Diego Gambetta — Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations

715 published claims from this book.

• A 1876 analysis still accurately describes a century of mafia behavior.
• A belief’s utility does not make it true
• A buyer’s trust of a salesman is reducible to a subjective probability p
• A character’s functioning differs from its gene-frequency changes
• A commitment mechanism can substitute for trust in transactions
• A core state can leverage kin ties to convert exclusion into partnership
• A costlier image-investment threshold paradoxically makes honesty identifiable.
• A group can retain superordinate status long after its subordinates vanish
• A guarantor’s protection is a public good benefiting both parties to trade.
• A modern state is an institutionalized division of political labor
• A one-shot buyer-seller game assumes common knowledge of everyone’s payoffs
• A political perspective on human life must be restricted to human capacities
• A realist view holds coercive power may be preferable to wider impotence.
• A reputation for honesty accumulates slowly but can be destroyed rapidly
• A ruler can pacify society by draining each class’s institutions of political meaning.
• A shared religious idiom eased rule over the arid zone’s diverse societies
• A single world religion can simultaneously sustain two very different social styles
• A state’s authority is always the claim of particular humans.
• A surplus of cheap lawyers increases litigation and legal uncertainty
• A trusting society requires citizens to surrender instinctive distrust.
• A trustworthy reputation can be exploited because it is imperfectly known
• Absence of centralized authority can foster trust and cohesion.
• Action pressure reorders beliefs to justify the trust we must place.
• Adding competition makes the economics of trust-building analytically intractable.
• Agreements require backward calculation from the other’s future perspective, not forward prediction.
• All states, ancient and modern, depend on a division of political labour
• Ambiguity in communication enables exploitation despite protecting social order
• Anarchism alone trusts dispersed coercive power to be made acceptable
• Anarchism asserts centralized coercion is neither justified nor a precondition for social life.
• Anarchism differs from other distrust of power by judging dispersed coercion trustworthy
• Anarchism fails mainly through its naive assumptions about the incidence of trust
• Anarchism is only plausible if a community withdraws from the world economy
• Anarchism’s defining weakness is its capricious account of trust’s incidence
• Anarchism’s plausibility diminishes as division of labor and inequality deepen
• Anarchy can engender trust while effective government destroys it
• Anarchy can generate social cohesion which effective government destroys
• Anarchy’s cohesion-generating claim rests on both empirical and theoretical support
• Animal and human behavior is highly contingent on circumstance
• Animal sensitivity to others’ behavior may explain how trust evolved
• Another’s reaction to one’s action confirms the validity of prior experience
• Anticipated future interaction makes people substantially more cooperative
• Anticipated opportunism blocks mutually beneficial transactions without trust
• Arid-zone ecology impels inhabitants toward specific social forms
• Arid-zone pastoral populations’ material and cultural needs presuppose cities
• Arid-zone states cycle rulers while preserving the governing structure intact.
• Aristocratic elites enforce virtue by inducing fear through ceremony and display
• Asking which single motive explains cooperation is the wrong question.
• Asset specificity determines when market safeguards give way to relational trust
• Asset-specific investment locks firms out of market-based price discipline
• Assumptions that dependent parties need assurance can ground trust theory
• Atomizing a society politically can destroy the very institutions its economy requires.
• Authoritarian regimes can overcome economic vicious circles without creating genuine trust
• Behavior can track type even when encounter partners are anonymous
• Behavioral departures from norms can be adaptive responses
• Behavioral equilibrium by type can emerge even when strangers cannot identify each other
• Belief in divine omniscient punishment does not reliably sustain cooperative behavior
• Belief in virtue gives no reason to trust that belief
• Beyond a certain social scale, societies must rely on egoistic rather than thick-trust motivations
• Blind trust arises when alternatives are worse, not from ignorance
• Blurring personal and impersonal levels of social experience obscures analysis
• Both ancient participatory democracies and modern states depend on division of political labour.
• Both Koreas answered colonial disruption with directive corporatism
• Bounded rationality and inevitable surprise make trust irreducible in locked-in economic relations
• Broad social trust arises only in aristocracies, which then undermine it.
• Buber defines trust as ungrounded and thus excludes evidence-based trust
• Building an honesty reputation requires each act be recorded and observable by future partners
• Building trust costs firms real resources, but distrust costs more.
• Business partners occupy a trust zone between friends and strangers.
• Business partnership functions as normative rules constraining opportunistic behaviour
• Calvinism’s economic ethic is really classical republicanism, not Protestantism
• Caring parents still hold divergent reproductive interests
• Changing a conquered people’s customs destroys the expectations underwriting social trust
• Choosing a commitment means choosing which intertemporal game to play
• Choosing a partner at random under uncertainty is hope, not trust
• Civic trust values depend on the amount of information each party possesses
• Classic Islamic order rested on tribal trust plus urban fear plus shared revelation
• Client firms avoid opportunistic defection through advance warnings allowing partners to match competitors
• Client firms bear the costs of training subcontractors in firm-specific assembly skills
• Client firms test subcontractor trustworthiness through staged contract commitments over years.
• Client firms verify subcontractor trustworthiness through graduated trial contracts, not reputation alone
• Clients may be held hostage by subcontractors exploiting scarcity for price hikes
• Clients trusted the photographer precisely because his motives were transparently commercial
• Coercion and interests alone compel cooperation even without shared values
• Coercion and material interests force rational adaptation even without shared values or kinship
• Coercion can substitute for trust when freedom is restricted
• Coercion reduces rather than builds mutual trust among unwilling subjects.
• Coercion substitutes power for trust and breeds its own betrayal
• Coercive force alone cannot sustain an extralegal order.
• Cohesive kin-like groups based on mutual trust emerge without a designer
• Collapsed trust turned commerce into mutual deception and crippled lending
• Collective oath is an act of group commitment, not factual testimony
• Collective outcomes require actual motivations, not just knowledge of what is desirable
• Colonial rulers taught subjects to weaponize distrust as a governing technique.
• Commerce depends on trust more than any other activity does.
• Communication succeeds only through shared contextual beliefs that cannot be fully formalized
• Competition among traders makes reputation equilibrium selection hard to prove formally
• Comprehensive contracts remove the need for trust only when no uncertainty exists.
• Concrete examples function as research strategies for trust theory
• Conditional responses outperform probabilistic inflexible adaptations
• Conditional trust can be rationally adopted even among egoists without social ties
• Confidence and trust are not substitutable but mutually reinforcing social attitudes
• Confidence and trust can decline together in a spiraling deterioration
• Confidence can degrade into hope when it no longer tracks one’s own actions
• Confidence converts to trust when exit or influence becomes available.
• Confidence targets ability while trust targets disposition or motivation
• Confirmation bias and inertia make reputations resistant to disconfirming evidence
• Confirmation bias cements both reputations and habitual trust
• Confirmation bias persists across scientists, laypeople, and prejudiced judgment.
• Confirmation-seeking bias appears across many domains, not just artificial laboratory tasks.
• Confusing familiarity with trust causes analytical error
• Context and prior beliefs about another person shape the interpretation of all communication.
• Contextual beliefs about the other person govern how any communicative act is read
• Contract law and markets fail without prior socialization into impersonal disciplines.
• Contract-based economic trust fails where state enforcement and market calculation are absent.
• Contracts make breach costly while promises invoke future distrust as sanction
• Contractual trust fails where state enforcement is sporadic
• Conversion to world religions enables migrants to escape kinship-bound trust for negotiated association.
• Cooperation can arise from cost-sensitive conditional dispositions, not just sanctions or altruism
• Cooperation can evolve without any trust being involved.
• Cooperation can occur without trust, since animals cooperate without mental trust states.
• Cooperation collapses if no one will knowingly take the dependent role.
• Cooperation depends on trust plus situation-specific constraints and incentives
• Cooperation fails even when it would benefit all individuals involved.
• Cooperation fails if no one can knowingly occupy a dependent party
• Cooperation has no general solution, only historically specific ones
• Cooperation has no single solution; motivations combine and overdetermine action
• Cooperation is enforced through community expulsion of those who deviate
• Cooperation only becomes a theoretical puzzle when one party depends on another.
• Cooperation requires common knowledge of mutual preferences, not just shared preferences
• Cooperation requires knowing others’ motives and being believed trustworthy
• Cooperation requires trust as assurance against defection by non-dependent parties
• Cooperation rests on coercion, interests, values, and personal bonds
• Cooperation sustained by despotism dissolves when the despotism ends
• Cooperation thrives where stakes are low, threats absent, and ambiguity reduced
• Cooperation unravels without iterated mutual knowledge of cooperative intentions.
• Cooperation with mafiosi is sustained by mutual economic interests beyond coercion
• Cooperation without dependence requires everyone’s contribution to be immediately detectable
• Cooperative concert can emerge even amid the maximal distrust of war.
• Cooperative dispositions are conditional and degrade beyond a cost threshold.
• Cooperative equilibria are no likelier than noncooperative ones without belief restrictions
• Cooperative equilibria require conditional trust, not blind trust or blind distrust
• Cost motives alone cannot sustain subcontracting without trust and loyalty
• Cost-driven market ties evolve into trust-laden partnerships over time
• Costly sentiments like guilt persist because they confer evolutionary gain
• Cultivated friendliness can become a near-genius social skill
• Cultural kinship explains the peaceful Britain-to-America power transition
• Current behavior need not reflect past evolutionary competition
• Custom bespoke manufacturing creates production uncertainty past six months
• Darwin’s selection metaphor derives directly from artificial breeding practice
• Darwin’s theory chiefly explains the origin of adaptations, not species
• Darwinian evolution does not entail that animal life is ruthlessly competitive
• De Maistre fused rationalist-politics critique with celebration of revolutionary victims’ suffering.
• De Maistre fused rationalist-politics mockery with utilitarian critique of its revolutionary consequences.
• Debt enforcement among Nima traders relied on public shame, not force or law
• Debt forms cascading chains that transmit creditor pressure downward
• Defining trust requires grounding it in mutual dependency relations
• Deliberately incomplete contracts force ongoing negotiation that courts cannot provide
• Democracy’s need for consensus forces complicity with the mafia
• Democracy’s need for votes makes it complicit with the mafia
• Departures from unbounded rationality significantly help maintain trust.
• Despotic rule fails because political stakes corrupt information flow
• Despotic systems fail because political meaning corrupts information into sycophancy
• Destructive knowledge cannot be unlearned, only managed through trust
• Development can start mid-system rather than from foundations.
• Development linkages can strengthen the very patronage relations they aim to override
• Development vicious circles are breakable despite their depth
• Directive authoritarian rule produced exceptional growth, employment, and development in South Korea
• Distrust deters legitimate renegotiation because demands look like opportunistic profit-shifting
• Distrust is self-fulfilling and cannot be invalidated by experience
• Distrust is unaffordable in aggregate even when exit is feasible from single relationships.
• Divergent belief systems across cultures cause misunderstanding that reduces cooperation
• Divine legislation structurally separated law-making from enforcement in Islamic states
• Economic specialization precludes the kinship ties that enable collective self-defense
• Economic trust in Accra is built through manufactured familiarity, not preexisting ties.
• Economists model markets as anonymous one-shot exchanges with no role for trust.
• Economists treat trust as background rather than transaction cost
• Effective cooperation does not require trust among animals
• Egoistic micro-motivation can sustain cooperation via self-interest without any general cooperative disposition.
• Egoistic micro-motivation lacks momentum across cases of cooperation
• Egoistic micro-motivation lacks momentum from one act of cooperation to the next.
• Egoistic motivations alone cannot sustain cooperation without plausible self-regulating structures
• Eighteenth-century economists tied prosperity to virtuous republican rule.
• Elections convert political confidence into trust, but vertrust can revert when influence seems futile.
• Elites induce obedience through ceremonial displays playing on fear
• Empirical study disproved Bhaduri’s semi-feudal landlord thesis
• Entrepreneurship correlates with conversion away from traditional religion
• Escalating threat levels themselves stem from structures of mutual mistrust.
• Established trust institutions breed indifference while new ones demand urgent trust
• Established trust systems are remarkably robust despite widespread fraud
• Ethnic and religious solidarity jointly cemented trust in Armenian and Jewish trade
• Even animal cooperation and coloration adapt precisely to current environmental conditions
• Even criminal societies require minimal cooperation to function at all.
• Even prevailing communities can be hit with attorneys’ fee awards
• Every cooperation-motivating option has identifiable limits
• Evolution shapes trust as an aspect of awareness
• Evolutionary cooperation requires a predisposing first cooperative move
• Evolutionary game theory asks which strategies survive, not which outcomes are rational.
• Ex post opportunism threatens agreements after relation-specific investments are sunk.
• Excessive violence can backfire by triggering revenge and betrayal within criminal hierarchies
• Executive power must be made commensurate with executive responsibility for government to move
• Expected cheating risk can collapse markets entirely under asymmetric information.
• Explaining trust requires understanding the conditions of cooperation
• Exploitative agrarian structures can persist after their original causes vanish
• Extended interpersonal trust cannot reinforce itself without external mechanisms
• Extreme default risk makes rational profit calculation impossible.
• Failure to seek disconfirmation sustains racial prejudice.
• Faith historically replaced belief as strongest trust word
• Familiarity and expected future meetings enable cooperative trust
• Familiarity, confidence, and trust are substitutable self-assurances with limits
• Family labour fails where kinship organization fails to migrate
• Favor-seeking replaces merit in untrustworthy but mobile societies
• Fear of not being trusted can itself trigger defection in cooperation games
• Fear of retribution compels even principled resisters into supporting violence
• Fervent popular religion served as a Spanish distraction device
• Feud obligation makes collective retaliation a cultural guarantee against aggression.
• Fine-grained discrimination of whom to trust limits the role of noncognitive trust.
• Firms shifted to permanent subcontracting of firm-specific component production
• Firms substitute safeguards for trust even where trust could work
• Frafra entrepreneurs broke with traditional religion far more than other migrants
• Free-rider parenting does not evolve when cooperative care reaches equilibrium
• French layoff restrictions drove firms to temporary-help and loaned-worker arrangements
• French small engineering firms outperformed dualist-model predictions of technological backwardness.
• French small firms outperformed predictions of the dualist economic model.
• Frequent repeated interaction makes cooperative trade equilibria feasible, whereas infrequent trade does not.
• Friendly disposition toward individuals is not a general macro-motivation to cooperate
• Friendship cannot model trust between strangers; it needs shared belief backed by sanctions
• Friendship works as trust because knowledge is easy to obtain.
• Friendship’s transparent motives can extend into wider social settings.
• Functional differentiation makes social structures contingent and permanently revisable
• Functional trust cannot generate itself without imposed initial conditions
• General-purpose equipment still cannot prevent subcontractor lock-in
• Genovesi subsumed religious faith under interpersonal trust
• Genuine trust requires one’s own freedom to exit a relationship
• Germanic English is personal while Latinate English conceals agency
• Governing capacity is produced only by never having been governed before.
• Governing corrodes the group cohesion that enabled a group to rule
• Governing itself erodes the cohesion that made a group fit to rule.
• Group realignment in segmentary societies is ritualized rather than shameful
• Guarantors favor repeat clients and may defraud one-time buyers
• Guarantors must keep trust scarce and attributable to themselves to stay in business
• High stakes motivate honest agents to pay for separating signals
• High-reliability systems mandate rigid rules and infallible coordination
• High-wage market economies substitute self-interest for unreliable charitable trust.
• Hire-purchase contracts can substitute for personal trust in lending to strangers
• Hispanization replaced a trust-based virtuous society with an honour-based suspicion-ridden tyranny
• Hobbesian sanctions produce egoistic macro-motivation to cooperate
• Hollowed civic roles degrade into mutual suspicion and private self-interest between orders
• Honest actors must spend resources to distinguish themselves from dishonest mimics
• Honest behavior that reveals nothing about disposition leaves a trader’s reputation unchanged.
• Honesty and loyalty under the ancien régime were imposed discipline, not spontaneous virtue
• Honour and virtue alone can guarantee debtor reliability absent coercion
• Honour cultures undermine the impartial justice trust requires
• Honourable motives alone cannot sustain reliable trust
• Hope has two opposites, anxiety and memory, which invert rather than negate it
• How a character works differs from its long-term genetic effects
• Humans can intentionally choose trust rather than inherit it as a by-product of evolution
• Hume held that shared perceived self-interest, not morals, first obliges promise-keeping.
• Ibn Khaldun ranked the unspecialized tribesman as the moral political norm
• Illegitimate government corrodes trust between ruler and ruled
• In patronage societies trust depends entirely on special personal relationships
• Increased contact builds mutual belief frameworks that reduce miscommunication and exploitation
• Increasing tax demands led Spanish rulers to expand baronial privileges.
• Individual rational self-interest can systematically produce collective disaster.
• Individual willingness to be dependent is only conditionally rewarded.
• Individually rational choices can yield collective disaster when trust is monopolized
• Industrial production needs hierarchy, leaving trust only for dealing spheres
• Infinite repetition sustains honest exchange without any binding commitment
• Information clarity neutralizes advantage of unscrupulous opportunists
• Initial trust priors derive from the past behavior of others
• Inner motives of honorable persons cannot causally guarantee trustworthiness under conflicting claims.
• Institutions substitute for trust by securing trustworthiness coercively.
• Instrumental friendliness cannot generate genuine trust
• Inter-firm trust cannot rest on friendship because instrumental friendliness is self-defeating
• Interfirm trust is not reducible to sentiment or friendship.
• Intermediaries must attach trust to their own reputations, not create direct seller-buyer trust
• Interview data was cross-checked against subcontractor accounts
• Invisible victims receive far harsher treatment than visible ones
• Islamic central power tolerated urban untrusting populations but opposed coherent rural groups
• Islamic governance once rested on tribal-group trust.
• Islamic high religion structurally separated legislation from executive power.
• Islamic universalism fortified clan trust but not individual trustworthiness
• Islamic universalism fortifies clan cohesion but cannot block patronage states
• Japanese colonial rule substituted for indigenous Korean development agents
• Japanese colonial rule used incentives in Taiwan but coercion in Korea
• Japanese rule generated pervasive distrust through opaque collaboration
• Kinship institutions cannot enforce trust once detached from ancestral and lineage sanctions.
• Kinship-based trust fails when its sanctioning institutions do not migrate
• Korea’s economic organization has generated self-sustaining interest in its continuation
• Korea’s established landed class forced the Japanese to rule by coercion rather than incentives
• Laboratory experiments fail to capture the long time horizons of real cooperation.
• Laboratory experiments remain valid because subjects bring outside-world resources into them.
• Laboratory studies lack time horizons that everyday trust requires
• Lack of confidence breeds alienation while lack of trust changes risk decisions
• Lack of confidence causes anomie while lack of trust alters decision-making
• Lack of government is what generates tribal trust.
• Lay people rarely seek disconfirmation of their beliefs.
• Lay theorists avoid seeking disconfirming evidence rather than falsifying hypotheses
• Legal exemptions destroy state predictability, which erodes communal trust.
• Legal inequality among citizens destroys the trust contracts depend on
• Legally enforceable commitments substitute for trust by realigning incentives
• Legitimate government conceives power as a mutually observed trust
• Legitimate politics is cooperative interdependence among agents with unknowable futures
• Liberalism overestimates individual choice and neglects the baseline confidence systems require.
• Liberalism shifts expectations from confidence to trust but neglects the confidence that participation requires
• Live-and-let-live truces emerged from random signals, not prior trust
• Living in constructed urban environments severs people from ecological consequences
• Lock-in effects make trust essential to ongoing subcontracting relations
• Locke conflated interpersonal trust with citizen-government trust
• Locke held that divine sanction underwrites all social bonds
• Lockean political legitimacy is a demanding ongoing project, not an achievable steady state
• Locked-in buyers face hold-up price demands from opportunistic suppliers
• Long acquaintance provides a better trust basis than sudden love
• Long domination produces adjustment to rather than rebellion
• Long-distance coercion fails because states cannot police distant provinces
• Loose social conventions undermine our capacity to make credible long-term commitments
• Love cannot ground trust because the other’s motives stay unknowable.
• Low trust plus immobile society yields fragmentation rather than predatory organization
• Low word-deed correlation stems from context neglect, not human untrustworthiness
• Luhmannian confidence is blind trust akin to hope, not trust
• Machiavellian personality traits can be measured and validated experimentally
• Machiavellian players exploit ambiguous social situations better than chance
• Machines are analyzed as social relations, not as natural objects
• Mafia behavior adapts and mutates yet never transforms at its core.
• Mafia cooperation extends through rational economic adaptation by ordinary citizens
• Mafia culture sustains itself through pervasive mutual distrust, not solidarity
• Mafia existed in towns as well as countryside from the start.
• Mafia-averse emigration unintentionally strengthens the mafia by removing opposition
• Mafiosi emerged as private enforcers of a public justice the state eroded
• Mafiosi’s understated style deliberately earns them trust and reputation
• Mainstream sociology has neglected trust as a theoretical concept.
• Margin-society trust operates differently than economists imagine
• Marxism explains why rational trust is historically scarce but anarchism cannot
• Medieval rulers already subordinated private loyalty to public utility
• Medieval rulers could be deposed for being useless in office
• Micro-level trust can survive and buffer macro-level loss of confidence.
• Micro-level trust in institutions can survive macro-level loss of system confidence
• Migrant entrepreneurs typically hold diverse part-time portfolios rather than single enterprises.
• Migrant slum economies combine communal kinship ethics with individual enrichment drives
• Migrants consciously cultivated trust despite constant risk of default
• Migrants invent informal market conditions rather than accept formal institutional offers.
• Migrants’ fluid kinship structure weakens household authority and family labor
• Migration dissolves descent structures and with them household authority
• Missing confidence saps diffuse sentiment while missing trust blocks decisive action.
• Modern Muslim politics keeps old kin idioms but lost their substance
• Modern society abstracts persons just as pre-industrial cultures personified objects
• Modern society’s specialization freed friendship from dependence, allowing selective trust
• Modern statehood displaced kin-based security with chains of dyadic patronage
• Modern systems give no choice about participation, only grounds for complaint.
• Modernity reversed Islam’s orientation, making religion egalitarian while politics grew patronage-ridden
• Moral disapproval from bystanders cannot dismantle structures of distrust
• More cooperation is not always desirable across all groups.
• Most human life is shaped by forces no one understands at the time
• Most machiavellian players exploit situations far better than chance
• Multiple equilibria mean historical accidents determine which trust regime emerges
• Muslim societies gained intense moralism alongside network-driven distrust
• Mutual visibility and hearing increase cooperative outcomes
• Mutually beneficial cooperation often fails to arise among rational individuals
• Mutually beneficial transactions can fail when payoffs are common knowledge
• Narrow self-interest does not automatically produce efficient exchange
• Narrow self-interest does not necessarily yield efficient exchange.
• Natural selection and rational foresight jointly produce group cohesion though proportions are unknown
• Neapolitan law punished theft more harshly than counterfeiting which attacks public trust
• No one assigns infinite weight to their own honesty when incentives grow
• No one can know how another person will act in the future.
• North Korea’s legitimacy rests on Confucian-styled corporate familism
• Nuclear danger is fundamentally a problem of constructing mutual trust
• Once cooperation stabilizes, prediction signals and self-awareness accrue
• One political view treats concentrated power and low motives as fixed givens.
• One shared religion spans atomized cities and cohesive tribes, easing dynastic succession
• Ongoing credit relationships replace bargaining as the dominant trade mechanism
• Only a bigger monopoly can destroy a smaller local monopoly
• Only a virtuous republic can generate the expectations that make people prosperous
• Only authoritarian central power, not democracy, can dismantle the mafia
• Opportunism fears, not drafting effort, drive the costly contingency planning in contracts.
• Optimal cooperation is assumed to evolve without deliberate design
• Opting out of cooperation is individually feasible but not in the aggregate
• Order inside groups mirrors the same mutual-restraint mechanism as between groups
• Organized crime emerges where distrust coexists with feasible social mobility
• Organized crime emerges where social mobility is feasible, not where it is blocked
• Others’ reactions confirm the validity of one’s own experiences
• Out-migration of opponents and political alliance explained Mafia survival into the twentieth century
• Over time, motivations to cooperate and to avoid defection can be analyzed jointly
• Overt risk calculation in contracts can undercut the trust it formalizes
• Parental care levels respond flexibly to changing reproductive conditions
• Parental care patterns evolve from fitness advantages to mutants
• Partnership contracts require nonopportunistic adaptation and advance warnings before dropping suppliers.
• Partnership norms define permissible behavior in exchanges otherwise open to exploitation.
• Pastoral wealth is defense-intensive because robbing other shepherds is easy and rewarding.
• Patrimonial elites extend control through fictive kinship and patronage networks
• Patrimonial rule relies on symbolic kinship and patronage networks
• People apply established procedures without re-evaluating marginally different situations
• People can act on trust they cognitively reject by making exceptions for favored individuals
• People fail to re-evaluate established procedures when situations change only marginally
• People knowingly keep flawed categories because they enable action.
• People willing to trust others are themselves more trustworthy and well-adjusted
• People’s cooperation preferences shift with experience of unreliable partners
• Perceived common interest suffices to generate contract-keeping without prior trust
• Perfect rationality presumes cost-free computation and closed problem sets
• Perfectly competitive markets are theorized to require no trust or recurrent relationships.
• Personal contact in firms primarily serves contingency adaptation through information exchange
• Personal sexual intimacy is the private analog of civic trust relations.
• Personal-bond ‘aristocracies’ are often the only way to start cooperation amid distrust.
• Petty capitalism sustains portfolio diversification rather than single-enterprise commitment
• Physical invisibility of another person enables far harsher punishment of them
• Political agency depends on human intelligence, skill, and chosen use of freedom
• Political culture can render some regimes unworkable.
• Political division of labor is irreversible and needs benign conditions
• Political ideologies conflate trust in intentions with trust in competence
• Political legitimacy requires free speech, association, and representation
• Political parties and armies can create trust by creating distrust
• Political parties are necessary but not sufficient for durable legitimacy.
• Political society substitutes enforceable legal arrangements for unsafe human partiality.
• Political subjection commits citizens to acts they cannot foresee or control
• Political trust is a realistic assessment of irreversible division of labour, not psychic submission
• Political trust structures hinge on both historical inheritance and human agency
• Polygynous male primates evolved larger canines than monogamous ones
• Populations contain people with differing natural dispositions toward honest dealing.
• Post-contract opportunism, not bargaining terms, is the key failure risk
• Post-investment opportunism exploits sunk asset and verification costs.
• Private honor is a self-love risking one’s possessions, not community regard
• Productive enterprises require routinized supervision that speculative activities avoid.
• Prominent positioning of threats raises their perceived probability and triggers preemptive retaliation
• Promises typically regulate relations with known people, not strangers
• Protection and exploitation fuse so thoroughly that victims cannot distinguish them.
• Protracted collective disaster can result from an excess of individual rationality.
• Public honor requires a witness and links persons outside the kin group
• Public humiliation substitutes for weak legal enforcement of debts
• Punishment threats must themselves be credible to enforce trust
• Pure competition cannot sustain social life, though moderate competition improves it.
• Pure moral commitment to cooperate is unstable without egoistic reinforcement
• Pure reputation models collapse because dishonest actors can mimic honest behavior perfectly
• Puritan spiritual self-validation produced unconditional trustworthiness that built modern capitalism
• Raison d’état doctrine long preceded Locke and undercut personal faith
• Random signals can crystallize into stable cooperation through learned signaling conventions
• Rational backward induction alone can void all mutually beneficial exchange.
• Rational interest-calculation cannot substitute for trust in politics
• Rationality limits and inevitable surprise make trust irreducible in locked-in relations.
• Re-evaluating a habitual strategy is costly, so individuals stick with it
• Real actions are overdetermined by multiple motivation types that can undermine each other.
• Real cooperation runs on mixed motivations that can undermine one another
• Realist political theory adopts the powerholder’s viewpoint
• Realist power theory usually justifies coercion by its practical services.
• Reasons for trusting virtue are themselves fragile enough that trust in trust is unjustified.
• Recursive deception can reach a point where no truth about agents’ intentions exists
• Recursive misperception of others’ intentions can erase objective truth from a social situation
• Recursive strategic deception can erase any determinate truth about intentions.
• Reducing lawyers and loser-pays costs could restore court trust
• Rejecting egoistic preference ordering can rest on non-selfish reasons like self-defense and group obligations
• Reliance is objective constraint while belief requires subjective freedom
• Religion functioned as a shared communicative idiom bridging tribal trust and urban fear.
• Religion supplies the ultimate sanction against private over public interest
• Religious moralities built on reward and punishment merely reinstall a divine sovereign
• Repeated encounters create emotional bonds in addition to strategic incentives
• Repeated games have multiple equilibria, so reputation outcomes depend on historical accident
• Republics sustain public trust better because public instruction is more severe
• Reputation alone does not substitute for direct experience in inter-firm trust.
• Reputation and shame, not force, enforced economic obligations in Nima.
• Reputation building requires sacrificing short-term gains for future returns
• Reputation deterrence fails when defectors can evade full penalties
• Reputation deterrence requires verifiable public knowledge of defections
• Reputation deters defection only if defections are publicly verifiable, which is often impossible.
• Reputation for honesty arises only when actions are recorded and observable
• Reputation for honesty is built through costly investment against short-term interests
• Reputation functions as a commodity that assures others one will honor commitments
• Reputation interpretation depends on the interpreter, not the reputation holder.
• Reputation is a public inference from visible data to hidden disposition
• Reputation is a public inference of disposition from background and behavior
• Reputation is the public inference of another’s qualities from imperfect observed data
• Reputation matters but cannot substitute for direct experiential testing
• Reputation means changing beliefs, not merely incentive-compatible behavior
• Reputation sanctions fail if defectors can escape punishment by restructuring.
• Reputation signals trust but experience substitutes for it
• Reputation-building is a deliberate investment of foregone gains
• Rising firm sales came partly from expanded subcontracting use.
• Risk emerges only from one’s own decision and action, never from inaction
• Risk perception varies subjectively and shaped modern risk-calculating individualism
• Risk-calculating individualism historically replaced the heroic individualism of danger
• Royal mistresses governed states indirectly by using lovers as instruments
• Rulers deliberately destroy social trust to extract compliance and revenue.
• Rural collective oaths express group commitment rather than factual accuracy
• Rural folk religion reinforces group boundaries through local sacred markers
• Rural kin networks persist for migrants scattered across urban criminal economies
• Rural North Africans revered but deferred the strict high religion.
• Salient threat cues raise perceived threat probability and trigger preemptive retaliation
• Sanctions can provide assurance to cooperative agents, not just deter egoists.
• Sanctions either alter egoistic utilities or provide assurance to cooperative agents.
• Scholar authority fused with tribal coalitions could overthrow states
• Sedentary agriculturalists face higher costs for aggression than mobile pastoralists do.
• Self-binding as first move lets a present self control a future self
• Self-enforcing agreements would resolve trust if termination threats deterred cheating
• Self-reinforcing agreements substitute for interpersonal trust.
• Self-reinforcing flagship systems cannot guarantee the ancillary systems that support them work.
• Sellers pay to be trusted when no other signal vouches for them
• Setting conditions for extended trust logically drives toward aristocratic social ordering.
• Shared cooperative pressure can itself generate trust between opposing parties.
• Shared familiarity can rival kinship as a basis of trust
• Shifted land relations eroded the Congress Party’s rural base and political standing.
• Shifts from personal to impersonal relations track society’s size and complexity
• Sicilians distrusted state justice and law enforcement since at least the sixteenth century
• Silence and violence reinforce each other until faith and fear become indistinguishable
• Situation-specific incentives override a person’s overall disposition in trust decisions
• Skipping trust research while economizing on trust has been wrongly conflated
• Slave societies could trust only that slaves prefer life over death
• Small groups succeed at collective action because dyadic trust motivates cooperation
• Small incremental betrayals only matter when repetition accumulates into a changed final state
• Social cohesion needs natural selection or rational foresight, not just function
• Social cooperation rests on expectations about others’ conduct, not on language
• Social inclusion depends on neither natural right nor individual trust decisions
• Social possibility rests on well-founded expectations about others’ conduct
• Social recognition of virtue is a precondition for ethical action in Muslim societies
• Social relations are sufficient but not necessary conditions for trust in economic life.
• Social science more easily explains macro-to-micro than micro-to-macro causation
• Social trust evolved from interpersonal relations to abstract anonymities of mass society
• Socialist states systematically destroyed subordinate societal subunits
• Socially extensive and enduring trust is inherently difficult to create
• Socially extensive trust requires an aristocracy to create it, which then undermines it
• Societies built on mutual distrust can stabilize into enduring structures.
• Sociology has long neglected trust as a theoretical concept
• Spanish decline drove rulers to sell power to the baronry for taxes
• State-imposed cultural change can substitute honour-based hierarchy for trust-based community.
• Stateless societies reveal forgotten patterns of human interdependence
• States can destroy trust even when they cannot create it
• States unbound by universal suffrage and special interests can break vicious circles outright.
• States unconstrained by suffrage obligations can break self-reinforcing poverty cycles
• Strategic group realignment gets camouflaged as religious piety in feuds
• Strategies to minimize reliance on trust have been conflated with neglecting to understand it.
• Structural and cultural theories fail to explain Italy’s persistent southern underdevelopment.
• Successful constraint-based cooperation can itself build up trust over time.
• Successful self-binding commitment depends on trustworthy others enforcing it
• Sunk investments create hostage situations where premature termination is costly.
• Surveillance states cannot obtain reliable information because all reporting becomes politically charged
• Suspicion of others’ trustworthiness is inherently well grounded
• Sustained domination produces habitual adjustment rather than rebellion among subjects.
• Symbols, unlike signs, represent the familiar-unfamiliar distinction within the familiar world
• Tenancy persisted in Indian villages for mutually-beneficial interdependence reasons, not exploitative dependence.
• Termination threats can deter opportunism in asset-specific exchange
• Testing trust requires a concrete setting and visible relation to one’s own risk decisions
• The assumption that people trust only on valid grounds is empirical and provisional
• The conceptual possibility of trust appeared only after the word ‘risk’ entered European languages.
• The confidence-trust distinction is a historical product, hinging on perceived personal causality.
• The Congress state had conflicting incentives both to introduce and to withhold rural innovations.
• The consequences of a process are not the same as how they are generated
• The early modern concept of risk replaced fortuna as a general feature of life
• The feud over raison d’état mirrors the utilitarians-versus-justice debate
• The KCIA exploited pre-existing societal distrust to consolidate power
• The Korean CIA exceeded even the KGB in domestic surveillance power
• The mafia already existed as an established force by 1838.
• The mafia converts distrust into profit by enforcing resource monopolies
• The mafia has always been urban as well as rural
• The mafia’s restrained style earned it reputational trust
• The mafioso’s guarantee enables trust and exchange in markets otherwise paralyzed by lemons.
• The need for costly contingency planning exists only because economic actors behave opportunistically
• The pretense of familiarity serves as the normal rhetoric of economic exchange
• The printing press replaced cosmological symbolization with questions of confidence and trust
• The rationality of trust is ineliminable from any agency-based conception of politics
• The surprising question is why cooperation persists at all, not why it fails
• The trusted party performs cooperative action, not the truster
• Theory clarifies social fate even if it cannot prevent it.
• Thick trust cannot extend beyond small groups except via mystified elite authority
• Thick trust requires face-to-face mutual knowledge, impossible at modern scales
• Thinking hard about an event inflates its perceived likelihood of occurring
• Thinking in detail about an event inflates its estimated likelihood
• Tit for tat is only one possible self-confirming equilibrium among many
• Tit-for-tat stability requires both players to believe the other will reciprocate
• Town religion is rules-based while tribal collective oaths express group loyalty
• Traders colluded on client credit information and ostracized defaulters
• Traditional Islam holds two religion styles together simultaneously
• Traditional Islam hosts two religious styles simultaneously unlike the Mediterranean’s historical shift
• Traditional Islamic central power suppressed trust-bearing groups but could not destroy them
• Traditional rural Muslim societies distributed political power symmetrically
• Traditionally stateless African societies were egalitarian yet individually mobile
• Transaction costs comprise negotiation, adaptation, and enforcement expenses that models ignore
• Transport is an exceptionally risky form of entrepreneurial investment
• Treason can be institutionalized through ritualized group reallocation
• Treason maintains equilibrium in segmentary societies as prices do in markets
• Treating trust as central to politics does not require naive credulity
• Tribes provide cities with rulers; the state is the tribe’s gift
• Trust alone cannot explain modern social order.
• Trust always rests on a wager with incomplete information, never certainty
• Trust and cooperation form a reciprocal, asymmetric loop rather than a one-directional act
• Trust and social fabric are mutually constitutive and two-way
• Trust arises where there is no government, while fear maintains order in towns.
• Trust as chosen policy is wiser than unreflective confidence in institutions
• Trust as passion can rest on either close familiarity or massive social distance
• Trust as passion is confident expectation of another’s benign intentions.
• Trust between strangers cannot rest on friendship’s personal knowledge model.
• Trust can be deliberately created by fabricating distrust
• Trust can be deliberately destroyed to enable domination.
• Trust can be deliberately dismantled as an instrument of power
• Trust can be deliberately simulated and codified far beyond its natural sources
• Trust can be purchased at the price of commitment expenditure
• Trust can be rationally pursued through codified as-if behavior
• Trust can be systematically dissolved while a society is preserved
• Trust can only be rebuilt by honestly prioritizing shared risk reduction.
• Trust cannot be assumed to emerge naturally in human interaction
• Trust cannot be eliminated from ongoing economic relations.
• Trust cannot be induced at will and breaks down when instrumentality is detected
• Trust cannot be secured by evidence because fidelity is unprovable
• Trust covers both unobservable actions and undisclosed knowledge others hold
• Trust develops where rewards are small, threats absent, and communication easy.
• Trust dies whenever participants lack full information, regardless of religion’s form.
• Trust discourse is not inherently legalistic despite contractual language
• Trust does not emerge naturally because humans tend toward extremes rather than fine-tuning
• Trust extends beyond what written contracts can enforce
• Trust fills the gap between formal structures and actual social reality
• Trust flourishes most where neither kinship nor contract obligations apply
• Trust flourishes only in the gaps left by kinship and contract structures
• Trust for risky dealings is placed with chosen criminal friends, not kin
• Trust functions as a device for coping with others’ freedom
• Trust functions as a lubricant that reduces economic transaction costs
• Trust governs dealings only where kinship and contract cannot constrain others
• Trust grows with use and decays with disuse
• Trust guarantors deliberately withhold certification to remain scarce and powerful
• Trust has no fixed units yet is measurable by context-specific worthwhileness, like information.
• Trust historically extended far beyond the narrow modern friend circle
• Trust in impersonal systems reduces to what individuals all do and expect
• Trust in practical capacity outweighs trust in politicians’ good intentions
• Trust in signal-disclosure cases hinges on interpretability, not truthfulness
• Trust is a deliberate choice, not merely a fortunate evolutionary by-product
• Trust is a fragile coping device for ignorance about others’ future behavior
• Trust is a policy adopted precisely where knowledge of future action is unavailable
• Trust is a policy for coping with uncertainty about others’ freedom.
• Trust is a public good whose benefits spill beyond its holders, causing underinvestment.
• Trust is a rational choice even for egoists, not a natural given
• Trust is a rational policy for conditions where knowledge is unavailable
• Trust is a result rather than a precondition of cooperation
• Trust is a small-scale phenomenon that institutions must replace to enable large-scale cooperation
• Trust is a theory about another’s future performance based on their claims
• Trust is a threshold on a probability distribution, not a binary state.
• Trust is an assumed background in standard economics, not a studied variable
• Trust is conceived both as one societal element and as social order itself
• Trust is defined as correct expectations about others’ actions that must precede monitoring.
• Trust is distinct from familiarity, friendship, and moral values
• Trust is expectation formed before the other’s action can be monitored
• Trust is not a resource depleted by use
• Trust is not the master distinction characterizing modern society.
• Trust is positioned differently in non-industrial social organization than economists assume
• Trust is produced through gifts rather than required as a precondition for association
• Trust is rational action taken despite uncontrolled exposure to loss
• Trust is the foundation that makes everyday social life possible at all
• Trust language marks anxiety in long-term market relations that price alone cannot govern
• Trust matters most from a modest political view bounded by human capacities
• Trust means predicating one’s actions on others’ risky actions
• Trust must be well based on others’ general motivation not to defect
• Trust needs concrete settings and visibility to be tested against risk.
• Trust only arises where opportunistic behavior is genuinely possible
• Trust only matters when one’s best strategy depends on another’s actions
• Trust operates in the zone between kinship and formal contract
• Trust operates most prominently in friendship, unmediated by kinship or contract.
• Trust operates where parties are both free and constrained
• Trust operations depend on interpreting signals, not on others’ actual truthfulness
• Trust questions admit analytical and anthropological research routes
• Trust questions admit both abstract-analytical and case-study approaches
• Trust questions only arise when opportunistic behaviour is possible
• Trust requires assurance that is at least somewhat well based
• Trust requires both freedom to betray and constraint making the relationship worthwhile.
• Trust requires both freedom to defect and constraints that make cooperation attractive
• Trust requires both security of expectation and willingness to suspend distrust
• Trust requires credible promises grounded in knowledge of the other’s dispositions and options.
• Trust requires repeated encounters, memory, costly honesty, and earned reputation
• Trust requires that reality’s conditions and the strains of commitment stay manageable
• Trust requires that the risky relationship be avoidable
• Trust requires the trusting party also hold a choice to withdraw
• Trust rests on expectations about others’ actions bearing identifiable risk
• Trust should be a by-product of good institutions, not their precondition
• Trust should not be economized even without supportive feelings and networks
• Trust sits between faith and confidence on an evidence-affect continuum
• Trust sits between faith and confidence, where evidence is balanced by affectivity.
• Trust solves problems of risk but operates only within a familiar world
• Trust structures may later givver way to simple confidence
• Trust survives widespread fraud in advanced economies
• Trust theory does not assume purely self-interested choice
• Trust was historically bound to friendship, not just narrow intimacy
• Trust was the necessary condition of all political association
• Trust-based social order loses plausibility as economic inequality and division of labour grow
• Trust-building always risks betrayal and remains a perilous undertaking.
• Trust-eroding domination made organized crime a plausible historical response.
• Trust, faith, and confidence differ in required sensory evidence
• Trust’s interconnected structure makes it fragile across whole systems
• Trusting action increases one’s vulnerability to another whose behavior is uncontrolled
• Trusting friends more than strangers is definitional to personal bonds
• Trustworthy reputation can be deliberately cultivated without deep personal bonds
• Tyranny is dissolved by predictability or by independent overriding power
• Unbounded rationality fails due to combinatorial explosion of decision spaces
• Uncertain demand makes specialized capital unprofitable in-house but profitable via subcontractors
• Under modern states, personal safety depends on patronage chains rather than kin groups
• Unequal legal status makes trust between citizens impossible
• Universal opportunistic caution would destroy human sociality altogether
• Universalized fear of exploitation would destroy human sociality
• Unpredictable harm damages organisms more than predictable but greater harm
• Unpredictable legal jurisdiction destroys rule of law and trust in courts
• Unpredictable shocks harm more than predictable stronger ones
• Unrelated individuals cooperate when mutual help raises both survival odds
• Unspecialized people, not specialists, hold moral and political capacity.
• Untrustworthy social reality claims can trigger doubt of one’s own sanity
• Unverifiable quality in subassemblies drives firms to keep assembly work in-house
• Urban high religion teaches rule-following rather than group loyalty
• Urban migration collapses lineage hierarchy into undifferentiated conceptual brotherhood.
• Violence, values, interests, and bonds are substitutable mechanisms for securing cooperation
• Violence, values, interests, and personal bonds substitute for one another in enforcing cooperation.
• Virtue-based motives alone cannot sustain trust without explicit impersonal beliefs supporting them.
• Virtuous cycles of trust and confidence can be reinforced by stable institutions.
• Wage-earning migrants do not budget and exhaust cash before pay period ends
• Wage-hired drivers fail because they lack incentive to maintain vehicles
• Warranties substitute for trust by making reliability claims credible
• Well-established institutions make trust unobtrusive; unsettled ones demand urgent trust
• Well-founded trust is a construct to build, reproduce, and repair, seldom achieved
• Whether a buyer transacts hinges on a threshold of perceived seller honesty
• Whether disappointment depends on one’s own behavior distinguishes trust from mere confidence
• Withdrawing trust shrinks systems below the threshold for self-reproduction.
• Withholding trust feeds a self-reinforcing spiral of lost rational capacity.
• Without charisma, elites resort to manufactured scarcity and physical threat
• Without distinguishing signals, honest and dishonest agents are observationally identical
• Word meanings shift slowly or fast based on social change
• WWI trench cooperation emerged from random signals interpreted over time