With talks by some of the best national and international researchers in trust and trustworthiness, this seminar explores trust as a historical, societal, and rhetorical phenomenon.

What is trust and trustworthiness in a rhetorical perspective? Can we talk about cultures of trust? What is a culture of trust? How does trust develop historically, and how do digital cultures influence trust and trustworthiness? Furthermore, how may we theoretically account for rhetorical trust and methodologically explore it?

This open and free seminar explores such questions. The seminar is organized by the research project “Trustworthiness: The Rhetorical History of Trust in the Nordics”.

The project examines why the Nordics are consistently among the world’s most trusting countries and explores how this trust is used to explain the stability, prosperity, and even happiness of the citizens in the Nordic countries.

Today, however, a wide range of factors threaten to overturn Nordic people’s propensity to trust each other, including an increasingly fragmented media landscape, as well as a more conflictual political atmosphere.

The renowned speakers in this open and free seminar addressees such issues of trust and trustworthiness.

Program

11.00-11.05: Welcome

11.05-11.25: The working group on Trustworthiness in the Nordic Countries: “Rhetorical trust”

11:25-12.25: Ute Frevert (Max Planck Institute): “Rhetorics and Politics of Trust in Modern Societies – A Historian’s Perspective”

The talk asks why modern societies care about trusting relations? What do they need trust for? What kind of work does trust do? Is trust synonymous with calculativeness, or does it go beyond an instrumental attitude? How do political systems – democratic and non-democratic handle trust?

12.25-13.00: Lunch

13.00-14.00: Helge Skirbekk (Oslo Met): “The historical development of Trust in Norway”

Norway is still characterised by high levels of trust, both in general and in public institutions. Why is this so, and why did it become so? In what is referred to as the Nordic model, there are several things that distinguish Norway from other Western countries. Among these are the high degree of labour organisation, the relatively small income differences, and the large extent of the public sector and the high level of taxes. But the high levels of trust cannot be understood without examining the relatively peaceful historical interactions between elites and population. Belonging to networks built on civic engagement can strengthen norms of mutual trust. I will investigate the emergence of unions and lay organisations, and their interplay with political elites in order to find an answer to this question.

14.00-14.45: Dag Wollebæk (Institute of Social Research): “Trust as sacred rhetoric”

In Norway, trust has become a foundational element of the national self-image. In public discourse, trust is often framed not merely as a strength, but as a sacred value: a non-negotiable, inviolable resource that must be protected at all costs. Drawing on the concept of sacred rhetoric (Marietta, 2008), I argue that the way we talk about trust affects political debate and institutional accountability in profound ways. Sacred rhetoric shifts public argumentation from the weighing of evidence and compromise to the invocation of moral absolutes, the discouragement of criticism, and the protection of power. While this rhetoric may encourage compliance and cooperation, it undermines deliberation and weakens critical vigilance. In this keynote, I examine how the rhetorical sacralization of trust affects democratic discourse in Norway. I argue that desacralizing the rhetoric of trust and shifting the focus from preserving trust to deserving trust would be desirable — to cultivate a political culture where institutions are not shielded by sacred narratives, but held accountable through reasoned scrutiny.

14.45-15.00 Break

15.00-15.30: Esther Oluffa Pedersen (Roskilde University): The Digital Society and Trust

Increasing digitalization raises the question how digital technologies influence relations of trust. This calls for an empirical and conceptual approach. Conceptually I argue that trust evolves between humans but is anchored within the individuals encountering each other with either trust or distrust. Affective and epistemic attitudes of trust or distrust are influenced by the individual’s prior experiences (e.g. betrayals of trust) and future goals (e.g. goals’ dependency on collaboration). Besides interpersonal relations trust also unfolds in institutional trust, trust in oneself and trust in technology. Thriving interpersonal and institutional trust are characterized by mutual assessments of trustworthiness and thus by reciprocity. Trust in technology is different as the non-agential technology does not reciprocate. Many argue that we do not trust but simply rely on technology. It is, however, an empirical fact that the other trust relations are influenced by digital technologies. I will exemplify this with the case of the Danish tax authorities’ fully automated property assessments. The property assessments were digitalized with the explicit ambition to recreate trust in the system of property taxation. Besides exceeding the budget, and as until now not completely implemented, the system has also been sending erroneous assessments out to the citizens.

15.30-16.00: Panel with presenters: How to study trust rhetorically and historically.

Would you to attend the seminar? Please send an email to: Olivia.Akerholm@student.uib.no