Scholars have long wrestled with the nature of trust. Perhaps this is because our understanding of trust is flimsy: we bandy the word about and use it to refer to a potpourri of characteristics. In the days of togas and laurels, Aristotle argued that in order to gain the trust of listeners, a speaker had to have ethos (character), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic). In other words, there’s more than one way to gain trust, and these ways vary vastly from the moral domain, to the emotional, to the logical.
Many centuries later, in 1995, three management researchers—Roger C. …
