Altruistic trust mislabels action because it conflates trust with behavior
Evidence
That trusting someone and acting on that trust are different is trivially evident. For example, I may trust you in various ways but never have reason to act on that trust. Against this distinction, Jane Mansbridge (1999) argues for “altruistic trust,” which implicitly runs trust into action. To speak of altruistic trust is implicitly to say that it is not trust, that one acts cooperatively beyond what one would do if one acted only from the degree of trust one had in another. One acts altruistically despite lack of sufficient trust to justify the action. Hence to speak of altruistic trust is to make trust a term of action rather than of knowledge. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 302
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- XREF: Tracks the trust-as-knowledge vs trust-as-action distinction that will anchor the Saramago reading: when sight vanishes, only the wife’s knowledge-based trust survives.
Related
- Trust is a state of knowledge distinct from acting on it (similarity 0.90)
- Trust is a cognitive state of belief, not an action or purpose (similarity 0.82)
- Trusting someone does not entail acting on that trust (similarity 0.82)
- Trust is a matter of knowledge and belief, not of choice or action. (similarity 0.81)
- Trust reduces to knowledge while trustworthiness is motivational (similarity 0.81)
- Trust is not an act; entrusting is, and the two are often conflated. (similarity 0.80)
- Trust belongs to belief states, while risk-taking is the separable action. (similarity 0.80)
- Trust is not reducible to emotion the way joy might be (similarity 0.80)
- Trust is a three-part relation assessing another’s intentions about some action (similarity 0.80)
- Trust is a kind of knowledge grounded in trustworthy evidence (similarity 0.80)
- Trust is a three-part cognitive relation grounded in truth, not choice (similarity 0.79)
- Trust is a three-part relation of agent, trusted, and act (similarity 0.79)
- Acting trustingly toward others can itself induce their trustworthiness (similarity 0.79)
- Trust is rational expectation about the trusted party’s self-interest (similarity 0.79)
- Trust is wrongly conflated with promise-keeping and entrusting (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Trust is anchored in a grasp of the other’s interests, not just behavior prediction
#corroborates(0.75) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 66