Institutional confidence rests on inductive generalization, not trust

Evidence

To be confident of such an institution, we need not understand its design and incentive system well enough to claim we trust it in the sense of understanding how its incentive structures produce correct actions by its agents. We also need not know those agents in an ongoing relationship that could give us the bases for trust in them. To be confident of it, we need only inductively generalize from what we think to be the facts of its behavior or even only from the apparent results of its behavior, as we inductively generalize that the winter will be cold. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 731

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens the core distinction in Hardin’s framework: trust requires knowing the other’s incentives, while institutional confidence merely requires observing outcomes.
• XREF: Anchors the blindness-novel reading: the wife’s sightedness supplies the observational ability whose loss makes inductive generalization impossible for others.