A cheater’s success is parasitic on surrounding trustworthy institutions
Evidence
I was once cheated by a small shop owner in downtown Chicago, who sold me a watch battery that was already dead, although it had recovered just enough to make my watch run for long enough to let me think the battery was okay. That shop owner’s success was parasitic on the larger system of shops and stores that were more trustworthy, because my behavior in his shop was merely a generalization of my normal behavior in shops, most of which in my experience had been trustworthy. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 1017
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Mirrors the doctor’s wife in Saramago’s Blindness — she benefits from generalized trust in the external order, just as Hardin’s generalized trust relies on ambient institutional reliability.
- ADDENDUM: Reinforces the ‘grafting’ article’s point that hard-to-fake signals (reputation, repeat business) sustain cooperation; the downtown shop relied on ambient signal we lack locally.
Related
- Untrustworthy actors free-ride on the generalized trust of honest markets (similarity 0.86)
- A cheater’s success depends on parasitizing a trustworthy system (similarity 0.80)
Broader Connections
- A cheater’s success depends on parasitizing a trustworthy system
#corroborates(0.98) - Parasitic cheating thrives where trust is generalized from trustworthy settings
#expands(0.92) - A trustworthy reputation can be exploited because it is imperfectly known
#expands(0.82) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 821 - Institutional and legal constraints give people strong external incentives to be trustworthy
#expands(0.75) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 167