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Trust is generally considered as the basis of relationships between major school stakeholders and contributes not only to productive attitudes and behaviors but also to the accomplishment of collective goals. The principal is the key person in creating the atmosphere and the conditions conducive to trust in which trust-based relationships among school constituencies can flourish. Specifically, school culture characterized by collegiality, professionalism, and consideration generally leads to higher trust in the principal if consistently supported by trustworthy behaviors of the principal. This brings several benefits to and desirable outcomes for school organizations, employees, and eventually students. Collaborative culture, organizational justice, teacher professionalism, job satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behaviors, with reduced burnout, is by no means an exhaustive list of positive organizational and work-related outcomes. Moreover, trust in the principal plays an essential role in the thorough and smooth implementation of educational changes and better student outcomes. However, trust in the principal is still an underexplored area of research. In addition to reliance on simpler correlational methods and cross-sectional data, which fall short of demonstrating multiple mechanisms that create and sustain trust in the principal, possible moderating roles of school characteristics have not received enough attention. Also, teachers are the primary focus of trust studies whereas parents’ and students’ perspectives have been generally overlooked. Thus, both theoretical and methodological shortcomings call for further studies about trust in the principal in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding across different school settings.

Household water use accounts for an important portion of water consumption. Notably, different households may behave differently regarding how water is used in everyday life. Trust and risk perception are two significant psychological factors that influence water use behavior in households. Since trust and risk perception are malleable and subject to construction, they are useful for developing effective demand management strategies and water conservation policies. The concepts of trust and risk perception are multidimensional and interconnected. Risk perception varies across social groups and is often shaped by subjective feelings toward a variety of activities, events, and technologies. Risk perception is also mediated by trust, which involves a positive expectation of an individual, an organization, and/or an institution that derives from complex processes, characteristics, and competence. Likewise, different social groups’ trust in various entities involved in household water use is subject to the significant and far-reaching impact of risk perception. The complexity of the two notions poses challenges to the measurement and exploration of their effects on household water use. In many cases, risk perception and trust can influence people’s acceptance of water sources (e.g., tap water, bottled water, recycled water, and desalinated water) and their conservation behavior (e.g., installing water-saving technologies and reducing water consumption) in household water use. Trust can affect household water use indirectly through its influence on risk perception. Moreover, trust and risk perception in household water use are neither given nor fixed; rather, they are dynamically determined by external, internal, and informational factors. A coherent, stable, transparent, and fair social and institutional structure is conducive to building trust. However, trust and risk perception differ among groups with diverse household and/or individual demographic, economic, social, and cultural characteristics. Direct information from personal experiences and, more importantly, indirect information from one’s social network, as well as from mass media and social media, play an increasingly important role in the formation and evolution of trust and risk perception, bringing a profound impact on household water use in an era of information. Future directions lie in new dynamics of risk perception and trust in the era of information explosion, the coevolution mechanism of risk perception and trust in household water use, the nuanced impacts of different types of risks (e.g., controllable and uncontrollable) on household water use, and the interactive relations of risk perception and trust across geographical contexts.

Since the 1980s there has been significant reform in the development, delivery, and evaluation of all areas of public policy and services provision, including schooling. The reforms are prompted by a general “turn” from direct government determination and provision of public services to indirect governance undertaken by a mixture of public, private, and philanthropic actors. Orthodoxies about public sector governance and schooling system reform have shifted over this time from a preference for bureaucracy to preferences for markets, contracts, and most recently social networks. Schooling system governance in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries has seen devolution of substantial statutory powers, responsibilities, and accountabilities to local parent communities or shared-interest coalitions, both for-profit and not-for-profit. Schooling policy, governance, and services provision work is now distributed across multiple state, parastatal, and nongovernmental actors. Trust in the actions of others within devolved and distributed systems is identified as an essential social lubricant of contemporary schooling governance and reform. Studies of the role played by trust in schooling systems remain relatively rare.

Interpersonal trust refers to confidence in another person (or between two persons) and a willingness to be vulnerable to him or her (or to each other). In contemporary organizational science, research conducted within organizations has extensively investigated personal, dyadic, and contextual factors that motivate interpersonal trust (i.e., trust between two persons) and the consequence of interpersonal trust for the trustor and the trustee. This line of work distinguishes between two orientations that researchers have taken when conceptualizing interpersonal trust: unidirectional trust and bidirectional trust. Unidirectional trust refers to a focus on one person’s trust in another without regard to the reciprocation of that trust. Unidirectional trust research investigates trust in another party at a higher hierarchy level (e.g., followers’ trust in the leader), a lower hierarchy level (e.g., the leader’s trust in followers), or at the same hierarchy level (e.g., employees’ trust in coworkers). Bidirectional trust focuses on the shared trust in a dyad. Research on bidirectional trust helps to provide insights about the complex pattern and evolution of interpersonal trust over time. However, research investigating bidirectional trust is relatively limited compared to unidirectional trust. Besides research on interpersonal trust within the same work unit, there is also a recent trend toward investigating interpersonal trust across work unit and organizational boundaries. Another important line of literature regarding interpersonal trust is the investigation of the causes and consequences of interpersonal trust violations and the effectiveness of remedies (e.g., apologies) for these violations.

Behavioral decision making and game theory (BDMGT) is the umbrella term for a set of methods aimed at recording the choices and eliciting the decision preferences of individuals (organizational agents like managers, employees, entrepreneurs, investors, or consumers). BDMGT comprises a set of well-defined decision problems that, in contrast to surveys or questionnaires that rely on self-assessment, evaluate actual behavioral choices with well-defined outcomes and choice parameters. Additionally, in contrast to idealized models, BDMGT focuses on actual decision-making processes. BDMGT allows for dynamic and complex decision scenarios that are nevertheless computationally tractable and have lower linguistic demands (thus making inter-group and cross-cultural comparisons easier). BDMGT decision problems can be broadly categorized as either individual (i.e., where the agent acts against nature or luck, and all outcomes return to the agent) or social (i.e., where [at least one] another agent—“the partner”—is involved). Social decisions can be further defined as either non-strategic (i.e., where the partner makes no decisions, but some of the outcomes can be returned to them) or strategic (i.e., where the partner makes decisions that can affect the final outcomes returned to the agent). Examples of generic research questions for individual decision tasks include how risk influences decisions (i.e., measuring risk preferences) or (for social decision tasks) how agents interact with each other (i.e., how they allocate resources, what they consider fair, how they build trust, or how they coordinate to achieve common strategic goals). The present entry focuses on the methodological aspects of BDMGT. There are major methodological considerations and common pitfalls associated with BDMGT that can bias results and their interpretation, including incentives and how participants should be paid, anonymity, double-blinding (and when this is not enough), social desirability, how the “partner” participant is explained, or what issues may arise with repeated decisions or trials. The field has also seen the introduction of newer but well-established developments in the field, such as computerized testing, decision neuroscience, and augmented and virtual reality.

A social dilemma is a situation of interdependence between people in which there is conflict between doing what is best for oneself, and doing what is best for the group: Trying to produce the best personal outcome (selfishness) hurts the group effort, and contributing to the group effort (cooperation) leads to a less-than-optimal personal outcome. The best personal outcome is realized by acting for oneself when everyone else acts for the group. Because of this, if each group member does what is best for him or herself, the group will fail, and each person will end up with a poor outcome. Solution of a social dilemma thus requires that at least some people forgo selfish interest in favor of the collective. Research into social dilemmas is primarily oriented around identifying the influences on a person’s willingness to cooperate and designing interventions that will encourage more frequent cooperation. There are many real examples of social dilemmas: clean air, charities, public broadcasting, and groundwater, to name a few.

Africa is a place of low social trust. This fact is significant for understanding the politics and economics of the region, whether for questions of national unity or economic coordination and growth. One of the central ways in which trust and social relations have come to be examined within the social sciences is through the notion of social capital, defined as the norms and networks that enable collective action. Use of the concept of social capital has mushroomed in popularity within academia since the 1980s and has been used within African studies to interpret the developmental effects of social relations. It is important to review how researchers have been synthesizing the study of African societies with the social capital approach, and offer suggestions on how this can be better achieved. Specifically, there is contradiction between the view that social capital is useful for economic development and the view that social capital means a community can decide its own economic goals. Students of social capital in Africa must accept that the cultural and normative diversity of the continent necessitates appreciation of the diverse aims of social networks. This means a rejection both of modernist theories of development and postmodern reduction of human relations to forms of power exchange. Future research on trust and social capital in Africa must give weight to community articulations of motivations to trust, what activities count as communal, and what new economic cultures are being formed as a result of present communal varieties.

Experimental economics has moved beyond the traditional focus on market mechanisms and the “invisible hand” by applying sociological and socio-psychological knowledge in the study of rationality, markets, and efficiency. This knowledge includes social preferences, social norms, and cross-cultural variation in motivations. In turn, the renewed interest in causation, social mechanisms, and middle-range theories in sociology has led to a renaissance of research employing experimental methods. This includes laboratory experiments but also a wide range of field experiments with diverse samples and settings. By focusing on a set of research topics that have proven to be of substantive interest to both disciplines—cooperation in social dilemmas, trust and trustworthiness, and social norms—this article highlights innovative interdisciplinary research that connects experimental economics with experimental sociology. Experimental economics and experimental sociology can still learn much from each other, providing economists and sociologists with an opportunity to collaborate and advance knowledge on a range of underexplored topics of interest to both disciplines.

Collaborating in teams by using various digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) to perform interdependent tasks and achieve common goals relevant for one’s organization is increasingly the new normal. Such more or less virtual teams—which can be all human or human-agent teams (HATs) (i.e., including autonomous software agents with artificial intelligence)—are complex dynamic open socio-digital systems embedded in an organizational, economical, and societal context. How and to what degree team members use ICTs to perform their tasks and to manage situational demands influence team processes and emergent states, such as transactive memory systems and team mental models, and thus team effectiveness. Research on input-mediator-output-input models of teamwork has shown that these processes are reciprocal, influencing team development over time. Research on virtual team effectiveness shows negative effects of virtual teams on team functioning and effectiveness primarily when short-term laboratory teams are studied, whereas no or lower effects were found for long-term organizational teams. These results have practical and theoretical implications, such as to support the launch of virtual teams by team-building interventions and trainings and to prefer longitudinal and field studies to examine processes and outcomes of virtual human teams as well as HATs.

Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are small devices that police officers can affix to their person—in a head-, shoulder-, or chest-mounted position—that can audio and video record their interactions with community members. BWCs have received strong support from the public and, in recent years, widespread buy-in from police leadership and officers because of their ability to improve accountability and transparency and enhance the collection of evidence. Implementation guidelines recommend that officers activate their BWCs during each officer–citizen interaction and inform the people they encounter that they are being recorded. Early research on this technology found that officers equipped with body cameras were significantly less likely to engage in force and receive citizen complaints. However, more recent studies with larger samples have had mixed findings about the impact of body cameras on use of force, citizen complaints, and other police activities and behaviors. Numerous legal and ethical considerations are associated with BWCs, including their implications for privacy concerns and public disclosure. However, police officials, policymakers, civil rights groups, and the public must continue to weigh these privacy concerns against the potential for BWCs to enhance police accountability and transparency. Future scholarship should focus on the degree to which BWCs can improve police–community relations and yield valuable evidence for both criminal cases and internal investigations.

Food safety has been a critical issue from the beginning of human existence, but more recently the nature of concerns over food safety has changed. Further, in terms of both scale and impact, the modern problems of food safety are very different from the issues that confronted the past. For example, especially since the late 1990s, society has faced food safety crises and scares arising from threats as diverse as bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE), dioxin contamination, melamine-tainted infant milk formula, and so forth. These phenomena show that an ever-increasing variety of contaminants such as chemical and microbial agents can potentially find their way into the food supply, while novel foods such as GM foods and cultured meat add new challenges when it comes to certifying food safety. Food safety has become a particularly complex issue in the context of the global economy because the governance of food safety is entangled with several larger trends at the global scale, including (a) trade liberalization in the 1980s; (b) the adoption of a risk analysis framework by global and national food safety administrations; and (c) the spread of food quality management regimes throughout the entire food industry, from food production to processing and retail. Furthermore, there are vast differences between developed and developing countries with respect to both food safety regulations and prominent food safety issues. These facts, combined with the borderless nature of sociotechnical food systems, contribute to a situation in which it is extremely challenging for any individual country to manage food safety issues within its jurisdiction. This observation underscores the importance of global food safety governance, a goal which is in itself difficult to achieve. Two especially significant dilemmas have emerged within the existing situation vis-à-vis global food safety governance. The first is the challenges arising from the tensions inherent in a “modern” food safety governance approach, a model that combines a science-based strategy of dealing with food safety problems, on one hand, and the ideal of participatory democracy, on the other hand, in trying to deal with food safety issues. Problems arise from the contradictions between the science-based risked management approach, focused narrowly on monitoring and mitigation of hazards, and the wide-ranging complexity of the social, political, and interpersonal factors that shape people’s real-world concerns about food safety. The second is cross-border application of risk management to food imports in the Global North and its implications for exporting countries in the Global South. Problems arise from disparities in approaches and expectations regarding food safety between the Global North and the South. These two dilemmas have one thing in common: Each inherently contains challenges arising from internal contractions, as when the goal of achieving sound and consistent solutions to food safety issues is pursued alongside the goal of building a broad consensus across varying actors whose values, norms, needs, and interests differ and who are situated in differing socioeconomic and political contexts. Drawing insights from the sociology of agriculture and food and from social studies of science, an attempt is made to unpack the societal and policy challenges of food safety governance in a globalized economy.

Trust is a relatively complex psychological state that arises in relationships characterized by dependence and risk. It has both cognitive and emotional elements that can be linked to certain actions made by parties involved in exchange relationships. The relationships of interest include some level of uncertainty, both about the motives and future actions of other parties and about the potential outcomes of engaging in cooperative behavior with those parties. Each party involved in an exchange relationship has a certain propensity to trust, a baseline shaped by various factors including previous relationships. An individual’s propensity to trust is viewed to be relatively stable over time and is most important in the earliest stages of a relationship when a leap of faith is required to enter the relationship because firsthand evidence about the other party is scant. During a relationship, a party’s propensity to trust serves as a filter through which the other party’s actions are judged. A party’s trustworthiness is shaped by views on the degree to which the potential trustee has (a) an ability to fulfill its duties, (b) a sincere concern about the welfare of the trusting party and a willingness to sacrifice its own outcomes, and (c) a commitment to abide by prevailing ethical norms. The relative importance of each component—ability, benevolence, and integrity—is likely to change over the course of a relationship. Trust may exist between two individuals in a dyad, among several individuals in a work group, between an individual and a firm, and between one organization and another. The last of these categories has been described as interorganizational trust, an important component in the relationships between firms and their stakeholders. When trust exists between firms, formal governance mechanisms, such as contracts and monitoring systems, will be less necessary, reducing transaction costs in the relationship. At the interpersonal level, trust in a relationship has been tied to many positive outcomes, including greater sharing of more accurate information and more frequent displays of organizational citizenship behavior. It has also shown a connection to higher levels of job satisfaction, creativity, cooperation, and productivity. When trust in leaders is higher, subordinates’ intention to quit is lower.

The relationship between journalists and their sources is central to journalism practice. It is a relationship based on a power struggle over the presentation of information to the public. The nature of that relationship continues to change in response to cultural, social, political, and technological circumstances. Historically, the relationship between journalists and sources has been predominantly characterized as interdependent, oscillating between cooperation and conflict over the control of information. However, the arrival of digital publishing platforms and growing use of artificial intelligence and automation in journalism have significantly disrupted this mutually dependent exchange. It has blurred the boundaries between the two roles by complicating the concept of “source” and “journalist” and released sources from their traditional reliance on journalists to disseminate their messages to citizens. Using digital platforms, sources have the option to bypass the traditional media and communicate directly with the public if it meets their strategic communication goals. Depending on whether the source is trying to reach a specific audience via social media or a wider audience via mass media, they can “opt-in” or “opt-out” of a traditional journalist–source relationship. The shift in power between reporters and sources poses a challenge to the authority and control of journalists who have lost their stranglehold over the means of publication. This change points to issues of accountability and scrutiny and raises questions about the ongoing relevance of journalism’s “fourth estate” role in democracy.

Transparency is the most recently established ethical principle for professional journalists, even though its roots stretch back almost a century. The emergence of transparency as a core journalistic ethic and value has been fueled mainly by three distinct yet interdependent developments. First, sociocultural advances in society have gradually increased the availability and demand for more information, including in areas such as politics and business. This development instilled an expectation of the “right to know,” also impacting the journalistic institution. Second, the introduction of digital media technologies has provided more means to disclose information, interact with journalists, and witness news production. Third, ethical and normative discussions by journalists and scholars have promoted more openness about journalism. Transparency has frequently been advocated as an effective way to combat the ongoing decline of trust and credibility in the news media. A central rationale supporting information disclosure and providing direct access to journalists and news organizations is that the audience will be able to ascertain which journalism it can trust to be true or which journalism may be superior. Specifically, in times when the news media is being labeled as fake or lying to the public, transparency may indeed be an important mechanism for the audience to hold journalism accountable. Yet, while the promise of transparency is an enticing prospect for the journalistic institution, empirical research has not quite been able to support all the claims that transparency will indeed improve credibility and trust in the news media. However, transparency is a nascent ethic and practice in journalism, and has only recently been officially recognized. Journalists and news organizations are still in the process of finding new ways to openly engage with the public, showing them the journalistic production process and building relationships with their communities. After all, building trust takes time and may only be achieved in a continuous effort to engage in an open, honest, and personal dialogue with the people.

Scientists who study issues such as climate change are often called on by both their colleagues and broader society to share what they know and why it matters. Many are willing to do so—and do it well—but others are either unwilling or may communicate without clear goals or in ways that may fail to achieve their goals. There are several central topics involved in the study of scientists as communicators. First, it is important to understand the evolving arguments behind why scientists are being called on to get involved in public engagement about contentious issues such as climate change. Second, it is also useful to consider the factors that social science suggests actually lead scientists to communicate about scientific issues. Last, it is important to consider what scientists are trying to achieve through their communication activities, and to consider to what extent we have evidence about whether scientists are achieving their desired goals.

Law enforcement negotiation is one of the only times when a law enforcement officer interacts with an offender during the commission of a crime and, as such, can influence the outcome of the situation in favor of law enforcement. All other interactions between offenders take place after the commission of the crime or during undercover operations when the law enforcement officer is hiding their identity. Law enforcement crisis and tactical negotiation (LECTN) provides techniques, tactics, and procedures for seamlessly dealing with difficult, dangerous, and disordered persons to obtain voluntary compliance through the application of verbal influence-based skill sets. LECTN is a method by which to deal with perceived threats to a subject’s emotional, psychological, or physical well-being during intense conflict or crisis situations. Understanding critical incidents and the mindset of a subject is critical to determining the proper communication strategies and tactics. At the heart of the process is understanding and assessing instrumental and expressive behavior in order to apply tactical negotiation or crisis intervention. A key skill set to being effective in negotiating with difficult, dangerous, and disordered persons is to build credibility through the application of the Behavioral Influence Stairway Model in the effective application of active listening skills, empathy, rapport–trust, and influence to persuade behavioral change on the part of the subject.

Over the past decades, prosecutors have become more and more powerful within criminal justice systems. Yet, there is still relatively little empirical research on prosecutors. Most of the literature focuses on the analysis of the prosecutorial system of a single country. Cross-country analyses are close to nonexistent. From a comparative perspective, the various possible means to establish the independence of prosecutors from government and at the same time securing their accountability to the law are of paramount interest. Regarding the former, appointment procedures, possible career paths, and the degree to which prosecutors are subject to orders both from within the prosecution agency as well as from without (e.g., the ministry of justice) are of special concern. With regard to prosecutorial accountability, it is the legality principle (also known as mandatory prosecution), the issue whether prosecutors enjoy a monopoly in the prosecution of criminals, whether decisions not to prosecute a suspect are subject to judicial review, and the transparency of the behavior of prosecutors that are key. Regarding the organizational design choices of prosecution agencies that have been implemented across countries, four different clusters can be identified. The four clusters perform markedly different in terms of the rule of law levels associated with them. The consequences of institutional design choices are surprisingly small. The de facto organization of prosecutors turns out to be far more relevant for outcomes than what is prescribed de jure. Countries in which prosecutors enjoy a high degree of de facto independence suffer significantly less from corruption than countries in which this is not the case. Given that the institutional design choices of prosecutors are of limited relevance for their de facto situation, the question is: What factors determine the de facto independence and accountability of prosecutors? It turns out that some rather stable and immutable factors are decisive: Common law legal systems do better than those belonging to the civil law legal families. Generalized trust also plays an important role. If most people believe that others can be trusted, very specific rules for the behavior of prosecutors may seem unnecessary. A number of trends regarding the organization of prosecutors can be observed in many countries, among them the increased reliance on trial waiver systems, bonus payments to incentivize prosecutors, the founding of prosecutorial councils, and prosecutorial activism. It is questionable whether the first three of these trends will increase the efficiency of prosecution agencies; rather, they are likely to lead to a deterioration in the overall rule of law score of those countries relying on them.

Even though conflict is increasingly finding its way into school settings, there is evidence that school leaders do not view themselves as being adequately equipped to meet the growing challenges. Training on short-term approaches to dealing with immediate issues may be available to practitioners through professional development offerings, but there is more involved in successfully and sustainably dealing with conflict than getting through a tense moment. School leaders need to be able to understand the causes and complexities—as well as navigate time elements—associated with ongoing conflict that can take place at the personal as well as organizational levels. Beyond understanding these concepts, administrators themselves need to increase the capacity of their staff and their organizations to assist in their development. In addition to learning how to recognize patterns and underlying causes advancing adversity, administrators would do well to invest in long-term conflict diminishing approaches such as building trust and improving interpersonal and organizational capacity as ways to increase credibility within and outside of the school itself. Finding people who can think critically and work adaptively to solve problems could prove to be a real advantage for educational leaders who strive to reduce the stress of the workplace and create a more collegial climate within the schools they serve. Building trust and the ability to “come through” capably for others even in tough situations increases the credibility of leaders. Leading through conflict with this credibility in turn helps to sustain a positive climate in schools.

There is a growing awareness of the crucial role that trust plays in every aspect of a school’s functioning and especially to student outcomes. To trust another person or group is to be at ease, without anxiety or worry, in a situation of interdependence in which valued outcomes depend upon the participation and contribution of others. The trustor can rest assured that their expectations will be fulfilled based on confidence in the other party’s benevolence, honesty, openness, reliability, and competence. As citizens across the globe have become increasingly distrustful of their institutions and leaders, the trend away from trust creates a special challenge for schools because trust is so fundamental to their core mission of educating students. The philosopher Annette Baier observed that we tend to notice trust as we notice air, only when it becomes scarce or polluted. These days, it seems evident that trust in our society as a whole has indeed been disrupted and is in scarce supply. As contemporary society has grown more complex, as changing economic realities, changing demographics, and changing expectations in society have made life less predictable, we are beginning to notice trust much more. There are a number of things that make cultivating and maintaining trust in schools challenging. These include the effects of social media, and other new forms of information and the propensity for the news of potential threats to one’s well-being, as well as the well-being of one’s children and community to spread farther and faster than positive news. Trust matters in schools and in our world because we cannot single-handedly either create or sustain many of the things we most cherish. Parents send their children to schools, trusting that they will be safe from harm, as well as guided and taught in keeping with our highest hopes for them. Schools are also invested with a significant share of a community’s collective resources in the form of tax dollars, school buildings, and local employment opportunities. In addition, schools are charged with keeping and promoting a society’s shared values and ideals. They foster and protect the collective ideals of respect, tolerance, and democracy, as well as the vision of equity of opportunity. Indeed, the future of a society rests with the quality of its schools. It is evident, then, why trust has become such a pressing issue for schools in these challenging and turbulent times.