Conditional trust can be rationally adopted even among egoists without social ties

Evidence

What he does do is express a powerful set of reasons why —- under certain conditions and even in the absence of trust generated by friendship, say, or religious identity — a basic predisposition to trust can be perceived and adopted as a rational pursuit even by moderately forward-looking egoists. We learn that, tentatively and conditionally, we can trust trust and distrust distrust, that it can be rewarding to behave as if we trusted even in unpromising situations. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2815

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Trust trust and distrust distrust’ encapsulates the higher-order logic of conditional trust — second-order dispositions that the reader can map onto Luhmann’s baseline familiarity.
• XREF: This is the precise theoretical bridge to both Luhmann (trust as device for coping with complexity) and Saramago (the doctor’s wife’s conditional, observant trust vs. the blind mob’s collapse). — connects to: Rational calculation alone would generate status seeking regardless of innate drive — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 63