Trust rests on expectations about others’ actions bearing identifiable risk

Evidence

I agree with the emphasis placed by both Partha Dasgupta and Niklas Luhmann (in this volume) on the importance of personal agency in defining trust. Thus Dasgupta identifies trust as an expectation about another person’s actions which influences our own actions before we have full knowledge of the outcome; and Luhmann exposes to full view the distinction between personal and impersonal social organization. Clearly trust is the predication of one’s own actions on actions of others which bear an identifiable risk of turning out unfavourably. The problem is to control extrapolation from a theory of rational choice to the larger frameworks of modern mass society. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2424

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precise working definition of trust via Dasgupta and Luhmann — the load-bearing term for the reader’s whole analytical apparatus.
• XREF: Core connection to the reader’s stated thesis: trust requires predictions about observable behavior under identifiable risk — exactly what the blindness epidemic destroys for the sighted wife’s community. — connects to: People frame structural food-safety risks as voluntary lifestyle choices. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 78