Trust rests on the trusted party’s self-interest, not on their personal character

Evidence

A reciprocal trusting relationship is mutually reinforcing for each truster, because each person then has built-in incentive to be trustworthy (Coleman 1990, 77). I trust you because it is in your interest to do what I trust you to do, and you trust me for the reciprocal reason. If, as subjectively seems to be true, trust relationships are typically reciprocal, we have reason to suppose they are not typically grounded in particular characteristics of the trusted. They are relational because they are grounded in incentives for trustworthiness, as in the encapsulated-interest account. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 123

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘encapsulated-interest account’ of trust: trusting someone means their incentives make trustworthiness in their interest.
• XREF: Hooks directly into Hardin’s mechanism of trust as grounded in observable constraints on opportunism — the same logic the reader maps onto the doctor’s wife in Saramago, whose incentives align with the blind group’s survival.
• BMF: The claim that stable trust comes from making the other reciprocally dependent (not from their virtues) echoes the mechanism in The Reluctant Fundamentalist where obligations are built through mutual dependence rather than goodwill.