Minority groups have more cross-group interactions and thus accumulate more untrustworthy relationship experience.

Evidence

Data from the General Social Survey in the United States for the years 1972 to 1994 show that blacks have much lower levels of socalled generalized trust than do others in the society (Patterson 1999, 175, 190–91). This could follow for various reasons. Life in poor ghettos and in broken families most likely tends to offer less trustworthy relationships than does life in more prosperous conditions. If these conditions produce little experience of trustworthiness in early life, they might lead to a pervasive distrust that is hard to overcome through later experience (see further chapter 5). … In addition, blacks individually have proportionately far more interactions with whites than whites have with blacks. This follows from the simple mathematics of the differences in the sizes of the two groups. (Suppose there are eight whites for every black and that on average each black has eighty interactions with whites every month. Then on average each white has only ten interactions with blacks every month.) Hence if relationships between whites and blacks are less trustworthy than those within the two races, blacks are likely to have far more experience of untrustworthy interracial relationships. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 465

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s integration with Saramago’s Blindness: asymmetric exposure to untrustworthy others parallels the sighted wife’s structurally one-sided position as sole reliable observer amid universal untrustworthiness. — connects to: US minority groups distrust each other more than they do Whites — Chen-Bo Zhong, Adam D. Galinsky, and Miguel M. Unzueta, Negational racial identity and…, 6
• QUESTION: The demographic-arithmetic mechanism is striking — is this minority-exposure effect generalizable beyond race (e.g., to any small-class group in Luhmann’s familiarity framework)?