Apparent betrayal may be consistent trustworthiness under changed incentives

Evidence

Dmitry Karamazov says that the lieutenant colonel implicitly trusted Trifonov. After his sad day of reckoning, the lieutenant colonel would presumably have said that Trifonov was not trustworthy. Unfortunately, Trifonov was trustworthy just so long as there was some longer-run incentive for him to be reliable in their mutually beneficial relationship. The moment there ceased to be any expectation of further gains from his relationship with the lieutenant colonel, Trifonov had no incentive to be trustworthy in this highly irregular commercial dealing between de facto crooks. Not surprisingly, he ceased to be trustworthy. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 64

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive core of Hardin’s model: Trifonov was ‘trustworthy’ all along — reliably responding to incentives — and the lieutenant colonel’s mistake was not misjudging his character but expecting relationship-loyalty where the ongoing-gain condition had already lapsed. This inversion (betrayal as consistent trustworthiness) is subtle enough to sit with.
• XREF: This is the exact analytical pivot for the Blindness integration: moral character explanations fail; the wife’s sightedness works because she alone faces the full incentive structure — everyone else’s ‘betrayals’ are consistent responsiveness to collapsed ongoing gains. — connects to: Personal trust shifts the odds in the trustor’s favour by incentivizing good behavior — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 1204