Interest-based trust resists generalization from individuals to institutions and groups

Evidence

If our notion of trust comes from understandings of individual behavior and character, the term is likely to be entirely out of place in application to a nation, group, or institution. There may be ways to interpret the notion to apply it to such actors, but it is not likely to be prima facie applicable without interpretation. It is now a commonplace understanding that interest is not readily generalized from individual to group or national levels. It should not surprise us to find that trust, which is commonly at issue just because interests are at stake, is not readily generalizable, either. In principle at least, the encapsulated-interest conception of trust can be generalized to fit institutions, although in practice it might not generally fit because the knowledge and the iterated interaction conditions cannot be met. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 706

Categorization

• XREF: Iterated interaction impossibility here echoes the blindness scenario where monitoring and repeat encounters vanish — institutional trust fails just as unobservable social order does in Saramago.