The Risk-Based View of Trust: A Conceptual Framework

Trust and risk have often been linked in the literature, but their relationship is far from clear. Trust has been used in three different ways — namely, as a perception (subjective trust), as various personal and situational factors that lead to subjective trust (trust antecedents), and as the actions resulting from subjective trust (behavioral trust). We explain how risk is related to these three conceptions of trust. First, we argue that subjective trust and perceived risk are in fact mirror images of each other. Second, we show how behavioral trust can be viewed as risk taking, so that the causal relationship between subjective trust and behavioral trust is similar to that of perceived risk and risk taking. And third, we discuss the role of personal characteristics (such as risk propensity and trust propensity) in the risk–trust relationship. We also develop a number of propositions based on our risk-based view of trust.