Между «ratio» и «irratio»: в поисках оптимальной стратегии изучения доверия в политическом пространстве

Полития: Анализ. Хроника. Прогноз. 2024. № 3(114). С. 82–108.

Sychev V.

The literature on political trust currently continues to be dominated by the cognitive approach, whose adherents perceive trust as a function of political knowledge and social experience. In turn, the psycho-emotional foundations of political trust (personality traits, psychological needs and emotions) are still in the shadow of the cognitive revolution and remain poorly understood.

The article attempts to justify the need to study political trust not only as a rational-evaluative construct, but also as a complex psycho-emotional phenomenon that arises at the intersection of cognitive and affective processes occurring at the conscious and subconscious levels.

Having consistently analyzed three approaches to understanding the nature of political trust — as knowledge, as heuristics and as affect — the author elaborates his definition of this phenomenon, describing it as a specific psycho-emotional state that accumulates knowledge about objects of political space, emotionally and symbolically significant images of politicians and institutions formed in the process of socialization, as well as the confidence that the expectations arising on this basis will be met to one degree or another in the future. Moving from the conceptual to the empirical level, he examines survey and experimental strategies for distinguishing between cognitive and affective foundations of trust, revealing their possibilities and limitations.

The final part of the article outlines potential further directions for research in the field of political trust. According to the author, agent-based modeling is extremely promising in this regard, as it allows looking at the cognitive and affective bases of political trust as a single whole, where cognitive and affective processes are closely interconnected and capable of moving from one state to another.

Keywords: cognitive approach, когнитивный подход, политическое доверие, political trust, агентно-ориентированное моделирование, agent-based modeling, trust heuristics, affective processes, survey and experimental strategies, эвристика доверия, аффективные процессы, опросная и экспериментальная стратегии

Publication based on the results of: Political attitudes and behavior: Content, factors, and consequences (2024)