Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model (Wiley Series in Agent Technology) Review

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Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model (Wiley Series in Agent Technology) ReviewThe authors are part of a leading Italian cognitive psychology work group. Castelfranchi's publications are many and highly insightful. This book is likely to represent a key reference work for many years, and I recommend it highly for researchers in cognitive and computational psychology areas. I will limit myself to criticisms and suggestions for elaboration.
The major weakness of the volume is its almost complete lack of reference to supporting empirical material. This absence renders the volume more like a classical philosophical text than a piece of scientific research. Moreover, though the title stresses computation, there is virtually no elaboration of or testing of computational models.
For instance, the authors repeatedly assert "trust is the glue of society," but they never give either argument or empirical support for this notion. There are, of course, whole fields that dewith the nature of human society that never mention trust at all, or at best consider it an optional phenomenon. The concept does not exist in standard economic or biological theories, and most anthropological accounts of social life never mention trust. The authors may be correct (I would say "a glue" rather than "the glue"), but they have gone zero distance in proving this fact.
The authors are critical of all previous models of trust, which they declare "pernicious" (p. 7), and set the goal of providing "a general, abstract, and domain-independent notion and model of trust." (p. 7) Seeking such generality, however, presumes that trust has some "essential" meaning, rather than being a term with several very loosely related meanings, as a Wittgensteinian treatment might suggest. If there is no essence, there is no general model. I doubt that there is such an essence. For instance, the concept of trust in "I had no choice but to trust his good will" is very different from the concept in "I exposed myself to harm by opting to trust his good will," and is different from the concept in "I trust the capacity of my mathematical software to solve this problem accurately."
The authors' negative evaluation of domain-specific models of trust leads them to reject the very best models, and the most persuasive evidence available to us. The whole research tradition initiated by Elinor Ostrom, James Walker, Toshio Yamaguchi and others on trust in common pool resource and public goods games is rejected for being too "restricted." (p. 26) On the other hand, they somewhat unexpectedly argue that "only a cognitive agent can trust another; only an agent endowed with goals and beliefs." (p. 38) The appears to imply that trust cannot be modeled most animal interactions. Of course, trust means something differentn applied to fish that scavenge the mouths of larger fish, but it is not clear that this behavior is not in the "family meaning" of the term trust.
I suspect that the authors' rejection of the standard behavioral game theoretic literature on trust is due to its mathematical nature. The authors do have some equations in the book, but they never use mathematics for the purpose of drawing conclusions from a set of postulates. Rather they use equations to describe their ideas, much as they use diagrams with boxes and arrows. They certainly show nothing but hostility to the behavioral game theoretic literature on trust, which they refer to as "economic." The whole of Chapter 8 is devoted to a critique of this literature. I do not believe their critique has a single element of validity. Their main argument is that the behavioral game theory (bgt) research is "reductivist." I submit that this is just name-calling---one can engage in it without having any substantive argument at all.
Their first specific point is that the literature is self-contradictory: for the bgt researcher "trust is the belief that Y will choose and will behave in a non-rational way," and hence that "the entire society is grounded on the irrationality of the agents." (p. 236) They arrive at this attribution by noting that bgt finds that agents exhibit other-regarding preferences, which the theory explicitly argues are rational although not selfish. The authors go to note that the trust behavior discovered in bgt is in fact not irrational, thus completely undermining their central point. Indeed, it is quite clear from their argument that they have learned the distinction between rationality and selfishness from behavioral game theory research. Whom do they think they are kidding in offering this lame critique?
The authors would have done better to have taken a more catholic attitude towards behavioral game theory trust research. Recognizing its obvious strengths, they would have done better to develop the behavioral game theoretic model for their readers, and then, in a spirit of respect and inclusiveness, noted its limitations, and devoted their efforts a developing a more inclusive explanatory framework.
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