Trust is produced through gifts rather than required as a precondition for association

Evidence

Once their customers become more familiar, they grant them special privileges (extras and, more important, credit), engendering trust by means of the gift and making a kind of friendship between buyer and seller, even when it was not a precondition for their association. Regular clients with substantial debts are few, and the traders must pick them carefully: in this respect they are as selective as we are with our personal friendships. But this does not prevent Frafras and others like them from invoking friendship quite casually in their economic relations, a sort of inflation of the social currency that members of our civil society would be likely to resist. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2436

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the Blindness argument: trust here is generated materially through gifts and credit (observable transactions) rather than resting on inner assurance of the other’s good character. — connects to: Fruit dispersal mutualism can be read as gift exchange without denying evolution — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 109