The article is devoted to the study of the group of respondents who position themselves as “the untrusting”. The phenomenon of distrust itself in works of domestic and foreign sociologists is most often referred to as an antithesis of trust. There is currently no full theoretical and methodological description of distrust. Underdeveloped theoretical framework of the phenomenon of distrust does not allow to fully answer the question about the main characteristics of the “distrusting” individual, what features are common for people in this group. The article describes the possibility of empirically supplementing the existing theoretical knowledge, as well as finding new sides of the subject under study. The purpose for the article is to describe the distinctive characteristics of Vologda residents who claim to be the “distrusters”. The group is distinguished in the course of the sociological research conducted by experts of the Federal State Budgetary Institution of Science “Vologda Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences”. They consider trust as a meta-relationship underlying all human relations; the basic characteristic of the social capital existing in a territorial community. In this regard, trust serves as a criterion for distinguishing social groups conditionally defined as “the trusting”, “trusting selectively”, “the untrusting”. The indicator of selecting the groups is the respondents’ choice from the set of proposed answers alternative to “no one can be trusted”. According to the research objective, the authors used a sociological profile as a research method. This method is often used by sociologists and psychologists to characterize different social groups in order to describe their distinctive features. The algorithm for making a sociological profile involves the use of socio-demographic, behavioral, cognitive, emotional characteristics of the study group as main indicators as they reflect the most significant characteristics of any social group. Based on the sociological profile of “the untrusting” the authors demonstrate the importance and opportunities of measuring distrust
Keywords
institutional trust, interpersonal trust, distrust, sociological profile, circles of social interaction, cognitive, behavioral, status characteristics of “the untrusting”