Trust is rational expectation about the trusted party’s self-interest

Evidence

In what follows, I give an account of trust as essentially rational expectations about the self-interested behavior of the trusted. The effort to construct such an account forces attention to varieties of interaction in which trust might arise and hence to differences in the plausible explanations of trust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 78

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the encapsulated-interest account of trust in one line.
• XREF: The reader’s integration with Luhmann and Hardin’s own framework is served directly: this is the precise definition Hardin defends. — connects to: Voluntary acts of personal trust give the trusted party an incentive to be trustworthy — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 1203