Cooperation requires trust as assurance against defection by non-dependent parties

Evidence

It is natural then to take two further steps. The first is to say that, in general, people will not do this unless they have some assurance that the other, non-dependent, party will not defect. This point, in a very abstract form, is of course central to the game-theoretical structures I have already discussed. This is also the place for the notion of trust. Cooperation requires trust in the sense that dependent parties need some degree of assurance that non-dependent parties will not defect: as I have already said, this need not take the form of ‘thick’ trust, individually based belief, but it must take some form or other. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 178

Cooperation requires trust in the sense that dependent parties need some degree of assurance that non-dependent parties will not defect: as I have already said, this need not take the form of ‘thick’ trust, individually based belief, but it must take some form or other. The next step after this is to claim that, in general, people will not trust others enough to bring about cooperation unless their assurance is to some extent well based: that is to say, unless people are also in general motivated, one way or another, not to defect if they are in a nondependent position. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 178

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines trust as assurance of non-defection — precise formulation usable directly in the Luhmann/Hardin synthesis.
• XREF: Directly feeds the claim that trust requires observable constraints on opportunistic behavior; Saramago’s blind society tests whether cooperation survives when observability fails. — connects to: Widespread mutual trust alone makes large-scale non-domination freedom possible — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 1300; Perceived punitive costs from cooperating with successors blocked coalition formation — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 1240
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 178