Cooperation can proceed without trust through self-interested agreement

Evidence

I can, however, also choose to take the risk of cooperating with you on some matter even if I do not trust you. While he was the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, when asked if he trusted Yassir Arafat, said, “I don’t know what it means to trust. He is the Palestinian leader, not the Israeli leader, and he is determined to do whatever he can to achieve Palestinian objectives. The real question is not whether we trust him. The question is whether there is a potential agreement that could be better overall for both sides, a win-win, not a zero-sum game” (quoted in Goldberg 2001, 66). Cooperation or coordination is the general goal, but there are many ways to achieve it, some of which do not depend on trust. Hence my actions are not simply determined by the degree of my trust, although they are often likely to be influenced by my trust or distrust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 100

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the Saramago integration: cooperation without trust (the wife commanding via incentives rather than affection) parallels Barak’s win-win framing, and echoes Milgrom’s one-shot trade mechanisms from the reader’s other readings.
• SHARE: Barak’s ‘I don’t know what it means to trust’ answer to trusting Arafat is a great exchange to send to someone interested in diplomacy or game theory.