Defaulting distrust of strangers follows from generalizing one’s own self-interested motives

Evidence

Without much experience of government action toward me, my “distrust” of government might be little more than the sense that people with no connection to me are not likely to take my interests to heart and might even abuse them. At first hearing, this might sound unduly cynical. This expectation is not restricted to government agents, however; it is far more general, because it fits virtually all of us. For example, suppose you hear or come to expect that a company in which you hold stock is in trouble and that its stock price is about to fall. You are likely to sell your stock so that not you but someone else takes the loss. If you are likely to seek benefit at cost to unknown others in this context, you might therefore expect others to do the same in various other contexts. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 757

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports Hardin’s assertion that trust requires observable constraints on opportunistic behavior — here grounded in recognizing the same opportunism in oneself, pairing with the reader’s goal of linking trust to the blindness epidemic’s collapse into predation. — connects to: People cling to self-interest vocabularies even when they contradict experienced motives; Arguments linked to self gain credibility via generalized self-positivity. — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 121