Even trusted intimates may rationally abuse trust under duress

Evidence

One might, in such a context, be able to develop a small number of intensive relationships in which trust is justified, but even then, as in Stalin’s cruelest years, the people one trusts may finally see it as in their interest to abuse the trust or perhaps to violate it, for example, in order to protect loved ones. … This raises the question of how to create a stable order in which trustworthiness prevails and those who are trusting therefore prosper. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 518

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Stalin’s cruelty as the extreme case parallels Hobbesian predation in Blindness — encapsulated interest fails precisely when survival interests override relationship interests.

Related

• Trustworthiness requires social embedding that constrains opportunism (similarity 0.81)
• Trustworthiness often rests solely on the interest in maintaining a relationship (similarity 0.80)
• Trusting action increases one’s vulnerability to another whose behavior is uncontrolled (similarity 0.80)
• Trust is morally neutral; mutual trust can enable atrocity (similarity 0.79)
• Withholding trust feeds a self-reinforcing spiral of lost rational capacity. (similarity 0.79)
• Being trustworthy carries no risk while being trusting exposes one to exploitation (similarity 0.79)
• Distrust needs less information than trust to form. (similarity 0.79)
• Even intimate relationships involve interests at their core. (similarity 0.79)
• Relationships built on self-interest are later recast as morally grounded (similarity 0.78)
• Distrust is often the rational default even in good relationships (similarity 0.78)
• Trust historically extended far beyond the narrow modern friend circle (similarity 0.78)
• Trust requires both freedom to betray and constraint making the relationship worthwhile. (similarity 0.78)