Trust can ride on mistaken identity and third-party prestige

Evidence

The officer asked me to explain it all again. He then took my letter into the office for a couple of minutes and returned to ask how much money I would like to have. … He asked me to sign a receipt for the money and then said that the bank would deal with my bank to get the funds. Naturally, I was floored by the whole transaction, but I asked no questions and acted as though this was, of course, the normal way to do business, asking for no collateral from a foreigner who just walked in off the street and who could as well leave the country tomorrow. … My bank was the very small Irving Bank and Trust Company of Irving, Texas. My letter had been signed by the president of that bank. It seemed likely that the officer of the bank had read the signature as that of the president of his correspondent bank. Of course, the president of the Irving Trust Company surely had more important things to do than to write personal letters to insignificant customers. With his enormous prestige and his apparently high regard for me, he was my intermediary in trust, no matter that I had never met him and presumably never would. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 641

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the book’s thesis about trust requiring observable constraints — here trust is granted to a complete stranger because the lender misreads a signature as high-prestige endorsement, i.e. trust without any real monitoring. — connects to: Prestige status requires explanation as information-goods access. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 1218; Prestige leaks across unrelated domains, making celebrity endorsement powerful — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 395
• SHARE: The specific correspondent-bank misunderstanding is a narrow banking-historical anecdote perfect for a banker or finance-history friend.