In the concise and excellent 2018 article What Is Trust, by Paul Thagard Ph.D., he identifies five candidate definitions for trust:
- Trust is a set of behaviors, such as acting in ways that depend on another.
- Trust is a belief in a probability that a person will behave in certain ways.
- Trust is an abstract mental attitude toward a proposition that someone is dependable.
- Trust is a feeling of confidence and security that a partner cares.
- Trust is a complex neural process that binds diverse representations into a semantic pointer that includes emotions.
He leans towards the last definition as the best, and at least for human-human trust dyads, I believe he is right.
But what about trust between institutions, or more specifically, online trust between institutions?
Here I believe that a variation of his first definition—trust is a set of behaviors, such as acting in ways that depend on another—is best, because first, it can be made measurable (something which businesses in the age of Big Data and AI love to a fault), and second, it precludes the need to hypothesize such things as institutional “feelings”, corporate brain states and organizational semantic pointers (which could be quite fruitful, but likely beyond the typical COOs job description).
So, with this in mind, and in preparation for describing and creating a theory of healthcare digital trust networks, I would like to propose a measurable definition of digital trust based on behavioral engagements:
Digital Trust of Institution B by Institution A is the act of using Institution A’s digital assets and platform to amplify Institution’s B message to the benefit of both.
Examples of healthcare digital trust would include such acts a regional hospital retweeting the state’s health department content about CoVid vaccination, placing a link to a CDC video about obesity, or a pharmacy embedding a local and current county health department map showing opioid disposal locations.
Is it necessary to go beyond this definition of digital trust? Perhaps. I do think a unified theory of trust encompassing relationships between people, institutions (and perhaps even animals?) could be very valuable to solving deep problems within our society, but for rapid implementation to help nudge the needle on current problems, a variation of my definition above may suffice.