No one assigns infinite weight to their own honesty when incentives grow

Evidence

If the incentives are ‘right’, even a trustworthy person can be relied upon to be untrustworthy. ‘Every man has his price’: repugnant though it is to our sensibilities, the cliché captures the view that no one awards an infinite weight to his own honesty. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 821

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects directly to Hardin’s ‘trust requires observable constraints on opportunistic behavior’ and to the reader’s core thesis of the doctor’s wife as sole guarantor of order.

Related

• Only incentives, not investment, can genuinely change trustworthiness. (similarity 0.84)
• Trust reduces to anticipating the trusted’s incentives toward us (similarity 0.82)
• Situation-specific incentives override a person’s overall disposition in trust decisions (similarity 0.81)
• Trust requires genuine choice, occupying the space between determinism and indeterminacy (similarity 0.81)
• Voluntary acts of personal trust give the trusted party an incentive to be trustworthy (similarity 0.81)
• Building stable relations generates the incentives that produce trust (similarity 0.81)
• Personal trust shifts the odds in the trustor’s favour by incentivizing good behavior (similarity 0.81)
• Trustworthiness can rest on character or reciprocity rather than narrow interest (similarity 0.80)
• Honourable motives alone cannot sustain reliable trust (similarity 0.80)
• Distrust requires little evidence while trust demands rich understanding of incentives (similarity 0.80)
• Trust is encapsulated interest achievable through many incentive mechanisms (similarity 0.80)
• Reciprocal trust multiplies each party’s incentive to be trustworthy (similarity 0.80)
• Acting trustingly toward others can itself induce their trustworthiness (similarity 0.80)
• Optimism about others’ trustworthiness is self-reinforcing through gained experience (similarity 0.80)
• Trust requires knowing the other’s incentives to honor it (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Cooperation can occur without trust when incentives align #exemplifies (0.85) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 100
• Institutional and legal constraints give people strong external incentives to be trustworthy #contradicts (0.80) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 167