Anarchy produces in-group trust that blocks broader trust across groups

Evidence

Hobbes supposes that in the state of nature distrust would be so rampant that individuals would turn on other individuals. What is more likely, and what is consistent with the vast literature on anarchy and on acephalous anthropological societies, is that there would be small-community organization. Individuals within small communities would thereby have some protections that would make productive life possible. The small societies might, however, engage in hostilities with one another. Experimental work on Japanese and American societies suggests that reliance on a group builds trust relationships within the group but blocks or at least hinders the development of trust relationships more broadly (Yamagishi, Cook, and Watabe 1998). As Gellner (1988, 147) argues, in segmentary, pastoral society, there is only one means of protecting oneself against sudden onslaught from others: to gang up in a group. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 861

Categorization

• XREF: Strongly relevant to the Blindness reading: the quarantine groups’ in-group solidarity against other groups precisely exemplifies the Yamagishi mechanism — group reliance builds internal trust at the cost of cross-group trust. This is the core sociological process of Saramago’s novel.
• SEED: Angle: how the Yamagishi in-group/out-group trust asymmetry maps onto the escalating inter-group war in the asylum in Blindness — small-group formation as the automatic response to collapsed general trust.