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Robots are increasingly becoming prevalent in our daily lives within our living or working spaces. We hope that robots will take up tedious, mundane or dirty chores and make our lives more comfortable, easy and enjoyable by providing companionship and care. However, robots may pose a threat to human privacy, safety and autonomy; therefore, it is necessary to have constant control over the developing technology to ensure the benevolent intentions and safety of autonomous systems. Building trust in (autonomous) robotic systems is thus necessary. The title of this book highlights this challenge: "Trust in robots—Trusting robots". Herein, various notions and research areas associated with robots are unified. The theme "Trust in robots" addresses the development of technology that is trustworthy for users; "Trusting robots" focuses on building a trusting relationship with robots, furthering previous research. These themes and topics are at the core of the PhD program "Trust Robots" at TU Wien, Austria.

'Trust in Modern Societies' by Barbara A. Misztal and 'The Problem of Trust' by Adam B. Seligman are reviewed.

The variable trust has become widely used in the social science research lately and few concepts seem to have attracted so much attention from such a broad variety of academic disciplines. In political science in the theories on social capital and political culture, emphasizing its importance for democracy, trus has been seen as na essential variable for the understanding of societies. In social capital theory the generalized interpersonal trust is often given a particularly important role to initiate virtuous circles of development in the societies. This paper will treat some of the different theories that are connected both to the definition and the effects of generalized trust and then issues connected to the uncertainty of the measurements of generalized trust

Frédérique Six (1962) studied Environmental Engineering at Wageningen University. Upon graduation in 1987 she joined McKinsey & Company as a business analyst and obtained her MBA at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France) in 1988. She rejoined McKinsey & Company as an associate and worked in the Amsterdam and London offices from 1989-1993 providing management consulting services to top management of large corporations and government institutions. From 1993 through 1999 she worked with KPMG Environmental Consulting as a senior management consultant and with KPMG Inspire Foundation as a senior researcher researching new ways of organizing. She has coedited The trust process, empirical studies of the determinants and the process of trust development (with Bart Nooteboom, Edward Elgar, 2003). In 2004 she obtained her Ph.D. in management at Erasmus University Rotterdam and joined the department of Public Administration and Organization Science at Free University (Amsterdam). Her research focuses on integrity and trust within and between organizations in both public and private sector. Her research interests are integrity dilemmas; dynamics of trust processes in work relations; creating structures and processes that stimulate integrity and trust; creating conditions for learning, innovation and change in organizations; tackling social challenges with dialogue in issue networks, social entrepreneurship and social partnerships. ; The purpose of this study is to find out more about how trust works as an interactive and asymmetrical process, how trust is built up against the inevitable occurrence of trouble and how organizational policies and settings affect the generation and maintenance of trust. A theory of interpersonal trust building is developed based on relational signalling theory. The key argument put forward in this study is that for interpersonal trust to be built in work relations within organizations, both individuals in the relationship need to have their actions guided by a stable normative frame. Thus the stability of normative frames becomes a joint goal and likely to be jointly produced within the relationship. The theory shows that for interpersonal trust to be built (1) legitimate distrust situations must be taken away through interest alignment arrangements, (2) institutional arrangements must be put in place that stimulate frame resonance, (3) both individuals must regularly perform actions conveying positive relational signals and (4) both individuals involved in a trouble situation must at least act in ways that are not perceived as negative relational signals. A multiple case study strategy was applied covering two organizations. Embedded within the case study strategy, a multi-method approach was used with interviews, observations, a questionnaire survey, documents and verification meetings as instruments for three types of analysis: a quantitative trust and trouble event analysis, a quantitative survey analysis and qualitative analyses.

The author of the present paper has been asked to discuss R. Helmholz, R. Zimmermann (eds.), Itinera Fiduciae: Trust and Treuhand in Historical Perspective (Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1998). He especially focuses on the possible (historical) ties between trusts and European Private Law or ius commune. The central question of his paper is whether or not the trust is a typical Anglo-American legal concept which must be placed outside the European ius-commune tradition.

Tax compliance has been studied in economics by analysing the individual decision of a representative person between paying and evading taxes. A neglected aspect of tax compliance is the interaction of taxpayers and tax authorities. The relationship between the two actors can be understood as an implicit or 'psychological' contract. Studies on tax evasion in Switzerland show that the more strongly the political participation rights are developed, the more important the contract is, and the higher tax morale is. In this paper, empirical evidence based on a survey of tax authorities of the twenty-six Swiss states (cantons) is presented, indicating that the differences in the treatment of taxpayers by tax authorities can be explained by differences in political participation rights as well.

Combining economic, social-psychological and sociological approaches to trust, this book provides a general theoretical framework to causally explain conditional and unconditional trust; it also presents an experimental test of the corresponding integrative model and its predictions. Broadly, it aims at advancing a cognitive turn in trust research by highlighting the importance of (1) an actor's context-dependent definition of the situation and (2) the flexible and dynamic degree of rationality involved. In essence, trust is as "multi-faceted" as there are cognitive routes that take us to the choice of a trusting act. Therefore, variable rationality has to be incorporated as an orthogonal dimension to the typological space of trust. The theory presents an analytically tractable model; the empirical test combines trust games, high- and low-incentive conditions, framing manipulations, and psychometric measurements, and is complemented by decision-time analyses.

Americans' trust in other Americans has been on the decline for decades. Their trust in American institutions such as business and religion is, although sometimes wavering, more resilient. Can our trust in institutions help repair our trust in each other?