High trusters are happier when trust pays off in their environment

Evidence

The worst of these shortcomings for an account of trust as encapsulated interest are the failures to accommodate strategic considerations, especially incentive effects in iteration (either directly or through reputational effects). Some of the other problems may be easily addressed in the more general encapsulated-interest account of trust, and some may be easily fitted into the model of figure 5.1. Even with its shortcomings, the simple model implies most of Julian Rotter’s standard conclusions about interpersonal trust. Rotter (1980) finds that high trusters are more likely to give others a second chance (this sounds almost definitional), and they are less likely to be unhappy and more likely to be liked by others. If they are in an environment in which trust leads more often, on balance, to gains than to losses, they should be less unhappy. As well, their openness to trusting others should lead others to select them as partners in various activities. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 579

Categorization

• XREF: The payoff-contingent happiness of high trusters connects to why trust collapses into predation in Saramago’s blindness epidemic — when trust ceases to pay off, even high trusters stop being open.
• DEFINE: Clarifies encapsulated-interest trust’s explanatory priority: incentive/strategic effects are its core, other features are secondary.