Distrust requires little evidence while trust demands rich understanding of incentives

Evidence

Turn now to epistemological asymmetries. Distrust comes easily because it can be built on a limited bit of behavior by the distrusted. Trust, however, requires too rich an understanding of the other’s incentives for it to come easily to many people. In a world in which there are many potential partners in cooperation for various purposes, the standard, relatively friendly tit-for-tat strategy might be too generous. In that strategy, I cooperate with you if you cooperated on our last round, and I defect if you defected on our last round. If we both start out by cooperating and we both follow the tit-for-tat strategy, we may readily establish a long-term cooperative relationship. Just because we have many potential partners available, however, we might often use the more draconian trigger strategy of dropping efforts with anyone who fails an initial attempt at cooperation. One failure at the outset of our potential relationship and you are out of — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 438

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The epistemological asymmetry undergirds Hardin’s claim that trust needs observable constraints—directly relevant to the reader’s Saramago/Luhmann integration where blindness removes the observations trust needs.

Related

• Distrust needs less information than trust to form. (similarity 0.90)
• Rational trust requires both trusted’s incentives and truster’s knowledge (similarity 0.86)
• Strategies to minimize reliance on trust have been conflated with neglecting to understand it. (similarity 0.85)
• Trust and distrust are asymmetric in motivation and epistemology, not mirror images (similarity 0.85)
• Misplaced trust costs far more than forgone trust, making distrust come more quickly (similarity 0.84)
• Distrust is often the rational default even in good relationships (similarity 0.83)
• Distrust is self-reinforcing because it selects for untrustworthy partners (similarity 0.83)
• Trust requires assurance that is at least somewhat well based (similarity 0.83)
• Weak distrust needs only rare expected violations, not likely ones (similarity 0.83)
• Building stable relations generates the incentives that produce trust (similarity 0.82)
• Confidence and trust are not substitutable but mutually reinforcing social attitudes (similarity 0.82)
• Trust must be well based on others’ general motivation not to defect (similarity 0.82)
• Cooperative equilibria require conditional trust, not blind trust or blind distrust (similarity 0.82)
• Initial cooperation can wreck backward induction and build rational trust (similarity 0.82)
• Learned distrust is harder to unlearn and blocks success more than learned trust (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Reducing distrust is different from generating trust #expands (0.78) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 754