Trust should not be economized even without supportive feelings and networks

Evidence

Trust, of course, can take on the connotations of a passion (Dunn, this volume; Mutti 1987), reinforced or undermined by feelings of affection, dislike, and irrational or intuitive belief (none of which can be induced at will). To economize on the latter — to assume that the right set of feelings and beliefs may simply not obtain — may be justified. But even in the absence of that set and of the ‘thick’ trust which may accompany it, and even if we do not believe in the social viability or in the moral desirability of those ‘aristocracies’ which bank on them (cf. Williams, this volume), it still does not follow that we should economize on trust or relegate it to the status of by-product. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2849

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Gambetta’s anti-reductionist stance; relevant to whether the doctor’s wife’s group could deliberately reconstruct trust rather than merely rely on circumstance