Acting trustingly toward others can itself induce their trustworthiness

Evidence

You might extend hospitality or act as though you trust me in order to demonstrate to me that you have faith in my morality or character or to give me an opportunity to live up to your hopes even though I may have no incentive to reciprocate your action. Alternatively, you may act according to a rule of reciprocity, doing unto others what they do unto you, even when it is not strictly in your interest to do so. Hence you may be trustworthy toward me because I am trustworthy toward you or because you may not wish to be the kind of person who acts toward another as though out of distrust that is not based on solid evidence. Such motivations are apt to lead to disappointment in many contexts, but they might be statistically justified in certain milieus. In particular, they might be justified in contexts in which there are rich possibilities of further interactions. In such contexts, however, interest is likely to conspire with your hopes in getting me to reciprocate. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 1015

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly engages Hardin’s own encapsulated-interest theory—these non-incentive motivations (trusting to give the other a chance to be worthy) are the counter-model he defends against, and the reader’s framing of the sighted wife as sole guarantor of order in Saramago turns on exactly this question of whether virtue can substitute for monitoring.

Related

• Trust can be extended to create an obligation in the trusted (similarity 0.91)
• Trustworthiness can rest on character or reciprocity rather than narrow interest (similarity 0.90)
• Trust rests on the trusted party’s self-interest, not on their personal character (similarity 0.84)
• Trust reduces to anticipating the trusted’s incentives toward us (similarity 0.83)
• Voluntary acts of personal trust give the trusted party an incentive to be trustworthy (similarity 0.82)
• Trustworthiness begets trust via reputation and repeated dealings (similarity 0.82)
• Reciprocal trust multiplies each party’s incentive to be trustworthy (similarity 0.82)
• Moral reciprocity can produce trustworthiness in the encapsulated-interest sense (similarity 0.82)
• Trustworthiness is grounded in the trusted’s interest in maintaining a relationship (similarity 0.82)
• Perceiving that one is trusted increases one’s actual trustworthiness (similarity 0.82)
• Trust grounded in false knowledge cannot be an intrinsic good (similarity 0.82)
• Trust is encapsulated interest achievable through many incentive mechanisms (similarity 0.81)
• Trustworthiness needs no moral groundings to sustain trust (similarity 0.81)
• Trust reduces to knowledge while trustworthiness is motivational (similarity 0.81)
• Optimism about others’ trustworthiness is self-reinforcing through gained experience (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Extending trust can create the trustworthy behavior it presumes #corroborates (0.95) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2874