Skipping trust research while economizing on trust has been wrongly conflated

Evidence

What is at issue is not the importance of exploring in greater depth the causality of those forms of cooperation which are independent of trust, but the fact that economizing on trust is not as generalizable a strategy as might at first appear, and that, if it is risky to bank on trust, it is just as risky to fail to understand how it works, what forces other than successful cooperation bring it about, and how it relates to the conditions of cooperation. Considering the extremely limited literature on this crucial subject it seems that economizing on trust and economizing on understanding it have been unjustifiably conflated. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2830

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEFINE: Distinguishes two conflated strategies: economizing on trust (presupposing less of it) versus economizing on understanding trust (not studying it).

Related

• Strategies to minimize reliance on trust have been conflated with neglecting to understand it. (similarity 0.93)
• Trust is not a resource depleted by use (similarity 0.86)
• Trust should not be economized even without supportive feelings and networks (similarity 0.84)
• Cooperation can evolve without any trust being involved. (similarity 0.84)
• Optimal cooperation is assumed to evolve without deliberate design (similarity 0.83)
• Trust only matters when one’s best strategy depends on another’s actions (similarity 0.83)
• Cooperation depends on trust plus situation-specific constraints and incentives (similarity 0.83)
• Explaining trust requires understanding the conditions of cooperation (similarity 0.83)
• Concrete examples function as research strategies for trust theory (similarity 0.83)
• Economists treat trust as background rather than transaction cost (similarity 0.83)
• The assumption that people trust only on valid grounds is empirical and provisional (similarity 0.82)
• Trust is a small-scale phenomenon that institutions must replace to enable large-scale cooperation (similarity 0.82)
• Trust is expectation formed before the other’s action can be monitored (similarity 0.82)
• Trust emerges as a result of cooperation rather than an element of social capital. (similarity 0.82)
• Cooperation can operate independently of trust (similarity 0.82)