Poverty-driven trust in family can produce active distrust of all outsiders.
Evidence
There may also be systematic distrust that sustains a destructive equilibrium. For example, familial trust can turn exclusionary, so that outsiders may become actively distrusted. Various studies of impoverished peasant subsistence communities in southern Italy, Mexico, and Peru suggest that people in such communities sometimes develop what the political scientist Edward Banfield (1958) calls amoral familism (also see Aguilar 1984; Westacott and Williams 1976; and, for a brief survey, Govier 1997). Family members stick together and both lie to and distrust others. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 469
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
Related
- Wariness can trap people in less trustworthy relationships, reinforcing distrust (similarity 0.80)
- Trust limits help explain cliques, familism, and ethnic exclusion. (similarity 0.78)
- Hostile larger societies drive stronger localized trust enclaves (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Communal trustworthiness often turns outsiders into targets of abuse
#expands(0.85) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 827 - Distrust is a self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling social dynamic.
#expands(0.80) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 273 - Self-fulfilling distrust becomes individually rational and resistant to disproof
#expands(0.80) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2863 - Trust limits help explain cliques, familism, and ethnic exclusion.
#expands(0.75) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 789