Trust is a fragile coping device for ignorance about others’ future behavior

Evidence

The condition of ignorance or uncertainty about other people’s behaviour is central to the notion of trust. It is related to the limits of our capacity ever to achieve a full knowledge of others, their motives, their responses to endogenous as well as exogenous changes. Trust is a tentative and intrinsically fragile response to our ignorance, a way of coping with ‘the limits of our foresight’ (Shklar 1984: 151), hardly ever located at the top end of the probability distribution. If we were blessed with an unlimited computational ability to map out all possible contingencies in enforceable contracts, trust would not be a problem (see D ta and Lorenz, this volume). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2719

Categorization

• XREF: Directly grounds the reader’s analytical frame: sight-loss in Blindness removes observability, forcing agents into exactly this condition of ignorance about motives and future actions that trust is built to cope with. — connects to: Ignorance of another’s intentions yields neither trust nor distrust; Contracting, not trust, brings the future into the present; Generalized trust is defined as unspecific trust in strangers — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 792 (+6 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The compact causal chain — trust exists precisely because unlimited computation and enforceable contracts are impossible — is a dense, load-bearing formulation worth returning to.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2719

Broader Connections

• Trust is a rational policy for conditions where knowledge is unavailable #corroborates (0.88) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1197
• Trust functions as a device for coping with others’ freedom #expands (0.82) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1146