西方人际信任研究的路径与困境

On How-to of Western Interpersonal Trust Studies and Their Difficulties

自上世纪70年代以来,信任研究成为西方社会科学界的热门课题,几乎所有社会科学领域都有学者涉足此项研究。但不同学科的学者对人际信任的理解和研究路径是不一样的:心理学家关注个体特征对信任建立的影响;社会心理学者倾向于将人际信任看成人际关系的产物;社会学家则更愿意从文化、制度或社会结构的角度去研究信任产生的机制。通过对西方人际信任的研究路径进行细致的梳理和分析,可以发现,西方的人际信任研究陷入了困境,其原因一方面来自于各学科特定的研究视角与研究方法的局限,另一方面则是因为西方学者所共有的研究预设和思维模式影响、框定甚至是限制了信任研究。为摆脱人际信任研究的困境,我们提出了一种新的研究路径——信任策略研究。

Interpersonal trust came to be a heated topic in western social sciences since 1970's,and scholars have tried to cope with it from almost all the perspectives,thus a variety of un-derstandings and approaches:psychologically,individual differences are focused on;socio-psychologically,interpersonal trust is considered as an inevitable product of interpersonal relations;and sociologically,interest is more shifted to the mechanisms of trust formation from cultural,institutional,or social structural perspectives.A careful review of these ap-proaches helps to find that studies of this topic get into a trouble spot.While the first reason lies in the limits of isolated perspectives and methodogy of a specific discipline,the second may be traced back to the fact that the research assumptions,thinking mode and the frame-works shared by the western community of scholars set a limit to the studies of trust itself.Inthe present study,a new approach——trust strategy analysis is proposed with an intentionto smooth out the difficulties in this acdemic arena.