Confirmation bias and inertia make reputations resistant to disconfirming evidence

Evidence

The overall role of the confirmation bias, and a general cognitive inertia, in the preservation of trust would thus appear to be quite straightforward. Neither reputations nor habits are readily changed in the face of the merest challenge to their integrity or viability, as we all know and understand from our day-to-day experiences. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 677

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to Hardin’s claim that trust rests on observable constraints — inertia explains why monitoring doesn’t need constant vigilance.

Related

• Confirmation bias cements both reputations and habitual trust (similarity 0.96)
• Distrust is often the rational default even in good relationships (similarity 0.84)
• Distrust is self-fulfilling and cannot be invalidated by experience (similarity 0.83)
• Only incentives, not investment, can genuinely change trustworthiness. (similarity 0.83)
• Trust reduces to knowledge while trustworthiness is motivational (similarity 0.82)
• Trust, though biologically inherited in its optimism, stays subject to correction by experience. (similarity 0.81)
• Withholding trust feeds a self-reinforcing spiral of lost rational capacity. (similarity 0.81)
• Trust is merely evidence-based expectation while trustworthiness is motivational (similarity 0.80)
• Distrust is self-reinforcing because it selects for untrustworthy partners (similarity 0.80)
• Misplaced trust costs far more than forgone trust, making distrust come more quickly (similarity 0.80)
• Distrust needs less information than trust to form. (similarity 0.80)
• Chronic losses from over-trusting create powerful incentives to abandon the disposition (similarity 0.80)
• Trust needs concrete settings and visibility to be tested against risk. (similarity 0.80)
• Trust cannot be secured by evidence because fidelity is unprovable (similarity 0.80)
• Trust grounded in false knowledge cannot be an intrinsic good (similarity 0.80)