People can act on trust they cognitively reject by making exceptions for favored individuals

Evidence

If the pressure to act is great even when the trust threshold is lower than 0.50 — when we verge, that is, on distrust — the tension between action and belief can generate, by means of wishful thinking and the reduction of cognitive dissonance, a deceptive rearrangement of beliefs. Thus there are those who distrust entire categories of people except the member of that category with whom they have a special relationship. Da Ponte makes this point clearly in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte. Don Alfonso claims: ‘E’la fede nelle femmine come |‘Araba Fenice, che vi sia ciascun lo dice, dove sia nessun lo sa.’ And the lovers respectively reply: ‘La Fenice € Dorabella’ and ‘La Fenice é Fiordiligi’. They both boldly and in mutual contradiction claim that all women are unfaithful except their fiancées. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2764

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs beautifully with the trust/monitoring thesis — the doctor’s wife in Saramago is the ‘fiancée exception’ writ socially; also resonates with Da Ponte’s Cosi fan tutte as a case study of trust thresholds in a social-contract frame. — connects to: Rational selfhood against myth must work through exception rather than defiance — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 65; People conform publicly to beliefs they privately reject — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 321
• DEFINE: Illustrates ‘wishful thinking and reduction of cognitive dissonance’ as mechanisms that rearrange beliefs to permit cooperative action at sub-threshold trust.
• CANDY: Mozart lovers each declaring all women unfaithful except their own fiancée is a delightfully quotable paradox.