Institutional confidence does not require personal trust in agents

Evidence

For most of us, however, reliance on government and other important institutions in our lives does not turn on our being able to trust them or their agents as we might be able to trust the people we deal with on various matters. One might know little about one’s bank and yet feel relatively confident that it will handle one’s money reasonably honestly. We accept the use of such institutions because they are virtually necessary, or at least very helpful, to us and because we begin to have a fairly high degree of confidence that they will perform better for us than any extant alternative would. Indeed, banks are an instance of an organization that we might even think we understand well enough to be confident that its individual agents will perform their jobs in our interest as expected. They are so thoroughly and richly monitored in all their actions that systematic cheating is difficult, although it must sometimes happen. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 729

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes institutional confidence from interpersonal trust — a key conceptual boundary for Hardin’s theory.
• XREF: Connects directly to Luhmann’s ‘familiarity’ baseline and the blindness novel’s collapse of institutional monitoring.