In his presentation, Louis Quéré gave an overview of current social science research on trust. Starting from the observation that the word trust is applied to several different phenomena, which interpenetrate but do not completely overlap, he attempted to untangle this tangle by taking as a starting point the link between trust and recognition. This link appears first of all in trust surveys, which measure not so much trust as degrees of social recognition of categories of people - recognition then consists in attributing to these categories values approved by the public. This link disappears, however, in analyses inspired by rational choice theory or game theory, which make trust a purely cognitive phenomenon. Generally speaking, standard representations of rationality fail to grasp the form of rationality specific to trust, which is based on the unconditional attribution of a value to the recipient of trust - which is also a mode of recognition. This form of rationality was much better grasped by three "classical" sociologists, G. Simmel, N. Luhmann and H. Garfinkel, whose analyses Louis Quéré summarized. In conclusion, he examined what lies behind the idea of "trust in institutions".
Louis Quéré is Director of Research at the CNRS. He spent his career at the Centre d'étude des mouvements sociaux (EHESS), and was director of this center and of the Institut Marcel Mauss (UMR 8178) from 2005 to 2009.
