Not trusting others can free ride on the collective benefits of everyone else’s trust.

Evidence

The decline in supposed trust of government might be merely a decline in the disposition to trust without first giving serious thought to assessing the trustworthiness of the other. Is that a bad thing? Never being willing to take a risk on anyone would likely be a bad thing. However, for a person not to trust unless there is reason for, or until there is evidence of, trustworthiness may not always be a bad thing for that person. Is it bad for others? The claim of Putnam and others is, essentially, that such not-trusting is bad for the larger society. In not trusting you, then, I free ride on the collective benefits of others’ trusting. If trust in government is impossible in any sense that is analogous to trust in individuals, this claim has no content. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 740

Categorization

• XREF: The free-rider logic directly parallels the collective-action problems of the law-merchant and diamond-trade sources; trust as a collective good sustained despite individual incentives to defect.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that distrusting free-rides on others’ trusting, rather than trust being the risky choice — is a genuinely counterintuitive reframing of the trust dilemma worth sitting with.