Community norms substitute for dyadic trust, so personal trust develops less.

Evidence

When we have the thick relationships of a small, close community, we may find that our interactions are governed by norms of cooperativeness that are collective rather than dyadic. I behave well toward you because the community will sanction me if I do not. In such a case, the norms of cooperativeness may be sufficiently effective that we do not so readily develop dyadic trust relationships over many things, because those things are governed by the communal norms (Cook and Hardin 2000). — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 816

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Saramago arc: the blind society first relies on communal norms in the asylum, but as those norms fail, dyadic trust relationships (the doctor’s wife’s pairings) become the residual mechanism of order — exactly the substitution Hardin describes in reverse. — connects to: Widespread civility and flourishing civil society reduce to shared personal trust