Epistemological and time limits cap how many people one can trust.

Evidence

On every account of trust based on assessments of trustworthiness, we obviously face epistemological and time constraints that prevent us from having strong trusting relationships with more than a limited number of people. The trustworthiness can be morally motivated, the result of encapsulated interest, or a matter of character or disposition. The constraint of time is clear enough if we must have ongoing relations with others in order to build trust in them. The epistemological constraints even cut against the possibility that we can trust large numbers of people through their reputations. In addition, in some contexts of dealing with groups rather than merely dyadically with individuals, the logic of encapsulated interest must be violated even if we have essentially ongoing relationships. Hence there are two ways in which we can come up against essentially numerical limits on trusting. First, unlike a medieval villager, whose world was tiny, we cannot trust more than a relatively small fraction of the individuals in our worlds. Second, we cannot trust large groups of individuals as such. We might be able to trust most or even all of the members of a collectivity when we engage with them dyadically, but we often cannot count on them as members of a group to encapsulate the interests of others in the group in cooperating in any collective purpose. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 782

Categorization

• XREF: Explains Saramago’s blindness society: with no relational histories and no observability, trust in anyone collapses exactly as this numerical and epistemological limit predicts — the sighted wife’s single-point trust becomes the anomaly that restores order. — connects to: Trust requires time for repeated interactions and is a cognitive capacity; Trust forms sequentially by reducing social complexity over discrete steps; Moral trust requires temporally stable social contexts to operate
• QUESTION: Hardin says we cannot trust groups ‘as such’ — but the doctor’s wife in Saramago seems to trust (and be trusted by) a collectivity assembled post-blindness. When observability vanishes, does trust shift from relational to categorical, contradicting Hardin here?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 782

Broader Connections

• Trust requires time for repeated interactions and is a cognitive capacity #expands (0.88)
• Moral trust requires temporally stable social contexts to operate #expands (0.75)
• Trust forms sequentially by reducing social complexity over discrete steps #expands (0.72)