FORMATION OF TRUST IN A PERSON AS A MULTILEVEL PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS

Abstract

The article provides a theoretical analysis of how trust in a person is formed as a multilevel process of moving from uncertainty to interaction, integrating a cognitive appraisal of another individual’s reliability, an affective sense of safety, and readiness to accept behavioral risk through openness, cooperation, and delegation. Trust is conceptualized as an integrated state that cannot be reduced to liking, because it entails expectations of responsibility, predictability, and the partner’s consistency with norms of reciprocity. The conceptual framework combines a developmental view of basic trust as an early security orientation, a social-learning logic of generalized expectancies of reliability, the notion of self-efficacy as an internal resource for accepting social risk, and a systems perspective that treats trust as a mechanism for reducing complexity. The paper argues that a stable level of trust in a particular person develops when signals of competence, benevolence, and integrity are sufficiently stable and is sustained by repeated predictability of decisions in comparable situations; by contrast, trust fragility is driven not only by systematic judgment biases but also by random variability in judgments–described as noise–which can generate a sense of unpredictability even without actual changes in the partner’s behavior. It is shown that the cognitive and affective bases of trust may develop unevenly and may differentially shape willingness to delegate, while trust repair after violated expectations depends on the type of violation and requires different corrective strategies. The practical significance of the findings lies in applying the integrative model to analyze and maintain trust-based relationships in managerial, educational, and helping contexts by increasing behavioral consistency, transparency of motives, communication quality, and constructive processing of mistakes. The scientific contribution is the emphasis on the temporal stability of trust evaluations as a distinct indicator of interaction quality and the proposal to distinguish bias from noise in trust measurement, thereby strengthening the validity of interpretations in psychological research and applied diagnostics.