Cooperation can arise from cost-sensitive conditional dispositions, not just sanctions or altruism

Evidence

If an agent cooperates on a given occasion, this is not of course necessarily because he has an altruistic disposition to cooperate; as we have already noticed, and the literature only too often reminds us, a threat of sanctions applied to an egoistic agent can produce the same result. Besides that possibility, however, there are motives to cooperation that are not egoistic, but are more restricted than the kind of thing represented by the simplest psychological generalization of the preference schedule OR. There are general dispositions to cooperate which are conditional, and in particular are sensitive to costs: an agent will cooperate if it does not cost too much, but beyond this threshold he will not. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 137

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines a middle ground between egoism and altruism: conditional cooperative dispositions that are cost-sensitive rather than unconditional.
• XREF: Directly relevant to Hardin’s point that trust requires observable constraints on opportunism — but here the constraint is internal dispositional cost-sensitivity, not external sanctions. — connects to: Regimes with capital substitute purchase for direct coercion of subjects — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 129