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Trust, distrust, and affective looping

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. And so it answers the concerns that make Faulkner (2015) favor a two-place account, without having to give up on the idea of limits to the attitude of trust.

  2. This formulation differs from my earlier “trust is an attitude of optimism that the goodwill and competence of another will extend to cover the domain of our interaction with her, together with the expectation that the one trusted will be directly and favourably moved by the thought that we are counting on her” (Jones 1996, 4) in that goodwill has dropped out of the picture. There is a sense in which, just in virtue of being responsive to the fact of another’s dependency, we can be described as showing them good will, but it is a mistake to think that those who trust must posit something, such as good will, that is above and beyond that responsiveness.

  3. For a discussion of hopeful trust, see McGeeer (2008).

  4. This term is borrowed from Calhoun (1984).

  5. According to Calhoun (1984), de Sousa (1987), Roberts (2003), (and others) emotions are partly constituted by these cognitive sets. Feeling views (James 1884; Damasio 1994; Prinz 2004), in contrast, say that these cognitive sets are set in train by the emotions rather than being constitutive parts of them. Nevertheless, that emotions involve, whether causally or constitutively, such cognitive sets is common ground.

  6. This will be true of any affective attitude account that takes affect to be prior to acts of entrusting, so the details of my particular account do not matter for this claim. The claim still holds if you analyse trust as confidence rather than optimism, provided that you recognize confidence as affective, rather than as, for example, a judgment of subjective probability. It does not hold, however, on a view such as Holton’s (1994), which takes trust to be a disposition to affective attitudes towards the one-trusted. More on this shortly.

  7. I say “merely” because emotions are constituted by or set in train cognitive sets, so they too have a cognitive profile.

  8. I take it that judgments are occurrent and beliefs dispositional.

  9. The distinction between active and passive contempt also explains how it is that high status individuals might simultaneously regard their servants, slaves, or retainers as contemptable and yet trust them in limited and menial domains. Their contempt is the passive contempt of indifference rather than trust-phobic active contempt.

  10. Exploring trust-philic and phobic pathways is, of course, only part of the story of how trust is created and sustained. One way to create trust is by increasing trustworthiness and communicating that trustworthiness to would-be trusters. This is the method used by, for example, appropriate regulatory and certification practices (see O’Neill 2002). I do not mean to downplay the importance of this pathway but only to focus on the comparatively neglected affective pathways that exploit affective looping.

  11. Thanks to Monique Wonderly for discussion of the philosophical import of attachment theory. See Wonderly (2016, 2017).

  12. Only some, for the Irish, who by all accounts form a non-trivial part of the estimated numbers of undocumented US migrants, have escaped demonization. The paradigm “undocumented” is Spanish speaking and not White.

  13. In describing this as empathy rather than sympathy, I am siding with Meyers (2016, 156): “empathetic engagement is an imaginative activity that seeks to understand another person “from the inside”—that is, to imaginatively replicate the other’s subjective experience including its cognitive, affective, corporeal, and desiderative dimensions.”

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank audiences at the Pacific APA, The University of Adelaide, and Monash University for their helpful comments.

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Correspondence to Karen Jones.

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Jones, K. Trust, distrust, and affective looping. Philos Stud 176, 955–968 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1221-5

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