Groups induce cooperation through sanctions even without trusting their members

Evidence

Much of our ordinary cooperative activity is embedded in groups of which we are members. Groups are themselves the focus of cooperation for collective purposes, and they can help to induce cooperative behavior by their members even in essentially dyadic relationships. In the former case, when we need collective action, we might wonder whether our groups can be trusted to cooperate in accomplishing our purpose. In the latter case, we often find that our groups oversee our individual actions and induce us to be cooperative even though we could not say that the group and its members trust us. The way small communities induce their members to behave in certain cooperative or coordinative ways is through sanctions for the violation of communal norms, among the most important of which is a norm of cooperativeness within the group. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 808

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the blindness novel’s quarantine scenario: when the group’s sanctioning capacity collapses, so does induced cooperation — the wife must substitute for the missing communal sanctions. — connects to: Cooperation can occur without trust when incentives align; Sanctions make trustworthiness a matter of self-interest rather than personal concern; Sanction-backed protection against worst risks enables wider productive cooperation (+26 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 808

Broader Connections

• Cooperation can operate independently of trust #corroborates (0.90)
• Coercion and interests alone compel cooperation even without shared values #corroborates (0.88)
• Small groups succeed at collective action because dyadic trust motivates cooperation #contradicts (0.85)
• Hobbesian sanctions produce egoistic macro-motivation to cooperate #corroborates (0.80) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 194
• Trust is a result rather than a precondition of cooperation #corroborates (0.75) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2781
• Trust and distrust can be institutionally interlocked without undermining each other #corroborates (0.75)