Information clarity neutralizes advantage of unscrupulous opportunists

Evidence

The finding of interest from this work for the argument here is that the most machiavellian of the players were most able to exploit the situation to their greatest advantage, and do much better than chance would predict when the situation was most ambiguous. However, when the game was played such that each player knew exactly what resources the others had, and there was a minimum of ambiguity, this advantage disappeared. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 591

Categorization

• XREF: Strongest single passage for the reader’s Hardin thesis — the machiavellian’s exploitation advantage exists only under opacity and vanishes when others can observe their resources; observational clarity is what curbs opportunistic behavior. — connects to: Easy access to information destroys its power as a status signal. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 707; Information disclosure changes agency behavior through good-faith career staff — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 395
• DEFINE: Operationalizes ‘ambiguity/opacity’ as the precondition for exploitation, and ‘clarity’ as the condition killing it — gives empirical content to the trust-requires-observability claim.