Trust is a result rather than a precondition of cooperation
Evidence
When transferred to the human world, the evolutionary approach might a fortiori suggest that trust would be better understood as a result rather than a precondition of cooperation. Trust would exist in societies and groups which are successful because of their ability to cooperate, and would consist in nothing more than trust in the success of previous cooperation. Cooperation could be triggered not by trust, but simply by a set of fortunate practices, random at first, and then selectively retained (with varying degrees of learning and intentionality). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2781
Categorization
- XREF: Inverts Luhmann’s familiarity-as-precondition framing; directly relevant to the reader’s Hardin claim that trust requires observable constraints — here trust comes after, not before. — connects to: Trust matters precisely because relations have prisoner’s-dilemma structure — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 908; Cooperation can occur without trust when incentives align; Initial cooperation can wreck backward induction and build rational trust — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 606 (+33 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The reversal of trust-before-cooperation into trust-after-cooperation is a genuinely paradigm-shifting claim, countering the foundational assumption of most trust theory the reader is synthesizing.
- QUESTION: Does this evolutionary trust-after view reconcile with Hardin’s observable-constraints argument, or does it offer a rival model worth adjudicating?
- corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2781
Broader Connections
- Cooperation can operate independently of trust
#corroborates(0.90) - Humans can intentionally choose trust rather than inherit it as a by-product of evolution
#complicates(0.75) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2821