Leading theorists insist rational-choice trust leaves something irreducible out

Evidence

Almost everything written on trust recognizes the possibility of accounting for much of what we commonsensically call trust with a rational-choice, expectations theory. Much of the literature, however, including contributions by the economists Oliver Williamson and Robert Frank, the philosophers Baier, Becker, and Hertzberg, and the theologian Buber, suggests or even insists that there is something left over. Some of these people seem to want to say that the rationalchoice elements or cases of apparent trust are not trust at all. Williamson (1993, 479) says that what he calls personal trust is “nearly noncalculative.” In a gentler claim, Baier at one point says there is still some vapor lurking after she has cleared away everything covered by her theory of trust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 367

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘vapor’ Baier names maps onto the residue of Hardin’s trust that even observable-constraint theories cannot fully capture — relevant to whether total blindness truly collapses all trust in Saramago.