Successful constraint-based cooperation can itself build up trust over time.

Evidence

Good, in this volume, considers experimental evidence which suggests the fundamental importance of long-term arrangements, of the absence of potentially aggressive devices, of the lack of ambiguity in what people cooperate about, and of a step by step increase in the risk involved in cooperation. Each of these conditions, by affecting constraints and interests, can also affect cooperation irrespective of a given level of trust, and when successful can serve to reinforce trust itself. … Yet as Williams shows (this volume), such conditions cannot be assumed: formal structures and social reality have a distressing tendency to diverge, sometimes sharply. It is in the space of this divergence that trust must be wedged, and if /a fortuna does not help, then intentionality based on the as if game must be brought into play. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2833

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that trust is ‘wedged’ into the divergence between formal structure and social reality is dense — trust lives precisely where institutional design fails, which resonates with why Saramago’s doctor’s wife must paper over the gap between proclaimed rules and lived behavior.
• XREF: connects to: Networks sustain conduct rules because they embed mutual obligation — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 41