Social Trust as an Underlying Substance of Cultural Preferences

The role and the importance of social trust have been objects of a comparatively well-defined interest among investigators with sociology and social psychology backgrounds. Unfortunately, this is not so true when it comes to economists. In Economics, even the link between culture and economic development still lacks the necessary attention. On the other hand, in order to explain this link, it will be of help and importance to take social trust into consideration both directly and as an infrastructural element of some important cultural dimensions. This article – being generally with a nature of an overview – attempts to show social trust namely as such an element, offering a framework for its interpretation and showing the correlational link between trust and several cultural constructs. This will hopefully help future modelling when it comes to investigating correlational and causal links between economic parameters and generalized social trust.