively imagine what a more trustworthy system might look like.” We describe the inclusive mediation model and how it expands on Nancy Dubler’s foundational work and honors her tremendous legacy. (shrink)

This paper makes an argument for the democratic value of distrust. It begins by analyzing distrust, since distrust is not merely the negation of trust. The account that it develops is based primarily on Martin Luther King Jr.’s work in Why We Can’t Wait. On this view, distrust is the confident belief that another individual or group of individuals or an institution will not act justly or as justice requires. It is a narrow normative account of (...) distrust, since it concerns a specific normative task. Distinctions between vertical and horizontal distrust, as well as trust and agnostic trust are also discussed. This paper argues that distrust’s democratic value lies in its ability to secure democracy by protecting political minorities from having their voices ignored. As such, distrust can be viewed as a kind of Madisonian “check and balance” that works to prevent tyranny. Distrust also works to secure democracy by forging new or alternative forms of democratic participation. The main example discussed in this paper is King’s involvement in the Birmingham Campaign during the Black Civil Rights movement in America. In this case, King and his supporters’ distrust of fellow White citizens and political institutions led to alternative forms of political expression such as non-violent protests, boycotts, and other forms of civil disobedience, all of which led to greater racial justice by working to alleviate White tyranny. (shrink)

Policymakers, scientists, and the public are increasingly confronted with thorny questions about the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. A key common thread concerns whether AI can be trusted and the factors that can make it more trustworthy in front of stakeholders and users. This is indeed crucial, as the trustworthiness of AI systems is fundamental for both democratic governance and for the development and deployment of AI. This article advances the discussion by arguing that AI systems should also be (...) recognized, at least to some extent, as artifacts capable of exercising a form of agency, thereby enabling them to engage in relationships of trust or distrust with humans. It further examines the implications of these reciprocal trust dynamics for regulators tasked with overseeing AI systems. The article concludes by identifying key tensions and unresolved dilemmas that these dynamics pose for the future of AI regulation and governance. (shrink)

Trust in medicine is often conceived of on an individual level, with respect to how people rely on particular clinicians or institutions. Yet as discussions of trust during the Covid‐19 pandemic highlighted, trust decisions are not always as individual or interpersonal as this conception suggests. Rather, individual instances of trusting behavior are related to social trust, which is conceived as a willingness to be vulnerable to people in general, based on a sense of shared norms. In this essay, I propose (...) that individual and social trust are connected to each other in what can be termed a “climate of trust.” I explain how masking trends during the pandemic facilitated a “climate of distrust,” and I consider the role that clinicians might play in transforming climates of distrust into climates of trust. (shrink)

Previous philosophical work on distrust in science has argued that understanding public distrust in science and scientific interventions requires that we pay careful attention not only to epistemic considerations (that is, beliefs about science), but also to values, and the emotional contexts in which assessments of scientific credibility are made. This is likely to be a truncated list of relevant factors for understanding trust/distrust, but these are certainly key areas of concern. The aim of this paper is (...) not to further innumerate the list of relevant factors. Rather, it is to map the ways that these key areas (beliefs, values, and emotions) are related to each other. These are not distinct categories, but rather they interact, making our picture of distrust more complicated than we might otherwise imagine. This discussion will take place in the context of resistance to medical interventions. Notably, Ebola interventions in West Africa, HIV/AIDS testing in South Africa, and vaccines across the world. (shrink)

The misinformation effect is influenced by many mnestic and non-mnestic factors. This article concerns the role of two of them: 1) state anxiety, defined as a situational experience of anxiety; 2) memory distrust, understood as a constant tendency to negatively evaluate one's memory. Both factors are relevant in the situation of being a witness and are believed to have a negative effect on the magnitude of the misinformation effect. In the present research, participants’ state anxiety had an immunizing effect (...) against misinformation. As for memory distrust, no relationship was found between negative evaluation of memory and susceptibility to misinformation. The results confirm the beneficial effect of anxiety on resisting misinformation and demonstrate a greater need for further explorations concerning memory distrust. (shrink)

The analytical model of political ideologies offered in this article describes the connection between rising levels of distrust towards societal institutions in modern democracies and how such developments has challenged traditional and long-standing political parties in the Western world, such as the Danish political party Radikale Venstre [the Danish Social-Liberal Party]. Through use of a tripartite model of trust developed by Arman Teymouri Niknam during his interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s attitudes towards trust brought together with different aspects of Axel (...) Honneth’s social-philosophical framework, Teymouri Niknam and Leif Hemming Pedersen show how distrust may be able to act as a progressive tool in the creation of a more just, diverse and equal future and also how a virtuous and healthy form of democracy is an ideal that can be challenging to realise in practice. Teymouri Niknam and Hemming Pedersen are thus able to point to the ways in which a healthy democracy needs a balance of virtuous trust and distrust in order to achieve a good amount of both stability and progress, thus pointing to a difficult balancing act that many traditional political parties find themselves struggling with especially at this point in time in many contemporary democracies. (shrink)

Philosophical literature has focused on the concept of trust, but often considers distrust merely as an afterthought. Distrust however, because of its pervasive role in our everyday lives, can be quite damaging. Thus, understanding the rationality of distrust is crucial for understanding our testimonial practices. In this paper I analyze whether it is rational or irrational to distrust an informant on the basis of identity bias. My aim is to show that distrust is irrational when (...) based on negative identity bias. First, I adopt Annalisa Coliva’s account of social hinge epistemology where it is rationally required to assume certain basic presuppositions, such that people are generally reliable informants, to obtain propositional justification and participate in the testimonial practice. Secondly, I show how distrust based on negative identity bias can spread across other domains of interaction and jeopardize the testimonial practice as we fail to assume that people are generally reliable informants. Thirdly, I argue that considering bias as a defeater is beneficial to maintain the claim that bias-based distrust is irrational, as it prevents the acquisition of propositional justification. Finally, I show that distrust is rational when based on evidence and reason that the speaker is not reliable or sincere. (shrink)

This article examines how distrust drives exchange. We propose a theoretical framework integrating the literature of trust into cultural sociology and use a case of patients giving hongbao (red envelopes containing money) to doctors in China to examine how distrust drives different forms of unofficial exchange. Based on more than two years’ ethnography, we found that hongbao exchanges between Chinese patients and doctors were, ironically, bred by the public’s generalized distrust in doctors’ moral ethics. In the absence (...) of institutional assurance, Chinese patients drew on the cultural logic of particularism and its associated cultural repertoire to induce fidelity from their physicians. They mobilized interpersonal networks to function as assurance and presented hongbao as a return of favor to the doctors. This form of exchange is gifting-oriented. Alternatively, if there were no interpersonal networks to rely on, they proactively offered hongbao to doctors at arm’s length in an attempt to personalize the relationship to seek assurance and abate their anxieties. This form of exchange is bribery-oriented. Both forms of exchange co-existed when there was one-way generalized distrust manifested from patients to doctors. When doctors also developed generalized distrust in patients, arm’s length exchanges declined, leaving embedded exchanges as the dominant form. Our study asserts the central role of culture in constituting exchange behaviors and the importance of institutions in shaping the form of exchange. It contributes to the midrange theory of trust, generating a number of hypotheses for future research on the relationships among culture, institutions, distrust, assurance, and illicit exchange. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers need a theory of distrust that can make sense of the institutional distrust that is common among people who face systemic oppression. Our purpose in this chapter is to lay the groundwork for such a theory. Our strategy is to use feminist insights about institutional distrust to critique the most general and well-developed theory of distrust in philosophy—Katherine Hawley’s commitment account—and to learn from this exercise about what a feminist theory of distrust should (...) be like. Though not designed to explain institutional distrust as we understand it, Hawley’s theory is meant to apply to people’s relationships with institutional representatives as well as to friendships or intimate relationships whose contours are shaped by informal institutional structures. It should therefore be able to explain the institutional distrust that is prevalent among oppressed people. However, we argue that it falls short in this regard. The chapter ends with discussion about what our critique suggests about future directions for the feminist philosophy of distrust. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke argue that virtue signalling – saying things in order to improve or protect your moral reputation – has a range of bad consequences and that as such there is a strong moral presumption against engaging in it. I argue that virtue signalling also has a range of good consequences, and that as such there is no default presumption either for or against engaging in it. Following from this, I argue that given that virtue signalling (...) is sometimes bad and sometimes good, we should avoid virtue signalling when we can be confident that the consequences will be bad, and we should press on with signalling when we can be confident that the consequences will be good. For the most part, I focus on three good consequences that are related to trusting dispositions: signalling trustworthiness, avoiding distrust, and scaffolding self-trust. I also highlight some additional positive consequences that are unrelated to trust. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in the dynamics and influences of activist groups, few studies have examined the specific tactics used by activists to achieve legitimacy and how these actions affect target firms or industries. This article studies the history and current state of the battle between tobacco control groups and Big Tobacco in search of evidence for their use of framing—a process of generating shared meaning and purpose through the creation of overarching messages—as a vehicle for carrying out their mission, achieving (...) legitimacy, and thwarting the efforts of adversaries. The authors propose that both sides marshal specific core frames in service of broader master frames, namely the projection of honesty and trustworthiness for the tobacco industry, countered by public health's master frame of distrust of the industry. The evolution of this battle may also be understood within the framework of a two-factor model of trust and distrust; the authors assert that the relationship between tobacco control and the industry will likely continue as one of low trust/high distrust, in part because the master frame of distrust has served multiple purposes for public health activists, including the establishment of greater legitimacy with the public and, by proxy, with the target industry. Several specific conclusions are drawn regarding the functions of distrust and the relationship between framing, trust, and legitimacy. (shrink)

Distrust of government and a sense that government has failed are central features of public life in America. Attack on Government is a psychological study of these and related features of the way we experience government in the United States. The book considers such topics as the moral standing of government, the free market ideal, and the abuse of power.

Tax compliance has been extensively researched. Yet, the classic question ‘why do people pay taxes?’ remains unanswered. In Jordan, tax evasion is widespread. The state and citizens have been trapped in a continuous hide-and-seek game, which has taken the form of a virtuous cycle. This paper investigates tax evasion along with the most noticeable features of the Jordanian tax system. It also highlights how the virtuous cycle of tax evasion has been established and what could possibly be a way out (...) of it. We argue that sociocultural values are the most prominent cause for tax evasion. That is, the procedures of state formation and functionality in Jordan have created mutual distrust between the state and its citizens. Having been raised in a community characterized by deep distrust, tax evasion is no longer considered immoral by substantial numbers of the Jordanian population. We argue that successive governments need to create a high-trust-based culture and formulate strategies that serve to acquire normative ethical values in order to enhance voluntary compliance. The way to accomplish this necessity is through enforcing the state’s transparency and accountability. The taxation system needs to concentrate on income tax rather than raise tax rates on essential commodities to collect substantial tax revenues. Thus, further reform of the taxation system along with a reduction in tax incentives need to be considered. Moreover, lowering the exceptionally high personal income tax threshold would bring Jordan in line with its peers, expand the base, and introduce more progressivity. There would also be a scope to introduce a minimum tax based on sales as a tool to address tax evasion. (shrink)

In this chapter I explore some of the roles of trust, mistrust, and distrust in deeply plural or diverse societies. Section One sets out the features of deeply diverse societies that provide the contexts of trust and distrust. Section Two proposes that social relationships in diverse societies need to have two qualities to be full of intersubjective trust (trustful) and, thus, worthy of trust (trustworthy) of the members of the relationships: cooperative and contestatory quality, and self-sustaining and co-sustaining (...) quality. Section Three suggests that such trustful relationships are grounded in and draw on a second type of trust: pre-existing co-operational trust. Section Four argues that trustful relationships and co-operational trust are co-sustained by a third type of trust: an interactive ethics or ethos of trust of the members within which they exercise judgements of trust and mistrust. These three types of trust form a triad that sustains virtuous (autopoietic) systems of trust and peacefulness (nonviolence). Throughout the sections the features of virtuous systems of trust are contrasted with vicious systems of distrust. (shrink)

How does trust operate under conditions of oppression? Little attention has been paid to how distrust may be both necessary and costly to its bearer. Distrust is clearly warranted under certain conditions, but do those conditions contribute to a reduction in one's overall well-being? More importantly, is there something about distrust itself (rather than the conditions that warrant it) that contributes to this reduction in well-being? In this essay, I explore these questions in depth. I explain what (...) the costs of distrust are and how they impede our well-being. I argue that the weakened development of trust through oppression has some important downstream consequences: namely, it requires the cultivation of skepticism as a virtue of distrust, which I argue should be included as one of Lisa Tessman's burdened virtues—those that are required for survival but that do not necessarily lead to the agent's flourishing. (shrink)

In 2019 the Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, an initiative of the European Commission, published Ethical Guidelines for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. This document, along with others, aims to lay the foundations in Europe for trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI). A set of prerequisites, ethical principles and strategies point the way to a human-centric European project that aligns with the needs and expectations of human beings. This article argues that this proposal faces difficulties due to the essentially negative image of AI, which (...) has its roots in literature (the Frankenstein Complex), influences the collective imagination, and is currently found in the audiovisual arts. Thus some recent film cases are analysed, with the aim of establishing a diagnosis and offering possible solutions. A question that hinders the ethical and political path that is intended in the European space and requires an extensive aesthetic education, which is currently systemically lacking. (shrink)