Community norms can produce trustworthy behavior without producing encapsulated-interest trust

Evidence

Although members of a small community might never develop a sense of reciprocal trust such as that in the encapsulated-interest account, they could all or almost all develop trustworthy behavior. These members would then be somewhat like the infant whose parents are supportive and whose experiences are benign, so that the child develops optimistic expectations of the trustworthiness of people and is therefore relatively ready to take the risks associated with cooperating with people. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 825

Categorization

• XREF: The optimistic-expectations mechanism parallels the doctor’s wife in Blindness — she retains a disposition toward cooperation and risk-taking that the newly blind lose; also echoes Saramago’s contrast between habituated trust and collapsed trust. — connects to: Enforced gift-exchange norms briefly mobilize group scrutiny and mutual trust. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 833
• DEFINE: Clarifies the encapsulated-interest account by contrast: trustworthy behavior can arise from disposition/optimism rather than from the incentive-structure calculation that defines Hardin’s trust.