The Roots of Trust
The Roots of Trust

Summary/Abstract: The present article addresses the question of the ‘roots’ of trust: a debate between cognitive andnon-cognitive trust theories, ongoing since the dawn of modern theorising on trust. On the oneside, there is the assumption of conceiving trust as a learnt capacity, based on Erikson’s conceptof basic trust. On the other side is the hypothesis of innate, built-in trust. After a critical overviewof the cognitive and non-cognitive approaches, given that neither side was able to build up a de -cisive argument, the paper proceeds to some relevant discoveries of the life sciences that serve asproofs of the concept. Michael Polányi’s principles of marginal control and boundary conditionshelp avoiding the pitfall of any reductionist determinism. The analysis results in a rejection of theearly learning concept of the cognitive approaches. Trusting is proven to be an a priori givenhuman faculty inscribed in our neurobiological system, but neither biologically, nor in any otherway, entirely determined. The possibility to trust is always present in the human: the trusting being.

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