In our everyday life trust plays an important role. Despite this, it took some time until research has focused on this phenomenon. Furthermore, for a long time the research devoted to trust was using the relatively narrow research paradigm of cooperative behavior. One crude way to assess the importance of trust in the risk domain is to count the studies published in the journal Risk Analysis in which trust was mentioned in the title, the abstract or the keywords. The first article referring to trust was published in 1990. Furthermore, 209 articles related to trust were published in Risk Analysis between 1990 and 2016. There seems to be a peak in the number of trust articles published between 2003 and 2011, but also in recent years trust remained a concept of interest to researchers publishing in this journal.
In my talk, I argue that trust is an important concept for a better understanding of risk perception of certain hazards and the acceptance of various technologies. I discuss the biological foundation of trust and that there would be no trust without deception. Based on the research conducted in the risk domain, I show that knowledge has been gained in past years when trust is important and how trust is related to other heuristics people rely on when evaluating hazards. I will also describe what questions future research needs to address.