Individual Swift Trust and Knowledge Based Trust (Robert et al, 2009, JMIS)

Cognitive Trust

1. Interpersonal trust can be categorized as cognitive, affect, and emotional [72, 73]. Like prior research on virtual teams, this study focuses on cognitive interpersonal trust [61, 63, 64, 67]. 

2.  Cognitive trust is defined as a “trustor’s rational expectations that a trustee will have the necessary attributes to be relied upon” [77, p. 943]. Cognitive trust can be developed through at least two paths. One, trust can be imported “swiftly” from previous experiences and invoked by similarities in the current situation/trustee with that of the past [99]. Two, trust can emerge as the result of personal experiences between the trustor and the trustee [94].

3.  Traditional models of trust have viewed trust as a developmental process closely intertwined with the relationship

development process [83, 134]. Trust is viewed as a result of a history-dependent relationship [75] that develops gradually through the communication of past behavior [82, 94]. Traditional trust development theories describe a deliberate cognitive process in which one party’s trustworthiness and the level of perceived risk of a given situation

are compared [94]. Through a sequential iteration, the achievement of trust at one level is theorized to enable the development of trust at the next level [82].

4.  There are at least three reasons members of temporary systems such as virtual project teams
 (1)  the lack of past experience
 (2)  the geographical dispersion
 (3) the reliance on ICT-mediated communication
 the traditional view of knowledge-based trust will predict low levels of initial trust among virtual team members. 

5.  high levels of trust have been observed in initial encounters in organizations [98], as well as in temporary traditional [99] and virtual teams [61, 63].

6.  The high initial trust observed in these systems is called swift trust, a form of trust that is conferred “ex ante” [99]. Swift trust allows individuals to manage issues of vulnerability, uncertainty, risk, and expectations in situations where a developed trusting relationship is absent [99].

7.  Team members place other team members into categories based on their characteristics (e.g., gender, profession, or organizational role) and form judgments based on that individual’s category and not his or her actual behaviors [99].

Swift Trust

1.  Swift trust, a presumptive form of trust, was introduced to explain the paradoxical trusting behavior exhibited by members of new temporary project teams [99, 151].

2. In these temporary teams, individuals who had no past working relationships immediately formed trust and began engaging in trusting behaviors.These individuals did not have a past track record or time to wait to develop one before working together. It was posited that these individuals imported trust from other contexts [99, 151].

3. we posited will influence the formation of swift trust: an individual’s disposition to trust (also called propensity

to trust) and category-based trust.

4. Disposition to trust is a “generalized attitude” learned from both personal experience of fulfilled and unfulfilled promises as well as through direct observed behavior of early caregivers [126] and refers to one’s general predisposition to trust or distrust other people [52, 94, 137]

5. Category-based trust is often based on cultural or identity-based stereotypes of teammates [15, 44, 99, 151]. These categories can be based on previous long-term associated groups such as race and gender or on ad hoc factors such as shirt colors or random assignments to groups [106]. Category processing treats individuals as members of a category rather than as individuals [24, 45].

6. Category-based processing influences the swift formation of trust. 

7. Identification with a salient social or organizational group (e.g., gender, race) influences swift trust formation [15, 98, 99]. Group identification, the degree to which one identifies with a group, is a result of category-based information processing in which an individual identifies him- or herself as a member of a categorical group [1, 88, 138, 139, 140, 147].

8. Strong group identification can lead group members to form a positive bias and ascribe positive attributes to members of their own group [8, 56, 122, 138].