Trust may have evolved from dense small-community interactions

Evidence

If others are generally untrustworthy, we can generally expect everyone to learn not to be readily open to cooperative gestures. We could imagine that trusting would be a result of social evolution from a prior, less complex world in which ongoing interactions are dense enough to ground trust, as in the thick-relationships variant of trust. This would work because each or many of us might see that trustworthiness is in our interest, and our trustworthiness would then beget trust from others even outside our close, norm-governed community. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 674

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Milgrom’s finding that thick, repeated interaction grounds cooperative equilibria, and echoes the general social-capital thesis that dense empirical communities are the substrate for impersonal trust.