Rational choice models miss that trust is decided without probabilistic knowledge at decision time

Evidence

Whether action on the basis of trust has been right, therefore, in the final, retrospective reckoning, depends on whether the trust has been honoured or been broken. From the purely objective and timeless perspectives of the kind which obtain in economic theories of rational choice, it would seem that this is just a question of one out of many uncertainties, the probability of which may, to a large extent, be estimated and calculated. This view, however, does not take time sufficiently into account; time, as it were, charges for providing the expectation of certainty. The decision-maker at the moment of decision does not have that knowledge at his disposal or rarely has it in the form of calculable probability. We have to conclude, therefore, that the appearance of a manageable rationality makes a crucial difference as to whether or not action is founded on trust. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 147

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the law-merchant/rational-choice literature in the reading portfolio; also grounds why Stevens’s trust was unfalsifiable in real time — retrospective reckoning is the only arbiter, which is Ishiguro’s whole narrative device. — connects to: Decisions against one’s will arise from situational confluence, not rational deliberation — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 489; Rational cost-benefit models fail to predict decisions about war and revolution — Scott Atran, The Devoted Actor: Unconditional…, 29