Trust can be engineered by institutional barriers that remove attack options

Evidence

Seldom in history has anyone gone so far toward establishing institutional trust as did Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, head of a system that, throughout its seven decades, had exhibited extraordinary variance. He made some previously possible Soviet threats virtually impossible by putting institutional barriers in their way. For example, in inviting the reformation of the Eastern European regimes and in dismantling the Iron Curtain, he greatly reduced the possibility of a sudden Soviet conventional attack on Western Europe. By withdrawing troops and certain materiel he made it virtually impossible to launch a secret attack without first visibly warning of attack during the necessary restoration of troops and equipment to the European theater. The obstacles he created consist of institutional structures that can impede individual audacity. Such institutional arrangements are appealing partly because they stabilize our expectations. Institutional behavior can regress toward the mean to average out the variance of individual behavior. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 753

Categorization

• XREF: Strongly connects to the reader’s Hardin synthesis: Gorbachev’s institutional barriers render opportunism unobservable-to-impossible, exactly the ‘observable constraints on opportunistic behavior’ Hardin argues trust requires — and parallels the wife’s enforced rules in the blindness ward.