Rational trust requires both trusted’s incentives and truster’s knowledge

Evidence

That trust is essentially rational is a common view. For example, James Coleman (1990, chapter 5; also see several contributions to Gambetta 1988) bases his account of trust on complex rational expectations. There are two central elements in applying a rational-choice account of trust: incentives of the trusted to fulfill the trust and knowledge to allow the truster to trust. The knowledge at issue, of course, is that of the potential truster, not that of the theorist or social scientist who observes or analyzes trust. Hence we require an account of the epistemology of individual knowledge or belief, of street-level epistemology, to complete the rational theory of trust (see chapter 5). — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 110

Categorization

Category: Connection Points

• XREF: The ‘street-level epistemology’ requirement maps onto Saramago’s blindness as destruction of the truster’s knowledge capacity.

Related

• Trust is encapsulated interest achievable through many incentive mechanisms (similarity 0.87)
• Distrust requires little evidence while trust demands rich understanding of incentives (similarity 0.86)
• Trustworthiness is grounded in the trusted’s interest in maintaining a relationship (similarity 0.86)
• Trust rests on the trusted person’s commitments and incentives, not just expected behavior. (similarity 0.84)
• Trust is fully strategic, requiring the truster to account for the trusted’s reciprocity (similarity 0.84)
• Trust is rational expectation about the trusted party’s self-interest (similarity 0.84)
• Trust requires knowing the other’s incentives to honor it (similarity 0.84)
• Trust rests on the trusted’s incentive to preserve the ongoing relationship. (similarity 0.84)
• Trust is a rational policy for conditions where knowledge is unavailable (similarity 0.84)
• Strategies to minimize reliance on trust have been conflated with neglecting to understand it. (similarity 0.83)
• Trust requires belief in the other’s motivations, not mere behavioral expectation (similarity 0.83)
• Trust reduces to knowledge while trustworthiness is motivational (similarity 0.83)
• Building stable relations generates the incentives that produce trust (similarity 0.83)
• Differences in trust are epistemological, not psychological or irrational. (similarity 0.83)
• Differences in capacity to trust are epistemological rather than psychological (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Distrust requires little evidence while trust demands rich understanding of incentives #corroborates (0.85) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 438
• Mere incentive compatibility is insufficient for trust as encapsulated interest #corroborates (0.82) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 71
• Trust is encapsulated interest achievable through many incentive mechanisms #expands (0.80) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 151
• Reciprocal trust creates mutual incentives for trustworthiness #expands (0.78) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 1015
• Trust requires both freedom to defect and constraints that make cooperation attractive #expands (0.78) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2729
• Trust requires belief in the other’s motivations, not mere behavioral expectation #qualifies (0.75) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 101
• Trust reduces the truster’s complexity while transferring that burden onto the trusted #expands (0.75) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 245
• Trust is a rational policy for conditions where knowledge is unavailable #qualifies (0.72) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1197
• Initial cooperation can wreck backward induction and build rational trust #expands (0.72) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 136
• Trust operates through uncommunicated inferences rather than explicit justification #qualifies (0.72) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 164