Universal opportunistic caution would destroy human sociality altogether

Evidence

A purposeful determination to avoid being a sucker, we now know, if generalized to the human race, would subvert human sociality more or less in its entirety (Williams, this In the extraordinarily complicated division of labour on which modern social life necessarily depends no one could rationally dispute (Luhmann, this volume; Silver 1985b; Elster and Moene 1988) that human beings need, as far as they can, to economize on trust in persons and confide instead in well-designed political, social, and economic institutions. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1204

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly parallel to Hardin’s point that trust requires departing from pure rational self-interest — the very theoretical tension the reader is mapping onto Saramago’s (1995, 1997) plague.
• QUESTION: Interesting to trace: does the doctor’s wife in Blindness survive precisely by refusing the sucker-avoidance logic — by being the one who trusts and gives without calculating?

Related

• Universalized fear of exploitation would destroy human sociality (similarity 0.92)
• Trust cannot be assumed to emerge naturally in human interaction (similarity 0.81)
• Withholding trust feeds a self-reinforcing spiral of lost rational capacity. (similarity 0.81)
• Trustworthiness requires social embedding that constrains opportunism (similarity 0.80)
• Building mutual trust requires confronting risk rather than avoiding it (similarity 0.79)
• Universal trust can be rational in sufficiently benign worlds despite Luhmann (similarity 0.79)
• Bounded rationality and inevitable surprise make trust irreducible in locked-in economic relations (similarity 0.79)
• Trust is rational action taken despite uncontrolled exposure to loss (similarity 0.79)
• Trust is a deliberate choice, not merely a fortunate evolutionary by-product (similarity 0.79)
• Distrust is unaffordable in aggregate even when exit is feasible from single relationships. (similarity 0.79)
• Liberalism overestimates individual choice and neglects the baseline confidence systems require. (similarity 0.78)
• Lack of confidence breeds alienation while lack of trust changes risk decisions (similarity 0.78)
• Strategies to minimize reliance on trust have been conflated with neglecting to understand it. (similarity 0.78)
• Social trust evolved from interpersonal relations to abstract anonymities of mass society (similarity 0.78)