The establishment of the trust relationship

In a situation in which two people are interdependent, Deutsch(1962) defines trusting behavior as choosing to take an ambiguous path that can lead to a beneficial event or a harmful event depending upon the behavior of the other personwhere the harmful event is more punishing than the beneficial event is rewarding. The interdependence of the participants is such that each must take the ambiguous path for both to experience the beneficial event, and if either instead makes a nontrusting choice, the other will experience a harmful event. Bennis, Schein, Berlew, and Steele (1964, p. 223) say that in trust there is ... an implicit assumption that one person will not deliberately hurt the other to satisfy his own needs.. . That is, there exists the mutual expectation that each will take the ambiguous path in a trust relationship. Considerable work has been done with Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) games to determine the conditions under which trust will be found,2 but little study has been made