What the community of researchers found was that when people tell stories about other people, the motivations are usually reliability, trust and knowledge . Gee, that guy promised this or she did that . And reliability is a good first cousin, if not a sibling, to trust . There have been eighteen books published on this subject in the last three years. Trust is really important.
Nothing happens without trust.
Nothing of value will happen without it, because without trust, if you have to negotiate and contract and monitor everything, so that no content occurs, no substance gets done. So reliability is a function of trust. And there s a third category. When people talk about people, it is sometimes called gossip. If you don t know the person, you have to tell stories about them.