Modern society’s specialization freed friendship from dependence, allowing selective trust

Evidence

Trust in friends very much depends on what we need to trust them about. In premodern societies trust and friendship belonged together much more extensively. To the extent to which modern society has relaxed our dependence on friends for acquiring and maintaining resources, and has diffused and ‘specialized’ our relationships beyond localized familiarity, it has also given us a greater freedom to include among our friends some highly unreliable persons. The point though is that we are free not to depend on them. With respect to certain actions, we may actually trust others much more than our friends. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2845

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the Blindness-based argument: the doctor’s wife’s group must trust functional strangers after collapse of familiarity — modern diffuse ‘specialized’ ties
• DEFINE: Contrasts trust-as-dependence from trust-in-friends, sharpening how trust is action-scoped rather than relationship-scoped