Dyadic trust relationships let small groups succeed where large ones fail.

Evidence

Our personal welfare often depends on group, and not merely individual, action, but we commonly cannot trust the group to act for us. In the logic of collective action, small groups are often expected to succeed even though very large groups cannot. The principal reason for their success is that the dyadic relationships between each pair of group members play a large role in motivating cooperative action. Hence trust relationships can enable us to cooperate beyond the dyadic level to some extent even though such relationships and their effects must run out for interactions within very larger groups. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 814

Categorization

• XREF: Scales directly to the reader’s Saramago integration: small bands of the blind succeed in mutual cooperation where the large society collapses — the dyadic-trust mechanism Hardin names. — connects to: Weak bridging ties outperform strong bonding ties for advancement — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 49