Cooperation depends on trust plus situation-specific constraints and incentives

Evidence

In conclusion, the above examples tell us not how a certain level of trust is reached, but only that once reached it may be effective for action yielding potential cooperation, in different ways depending on the constraints, and on the costs and benefits presented by specific situations. Clearly, the higher the level of trust the higher the likelihood of cooperation, but cooperative behaviour does not depend on trust alone, and the optimal threshold of trust will vary according to the occasion. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2765

The strategy of economizing on trust does not of course imply that we should wait for cooperation to evolve by itself; it just claims that we should set our sights on cooperation rather than trust. We should, in other words, promote the right conditions for cooperation, relying above all on constraint and interest, without assuming that the prior level of trust will eventually be high enough to bring about cooperation on its own account. In a ‘dissenter’s confession’, Hirschman (1984b) — although he disagrees with taking the strategy of economizing on trust too far (1984a) — makes an important case for breaking vicious circles in underdeveloped countries by implementing systems with technologically severe constraints capable of generating, rather than merely presupposing, trust: ‘According to my way of thinking the very attitudes alleged to be preconditions of industrialization could be generated on the job and “on the way”, by certain characteristics of the industrialization process’ (p. 99). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2823

David Good analyses the implications of a wide spectrum of socio-psychological evidence for the notion of trust and for the rationality of its manifestations, and reviews the conditions which make cooperation variably dependent on trust. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 78

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s Hardin thesis: trust requires observable constraints; Hirschman’s ‘technologically severe constraints generate trust’ is a causal mechanism for how constraint creates trust rather than presupposing it.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘economizing on trust’ as the strategy of promoting cooperation through constraint and interest rather than presupposing trust.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2765; Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2823; Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 78