The pretense of familiarity serves as the normal rhetoric of economic exchange

Evidence

Loans in Nima are never made to strangers. Landlords lend to tenants, patrons to clients. The borrower often invokes friendship as a way of soliciting a loan; the pretension of familiarity is the normal rhetoric of economic life in a place like Accra. Kinsmen make poor borrowers since they equate their interests with those of the lender. Again, small traders sell to strangers for cash. Once their customers become more familiar, they grant them special privileges (extras and, more important, credit), engendering trust by means of the gift and making a kind of friendship between buyer and seller, even when it was not a precondition for their association. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2436

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s thesis in Blindness: the doctor’s wife enacts generous giving to engender trust; here small traders engender trust via gifts and credit rather than demanding prior familiarity.
• DEFINE: Showcases the distinction between claiming friendship and genuine familiarity as the basis of credit — the observable-constraint mechanism Hardin describes.