Trust between strangers cannot rest on friendship’s personal knowledge model.

Evidence

But it is clear that if friendship is the model of interpersonal trust, it is also clear that interpersonal trust itself cannot, as it stands, be a model for enduringly cooperative and trusting relations between strangers. If a society of friends is imaginable at all, then it will be like the Society of Friends itself — a society held together, as Locke argued, not only by the fact that ‘human beings can and do take pleasure in each other’s company’ and ‘the emotional impact of moral socialisation within a particular family and community’, but also and inescapably by something like ‘the revelation to them of God’s requirements for his creatures, weakly enforced by prudential sanctions within this life but backed by overwhelming sanctions in the next’ (Dunn 1985: 46-7). In a Godless order, however, it would seem at first sight impossible to hold up either friendship or Friendship as a model for enduringly cooperative and trusting relations between strangers. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1516

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s Luhmann/Hardin synthesis: friendship = Luhmann’s ‘familiarity’ grounded in face-to-face knowledge, which collapses when observability vanishes (as in Saramago’s blindness). This is the theoretical hinge for why broad trust needs external constraints.

Related

• Friendship cannot model trust between strangers; it needs shared belief backed by sanctions (similarity 0.92)
• Trusting friends more than strangers is definitional to personal bonds (similarity 0.84)
• Trust operates most prominently in friendship, unmediated by kinship or contract. (similarity 0.83)
• Trust historically extended far beyond the narrow modern friend circle (similarity 0.83)
• Extended interpersonal trust cannot reinforce itself without external mechanisms (similarity 0.82)
• Modern society’s specialization freed friendship from dependence, allowing selective trust (similarity 0.82)
• Promises typically regulate relations with known people, not strangers (similarity 0.82)
• Familiarity and expected future meetings enable cooperative trust (similarity 0.81)
• Friendship works as trust because knowledge is easy to obtain. (similarity 0.81)
• Trust governs dealings only where kinship and contract cannot constrain others (similarity 0.81)
• Trust was historically bound to friendship, not just narrow intimacy (similarity 0.80)
• Strategies to minimize reliance on trust have been conflated with neglecting to understand it. (similarity 0.80)
• Trust alone cannot explain modern social order. (similarity 0.80)
• Friendship’s transparent motives can extend into wider social settings. (similarity 0.79)
• Trust solves problems of risk but operates only within a familiar world (similarity 0.79)