Trust: ..From Socrates to Spin [Hardcover]

Kieron O'Hara explores the ideas around a complex component of human behavior such as trust in a structured, academic approach. He initially (and sometimes too slowly) establishes the fundamental concepts in the first five chapters and only then, 95 pages later, classifies trust in four major groups of relationship models to be further scrutinized in the second half of the book. Chapter one is used to present the book's proposal and put it in context. It briefly contrasts the inspiration of trust with several others, like morality, faith, cooperation, knowledge, and so on. The next three chapters consider, from the point of view of someone in a stable western democracy, how trust as we know today was developed over the centuries, makes us work together over common goals and what social and moral aspects were inherited from the ruling religious and political institutions since biblical times. It shows how and why the information revolution destroyed many of the well-established models of trust and created new others, most of them yet to be understood today. The last chapters of his work discuss our contemporary perception of trust, and try to recognize if we have or not a crisis on trust and authority. If we have, what solutions can we devise?

Although the author focuses only on European and North-American societies on his study, the book is still very rich on references, quoting Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Descartes, Nietzsche and the Genesis to mention a few. He justifies, rightfully, that discussing the western philosophy and sociology behind trust is already a very complex task to achieve and no single book "could make an exhaustive account of all important movements and events", and this is the most familiar society for him to write about.

An interesting point from any IT professional's perspective is the kind of trust described as the trust relied in institutions, or global trust. This kind of trust, according to the author, is based on the fact that in a global and complex society we have no option but to replace the trust based on personal experience for one based in institutions. We then let the institution decide who is trustworthy or not, based on professional expertise, association or commercial and non-commercial certification programs. All pros and cons that IT and mostly security professionals experience everyday from this model of trust are scrutinized in the book. Although the book is sometimes slow or too academic in its style, it is surely worth to read for those looking for a large-scale perspective on contemporary human behavior.

The Author
Kieron O'Hara works at the University of Southampton as a Senior Research Fellow in the Office of Science and Technology's Cybertrust and Crime Prevention Programme. His Ph D. thesis in the same university is titled "Mind as Machine: Can Computational Processes Be Regarded As Explanatory of Mental Processes?" (November 2000) and follows a steady line of articles focused on logic and information, knowledge management and artificial intelligence (including all adjacent domains such as expert systems) as well as sociological studies on human behavior and the Internet phenomena. O'Hara is the author of Plato and the Internet (Icon books 2001), co-author of the script of the computer game Tomb Raider 4 and editor of books such as 'Advances in Knowledge Acquisition'.