A conceptual analysis of trust

With this article, I present a novel conceptual analysis of trust. The analysis is interdisciplinary, as it acknowledges and combines influential conceptualizations from political science, psychology, and sociology. I emphasize diverging conceptual aspects as complementary and develop an argument for how they relate within different forms of trust. Concretely, I employ Sartori’s conceptual guidelines to systematically develop the concept along the ladder of abstraction. As I descend the ladder, I move from a universal conceptual definition into the development of increasingly concrete subtypes within the realms of interpersonal and institutional trust. The resulting framework centrally exists beyond any particular school of thought, and thereby represents an important move toward multidisciplinary consensus around the meaning of this fundamentally important concept.