Abstract: In 1993, Slovic developed “asymmetry principle” of trust by contrasting trust degree of college students to positive and negative events, that is to say, negative events has a much stronger effect on decreasing social trust than positive events on increasing it; “trust is much easier to destroy than to create.” He thought it was because of some negative psychological tendencies. Siegrist and Cvetkovich(2001) called them “negativity bias”. White et al.(2003) proposed the other two explanations: extremity bias and confirmatory bias. Over the past ten years, different researchers replicated Slovic’s classic study, continually and deeply explored asymmetry principle by different types of information and hazard, as well as pre-attitude. Their results partly supported asymmetry principle. They concluded that asymmetry would be influenced by many issues like pre-attitude. In certain conditions, trust would be symmetry. Therefore, they pointed that asymmetry was not general attribute of trust, but special representation on some conditions. Earle、Cvetkovich、Siegrist etc refuted asymmetry principle by framework of trust, suggesting that trust included social trust and confidence. The former was based on shared values, obeying similarity principle, thus it was resilient, symmetry; the latter was based on objective behavior standards. Once events were incongruent to these standards, confidence would be destroyed, thus it was fragile, asymmetry. Earle et al. concluded that, previous researches mainly aimed at confidence, resulting in asymmetry principle. They considered that social trust was the key point of studies on trust. This paper pointed that, the reason why Slovic developed “asymmetry principle” of trust is that, he didn’t differentiate social trust and confidence; and he chose nuclear power which is high risk hazard and public couldn’t accept at all. Thus, any information about nuclear power would affect public trust, especially negative ones. The researchers followed replicated and expanded Slovic’s classic study. Though they got some valuable results on conditional asymmetry, they were still based on asymmetry principle and negativity bias, and didn’t notice the construction of trust. Thus their contribution is limited. Earle et al. suggested that trust was symmetry because they were aware of the definition or structure of trust, aiming at social trust rather than confidence. And they analyzed it by three models——SVS Model, TCC Model, and Function Model. Their work promoted theoretical exploration of trust. In a word, the reason why there was contradiction like “asymmetry” and “symmetry” was that, there were differences on the definition or framework of trust. The former saw trust as unidimensional rather than multidimensional developed by the latter. No matter trust is symmetry or asymmetry, in real risk management, we should make great efforts to quest for measures to improve public social trust and confidence, promote the development of technology, enhance the level of life, and stabilize risk management.

Key words: Trust, Asymmetry principle, Symmetry principle

摘要： 上世纪90年代研究者开始研究信任的“不对称性原则”，即失去信任比得到信任容易。十余年来，不同研究者从信息类型、灾害类型以及先前态度等方面对信任的“不对称性原则”展开了继续探索，认为信任的“不对称性原则”是有条件的。另有一部分研究者直接从信任的结构对“不对称性原则”进行了反驳，认为信任应该包括社会信任和信心，社会信任基于共享的价值观，是对称的；信心基于客观的行为标准，是不对称的。信任研究应该针对社会信任这一维度。之所以会出现“不对称”或“对称”的矛盾，主要是由于信任结构的不一致。前者将信任看成是一维的，而后者认为信任是二维的。这就推动了信任的理论结构探索和启发式研究。通过对信任机制的研究，风险管理者和专家能够在实际的风险管理中制定相应的提高公众信任的措施，推动科技发展，提高生活质量，提升风险管理。

关键词: 信任, 不对称性原则, 对称性原则