Distrust: emerging consensus and outstanding issues

Distrust has been studied less than trust, but recently this is changing. Recent contributions indicate that the distrust process may be quite similar to the universal variform process of trust proposed by Dietz (2011; see also Six & Latusek, 2023). In such universal trust and distrust sequences an actor forms either trustworthiness or untrustworthiness beliefs based on the same types of inputs. These beliefs influence a decision to trust and, possibly, trust-informed actions, or a distrust decision and distrust-informed actions. Depending on the context within which the trust encounter takes place, different elements within the steps of the sequence have more weight or are relevant, but the sequence itself is universal. In this paper we take stock of where the emerging consensus lies and where remaining diverging perspectives are in distrust research. We identify five interrelated themes (Table 1): (1) definitions of distrust; (2) the relationship between trust and distrust; (3) from trust to distrust and vice versa; (4) a sequence for the distrust process; and (5) functionality and dysfunctionality of distrust.