Affective trust and self-interested trust involve the same underlying mechanism

Evidence

Consider another class of ways I might come to take your interest into account. If I love you, or am your close friend, or am altruistic toward you, I might directly count your interest to some extent as my own. In economists’ jargon, I might partially include your utility in mine. Hence you can trust me to some extent just because the effect of our interaction on your welfare will matter to me. We commonly trust our parents, siblings, close friends, spouses, and others who are close to us in this way within varying limits. One might wish to call these normative instances of trust. But the actual trusting is not different from the purely interested cases under the trust game or iterated exchange. If there is a normative quality to these instances from love and so forth, it is in the fact of the love or friendship and the caring for another that follows from these. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 152

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that normative trust is mechanically identical to interested trust resonates with the reader’s Saramago reading: the doctor’s wife’s care for the blind strangers functions as the same encapsulated-interest structure that makes her the guarantor of order.
• DEEPTHINKING: Hardin’s flattening of love-based trust into the same game-theoretic structure as self-interested trust is a genuinely paradigm-shifting claim worth sitting with.