Trust survives widespread fraud in advanced economies

Evidence

Despite its apparent fragility and our many attempts to do without it, it is clear that, in many societies where it is well established, trust is remarkably robust. Fraud is widespread in all the advanced economies, and is extremely costly to companies and individuals alike, but rarely does it lead to the conclusion that no one can be trusted. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 722

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Established trust systems are remarkably robust despite widespread fraud (similarity 0.94)
• Collapsed trust turned commerce into mutual deception and crippled lending (similarity 0.89)
• Trust flourishes most where neither kinship nor contract obligations apply (similarity 0.81)
• Suspicion of others’ trustworthiness is inherently well grounded (similarity 0.80)
• Trust requires freedom be transferred from uncontrollable potency to institutionalized personal responsibility. (similarity 0.80)
• Trust rests on structural system guarantees that relieve individuals of risk assessment (similarity 0.80)
• Trust in practical capacity outweighs trust in politicians’ good intentions (similarity 0.80)
• Trust’s interconnected structure makes it fragile across whole systems (similarity 0.80)
• A cheater’s success depends on parasitizing a trustworthy system (similarity 0.80)
• Individual trust is not rational even where group-wide trust would benefit all (similarity 0.80)
• Trust should be a by-product of good institutions, not their precondition (similarity 0.80)
• Excess knowledge that trust is being built can itself collapse it into distrust (similarity 0.80)
• System trust rests on expectations that most won’t test the system (similarity 0.80)
• Economists treat trust as background rather than transaction cost (similarity 0.80)
• Trust clues only reduce risk, never eliminate the leap of faith. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Institutional and legal constraints give people strong external incentives to be trustworthy #expands (0.85)
• A cheater’s success depends on parasitizing a trustworthy system #complicates (0.80)
• Actual trustworthiness combines motives that resist institutional mimicry #complicates (0.75)