Distrust is self-fulfilling and cannot be invalidated by experience

Evidence

Trust is a peculiar belief predicated not on evidence but on the lack of contrary evidence — a feature that (as Pagden (this volume) shows) makes it vulnerable to deliberate destruction. In contrast, deep distrust is very difficult to invalidate through experience, for either it prevents people from engaging in the appropriate kind of social experiment or, worse, it leads to behaviour which bolsters the validity of distrust itself (see my paper on the mafia, this volume). Once distrust has set in it soon becomes impossible to know if it was ever in fact justified, for it has the capacity to be self-fulfilling, to generate a reality consistent with itself. It then becomes individually ‘rational’ to behave accordingly, even for those previously prepared to act on more optimistic expectations) Only accident or a third party may set up the right kind of ‘experiment’ to prove distrust unfounded (and even so, as Good argues in this volume, cognitive inertia may prevent people from changing their beliefs). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2863

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly maps onto Saramago’s Blindness: the white blindness strips observability, so distrust spirals into Hobbesian predation with no possible ‘experiment’ to disprove it — exactly the collapse the reader is analyzing.

Related

• Distrust is a self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling social dynamic. (similarity 0.87)
• Withholding trust feeds a self-reinforcing spiral of lost rational capacity. (similarity 0.85)
• Distrust restricts information so the distruster never learns to distrust less (similarity 0.84)
• Distrust arises from inconsistency or symbolic discrediting of trust (similarity 0.84)
• Distrust needs less information than trust to form. (similarity 0.83)
• Misplaced trust costs far more than forgone trust, making distrust come more quickly (similarity 0.83)
• Distrust is self-reinforcing because it selects for untrustworthy partners (similarity 0.83)
• Confidence is a self-fulfilling virtuous spiral unlike superstitious hope (similarity 0.83)
• Distrust strategies can become autonomous habitual routines (similarity 0.83)
• Distrust self-amplifies through feedback loops that confirm the distrust (similarity 0.83)
• Distrust becomes socially visible through distrustful behavior (similarity 0.83)
• Confirmation bias and inertia make reputations resistant to disconfirming evidence (similarity 0.83)
• Distrust is often the rational default even in good relationships (similarity 0.82)
• Confirmation bias cements both reputations and habitual trust (similarity 0.82)
• Trust, though biologically inherited in its optimism, stays subject to correction by experience. (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Distrust is a self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling social dynamic. #corroborates (0.95) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 273