Large groups facing collective-action dilemmas cannot be trustworthy as groups.

Evidence

In standard contexts of collective action that takes the form of a large-number prisoner’s dilemma exchange, however, the group cannot be trustworthy. The members of the group might well share some set of interests as, for example, the people of Los Angeles and Houston virtually all share an interest in reduced pollution in their cities. If all of them would stop barbecuing over open flames in their backyards, pollution would be significantly reduced. The interest of any given individual in these cities, however, is typically to renege on acting for the collective benefit, to free ride on the efforts of others, while barbecuing as usual. According to the logic of collective action, your own interest, as in this example, is to free ride on the efforts of others even with respect to your own personal interest in the product of group effort (Olson 1965; Hardin 1982a). Eo ipso, your interest is not likely to encapsulate mine with respect to that joint product if it does not even include your own. … There might be people who would bear costs on behalf of others that they would not bear on behalf of themselves, but we cannot rely on many people to do so, and therefore collective actions often fail. In sum, we commonly cannot trust large groups of individuals as such. We might be able to trust many or most of the members of a collectivity in individual-to-individual interactions, but we cannot count on them as members of a group to encapsulate the interests of others in the group. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 810

Categorization

• DEFINE: The free-rider logic of collective action precludes group-level encapsulated-interest trust: no member’s interest encapsulates another’s on the joint product.
• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s Saramago scenario: during white blindness, the collectivity is exactly this kind of large-number, unobservable group — no member can encapsulate another’s interests absent monitoring, so Hobbesian degradation follows. — connects to: Group intentions cannot be reliably ascribed to legislatures — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2482; Mass-based membership groups as an aggregate poorly represent public opinion. — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics:…, 81; Horizontal protest collectives cannot negotiate because they lack decision mechanisms — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 445