Russell Hardin — Trust and Trustworthiness

622 published claims from this book.

• A cheater’s success depends on parasitizing a trustworthy system
• A cheater’s success is parasitic on surrounding trustworthy institutions
• A child’s autonomy depends on parental love given without reciprocation
• A colonial power deliberately destroyed trust relations to sustain political control.
• A dispositional spillover thesis needs psychological data, not correlational evidence.
• A distant subordinate’s written correspondence can become damning evidence against him
• A few highly trustworthy people can upshift an entire system’s baseline
• A general norm of trustworthiness is inherently weak compared to specific targeted norms.
• A person can be untrustworthy toward society yet demand trust from partners
• A secular ethic of republican citizenship can substitute for Weber’s Protestant work ethic.
• A single concrete example can prove existence but not more
• A single highly trustworthy actor can raise the trustworthiness of competitors
• A true but incomplete theory can make its holder misread anomalies
• A trustor risks loss before any payoff is realized
• About five percent of attentive citizens sustain American democratic responsiveness
• Abundant alternative partners make harsh trigger strategies rational.
• Acting on mistaken assumptions about reputation can still yield trust
• Acting trustingly toward others can itself induce their trustworthiness
• Adult distrust from childhood abuse persists even when unjustified by current conditions
• Affective trust and self-interested trust involve the same underlying mechanism
• Agricultural subsistence economics structurally suppress cooperation and trust beyond the family
• All communication is necessarily a partial selection from inner reality
• Allowing prisoners limited mobilization may better prepare them for release than suppressing it
• Altruism is a scarce capital best saved for contexts institutions cannot handle
• Altruistic trust mislabels action because it conflates trust with behavior
• An infantile openness to the world rests on instinct, not trust.
• An irreversible visible act can lock in a commitment without legal enforcement
• An opportunistic, insincere commitment can still bind future behavior
• Anarchy produces in-group trust that blocks broader trust across groups
• Anomalies that disconfirm theory become prized scientific opportunities today
• Antiabortion activism among secularized Catholics functions as a commitment device to preserve faith
• Apparent betrayal may be consistent trustworthiness under changed incentives
• Apparent one-shot trust is often calculated group-level risk
• Apparent trust differences are often just differential risk-taking and learning speed
• Apparent trustworthiness depends entirely on the context of the assessment
• Aristocratic trustworthiness is enforced by community-wide exclusionary norms, not reciprocity.
• Aristotle’s concept of trust is cognitive rather than merely behavioral.
• Articulated moral rule systems inevitably generate internal rule conflicts
• Assessing another’s trustworthiness requires direct or reputational knowledge
• Background societal norms determine whether wariness or openness is the correct stance
• Backward induction argues rational players defect from the first move of any finite game.
• Bankruptcy and collapsed future expectations erode even established trustworthiness
• Bare commitment without social support is superhuman and rarely sustained.
• Being morally obligated to trustworthy action does not make one trusted.
• Being trustworthy carries no risk while being trusting exposes one to exploitation
• Blind trust in authority can be culpable stupidity rather than virtue
• Blind trust without evidence is imprudent once reason can assess it
• Breaking a distrust equilibrium requires coordinated multi-agent action
• Breaking dependence on kin relations enables greater economic development
• Broad norm systems contain conflicting norms that weaken universalistic ones.
• Buber’s ungrounded trust inverts ordinary judgment that grounds justify trust.
• Building stable relations generates the incentives that produce trust
• Capacity for trust requires formative developmental experiences.
• Capacity-based trust would make Nixon one of America’s most trusted presidents
• Causal interdependence of welfare is not trust
• Chinese guanxi referrals are information-seeking, not necessarily influence peddling
• Chronic losses from over-trusting create powerful incentives to abandon the disposition
• Citizens cannot trust government because they lack knowledge of its trustworthiness
• Close communities substitute communal sanctioning norms for dyadic trust relationships
• Cognitive limits on trusting many people explain clique formation and exclusion
• Commercial conflicts of interest in science threaten public trust in research
• Communal trustworthiness can seed willingness to trust in wider society
• Communitarian theorists could not live in the societies they extol.
• Community norms can produce trustworthy behavior without producing encapsulated-interest trust
• Community norms substitute for dyadic trust, so personal trust develops less.
• Community-norm trust does not encapsulate another’s interests
• Competitive honor systems undermine impartial justice and cross-group trust.
• Comunitarian resistance to change masks defense of present hierarchy
• Concealed deliberation can produce better judgments than open debate
• Conceptual slippages can vitiate conclusions in any theory of trust
• Confinement to one community makes reputational sanctions powerful enough to guarantee repayment
• Contemporary concepts get meanings by convention, not by ideal form
• Contemporary urban life makes openness to new relationships the modal stance
• Contract enforcement replaces rather than constitutes trust between parties
• Contract law enforces promises only when stakes are high and reliance is costly
• Contract law governs economic relations far better than professional or personal ones
• Contract theory stretches to justify even slavery as mutually beneficial agreement.
• Contracting, not trust, brings the future into the present
• Cooperation can occur without trust when incentives align
• Cooperation can proceed without trust through self-interested agreement
• Cooperation is broader than trust and mostly grounded in institutions, not trust.
• Cooperation is often rational gambling on typical trustworthiness, not chosen trust.
• Cooperative interaction sustains trustworthiness through ongoing institutions
• Coordination behind a leader generates trust because followers can withdraw support
• Coordination, not normative commitment, sustains social order in many regimes.
• Correcting pessimistic distrust requires new experience or countervailing theory.
• Costly emotions like guilt persist because they confer compensating communicative gains
• Credibility loss, not shared reliance, disciplines promise breaking
• Credible commitment requires evidence, not mere declaration
• Credible religious commitment can be signaled by hard-to-fake involuntary displays
• Cross-national trust comparisons measure different questions in each society
• Cross-national trust gaps reflect question-framing differences, not real trust levels.
• Declining civic participation weakens officials’ trustworthiness, not just citizens’ trust
• Declining governmental trust is a trustworthiness problem, not a trust problem
• Declining trust in government reflects trustworthiness, not citizen psychology
• Declining trust in government stems from increased knowledge, not worsened performance
• Defaulting distrust of strangers follows from generalizing one’s own self-interested motives
• Deliberate violations of driving conventions are treated as murder
• Democratic accountability uniquely enables mutual trust between citizens and governors.
• Democratic theorists assumed political agents would be knaves needing institutional constraint.
• Deontological moral theory’s policy failures do not undermine its role in trustworthiness.
• Deontological rule-following ignores that moral action is essentially interactive, harming public policy
• Destroying state confidence causally reduces interpersonal trust and cooperation.
• Differences in capacity to trust are epistemological rather than psychological
• Differences in trust are epistemological, not psychological or irrational.
• Direct willing into future action fails but indirect self-binding through external devices works
• Disabling a government’s capacity for harmful action reduces distrust more than generating trust does
• Dispositional optimism explains risk tolerance, not trust itself
• Dispositional trust theories explain only variation in risk-taking, not trust itself
• Dispositional trust theory requires psychology, not just correlational survey data
• Distributions of trustworthiness matter more than average levels for social structure
• Distrust can be engineered to replace trust while preserving social order
• Distrust flows from assessing incentives, but trust in government rarely can
• Distrust is often the rational default even in good relationships
• Distrust is self-reinforcing because it selects for untrustworthy partners
• Distrust is the negative of trust, not its complement, leaving room for neutral wariness
• Distrust needs less information than trust to form.
• Distrust of government arises from generalization over humans and fiction
• Distrust of government rests on logical inference about incentives, not induction
• Distrust of power holders needs no theory but trust of them does
• Distrust of the powerful poisons trust among the powerless as well
• Distrust requires little evidence while trust demands rich understanding of incentives
• Distrust restricts information so the distruster never learns to distrust less
• Distrust self-reinforces by withholding the information cooperation would provide
• Distrusting government openly is a distinctively modern democratic innovation
• Divergent trust judgments refute trait-based accounts of trust.
• Dyadic trust relationships let small groups succeed where large ones fail.
• Each person privately fears their true indifference being detected by others
• Early neglect and abuse cripple the capacity to trust that requires early development
• Economic institutions prove trustworthy toward customers but often not toward society
• Economic stasis breeds paranoid cognition and can turn positional conflict lethal
• Economic stasis makes prosperity positional, breeding distrust and lethal conflict
• Effective social conventions are economical, monitorable, and harsh on violators
• Effective social conventions are economical, monitorable, low-cost to sanction, and stable
• Effectiveness in office inevitably offends constituents who trusted the campaign
• Encapsulated-interest trust theory holds constant across analytic levels
• Enforceable contracts and audits protect against catastrophic losses and thereby enable cooperation.
• Enforceable contracts enable cooperation by limiting worst-case risks
• Enforced sanctions under governments underwrite all ordinary trust
• Epistemological and time limits cap how many people one can trust.
• Erring toward optimistic trust is easier to correct than erring toward pessimism.
• Ethical religions broke kinship bonds to enable modern economic development
• Even intimate relationships involve interests at their core.
• Even trusted intimates may rationally abuse trust under duress
• Evolutionary accounts explain trustworthiness, not trust itself
• Examples prove existence by disproving universal negative claims
• Expecting rationality yields better predictions of behavior than expecting irrationality.
• Explaining trust is epistemic, explaining trustworthiness is motivational
• External distrust or threat drives people to build stronger local trust enclaves
• External institutional incentives can align interests with commitments
• Failed states push societies toward familism and alternative control organizations
• Failed trust is answered with still more trust, not less.
• Falling in love substitutes for the knowledge that grounded trust normally requires.
• Following norms reduces the cognitive burden of repeated decision making
• Forced interdependence can generate trust almost instantly
• Forced mutual dependence can generate instant trust without personal knowledge
• Functional accounts explain how trust persists, not how it begins
• Functional benefit alone does not cause trust to arise.
• Functional explanations can justify harmful behaviors, so functionalism is not inherently good
• Functional explanations require a real causal feedback loop through a group.
• Functional explanations work when behavior responds to incentives
• Functionalist explanation wrongly assumes social outcomes are necessarily good for society
• Future gains from continued interaction function as both incentive and sanction for trust.
• General-population trust surveys are irrelevant if 5 percent of citizens drive politics
• Generalized distrust in a benign society costs more than misplaced risks
• Generalized distrust is coherent rational belief where generalized trust is not.
• Generalized distrust is more rational than generalized trust.
• Generalized fidelity value rests on actual trustworthy individuals
• Generalized social trust lacks grounding in specific relationships.
• Generalized trust actually operates with scoped contextual constraints
• Generalized trust is closer to expectation than to relationship-specific trust
• Generalized trust is defined as unspecific trust in strangers
• Generalized trust is noncognitive and nonrelational by definition
• Generalized trust is not necessary for social order
• Generational replacement drives twice the civic decline television does
• Genetically evolved sentiments can motivate action against self-interest
• Genuine trust statements are always elliptical, implying a specific task or domain.
• Government absorbs worst-case risks so citizens can cooperate modestly
• Government being trustworthy matters more than the public trusting it.
• Government sanction underwrites contracts even in large civilized societies
• Governments can function without citizen trust; non-distrust suffices.
• Governments cannot satisfy the encapsulated-interest account of trust.
• Governments work when citizens do not actively distrust them.
• Great power differentials make distrust spread contagiously among the weaker parties
• Great power inequalities undercut the possibility of voluntary uncoerced agreement.
• Grounded trust cannot be selectively aimed without criteria for selection
• Grounded-moral-obligation views of trust rob the concept of its distinctive content.
• Groups induce cooperation through sanctions even without trusting their members
• Hierarchical merit systems turn peer cooperation into competition and block group action
• High trusters are happier when trust pays off in their environment
• High trusters differ from low trusters mainly in risk-taking for cooperation
• Hobbes identified religious fundamentalists and glory seekers as inherently anti-order groups
• Honor cultures arise where livestock theft requires self-defense absent legal protection
• Horizontal distrust among subordinates follows from vertical inequality
• Hostile larger societies drive stronger localized trust enclaves
• I can voluntarily obligate myself by promising but cannot obligate another to be trustworthy
• Identity and beliefs can be a product rather than a cause of institutional commitment
• Ignorance of another’s intentions yields neither trust nor distrust
• Imprecise survey questions manufacture the illusion of generalized trust
• In-group-trust patterns prove trust is relational, not based on the trusted’s traits.
• Individual trust is not rational even where group-wide trust would benefit all
• Individual-level rational-choice accounts of trust fail as general explanations
• Infant trust develops from relationship quality, not provision, and underlies adult trusting capacity.
• Infant trust is an evolved instinct, not a cognitive model
• Initial cooperation can rationally break the backward induction argument.
• Initial cooperation can wreck backward induction and build rational trust
• Initial cooperation despite backward induction is what sustains living societies.
• Institutional confidence does not require personal trust in agents
• Institutional confidence rests on inductive generalization, not trust
• Institutional constraints can make trustworthy behavior arise from aligned interests rather than care
• Institutional reliability is often assumed by fiat rather than evidenced by data
• Institutional safeguards precede trustworthiness, which precedes trust
• Institutional trust can rest on role design rather than individual knowledge.
• Institutionalized government stabilizes citizens’ inductive expectations, not strong trust
• Institutions and third-party guarantors supply the knowledge trust requires
• Institutions can mimic encapsulated-interest incentives to substitute for ongoing relationships.
• Institutions deliberately engineer distrust to block group mobilization against them
• Institutions designed on incentive grounds can support encapsulated-interest trust
• Institutions enable cooperation specifically where distrust is justified.
• Institutions enabling safe cooperation must precede trustworthiness, which precedes trust
• Institutions exist largely to obviate the need for risky trust.
• Institutions exist to block the destructive tail risks of interacting with the untrustworthy
• Institutions should cultivate trustworthiness, not trust itself
• Institutions substitute for the need to trust in risky interactions
• Intense issue commitment can be a proxy for sustaining minority-group identity
• Intensive trust investments require time budgets that scale poorly
• Interest-based trust is easier to assess than morals or norms trust
• Interest-based trust resists generalization from individuals to institutions and groups
• Interests are only a proxy for well-being, not the whole story
• Interests are shared either causally or by genuine adoption of another’s welfare
• Internalization models of norms cannot explain how norms first arise.
• Internalized norms arise from pragmatic habits mistakenly moralized as duties.
• Internalized norms begin as pragmatic habits then become moralized via is-ought confusion.
• Intimate unit loyalty, not national purpose, drives courage under fire
• Intragroup trust can enable intergroup brutality
• Involuntary signals like blushing solve credibility without willpower
• Justified distrust can be a moral act and so trust is not inherently moral
• Justified distrust is benign and morally acceptable, not a social failing.
• Khaldun held that urban specialization destroys communal trust.
• Knowledge acquisition begins with unexamined reliance on others’ claims
• Lacking trust intermediaries blocks credit, self-employment, and community entry
• Large groups facing collective-action dilemmas cannot be trustworthy as groups.
• Large-scale societies cannot ground encapsulated-interest trust and so rely on institutions.
• Leading theorists insist rational-choice trust leaves something irreducible out
• Learned distrust is harder to unlearn and blocks success more than learned trust
• Learned distrust traps ghetto children even when mobility opportunities appear
• Learned normative reactions can motivate behavior without any prior interests.
• Learning to trust another is learning their interest in continuing interaction
• Learning-based trust fits the encapsulated-interest model through iterated incentives
• Legal enforcement of promises requires high stakes plus costly reliance on nonfulfillment
• Loss of positional power can void the sanction backing a trust relationship
• Love commonly produces trust rather than presupposing it
• Love does not obviously involve trust and usually precedes rather than follows it.
• Love lets trust escalate fast without requiring shared associates or community support
• Love makes one trustworthy by genuinely incorporating the beloved’s interests
• Love permits rapid risk escalation without external social support
• Low group-level trust reflects asymmetric interaction frequencies and early-life experience.
• Low voter turnout can signal satisfied acceptance rather than government failure.
• Low voter turnout may indicate absence of distrust rather than failure of support
• Luhmann distinguishes confidence in institutions from trust between persons
• Luhmann frames trust as an individual’s mechanism for reducing complexity.
• Luhmann’s complexity reduction actually depends on trustworthiness, not trust
• Mafia enforcement makes distrust rational and blights mutual-benefit competition
• Mafia protection signals that distrusting others is rational
• Manufactured distrust among subjects creates the conditions for organized crime
• Many languages lack a direct equivalent of the English word trust
• Market competition disciplines lawyers more than bar association sanctions
• Market confidence is inductive expectation reviewable against dealer behavior
• Markets organize exchange so that trust in trading partners is largely unnecessary.
• Mature relationships make trust overdetermined by multiple independent motives
• Meaningful trust requires expectations particular to the specific person, not generalized optimism.
• Mere expectation-based trust theories are half-strategic and miss second-order effects.
• Mere stated intent cannot establish credible commitment
• Minority groups have more cross-group interactions and thus accumulate more untrustworthy relationship experience.
• Misplaced trust costs far more than forgone trust, making distrust come more quickly
• Modern societies still sustain intensive trust in family and friends
• Moral character and trustworthiness are only weakly correlated
• Moral dispositions are thin and unreliable beyond close communities
• Moral dispositions resist contrary incentives yet people overestimate their behavioral role
• Moral judgment of adultery reflects interest, not nature
• Moral reciprocity can produce trustworthiness in the encapsulated-interest sense
• Moralized accounts of trust actually moralize trustworthiness
• Moralizing trust often stems from confusing it with trustworthiness
• Most citizens hold inductive expectations about government rather than grounded trust
• Most citizens will find any single policy far from their own preference
• Most citizens’ political expectations derive from mimicking other people’s expectations
• Most empirical trust research cannot assess relational trust because it omits relationships
• Most people comply voluntarily, freeing police to coerce minorities and criminals.
• Most people experience trust as relationship-bound, not generalized
• Most theories of trust rest on four assumptions irreconcilable with encapsulated interest
• Motivational issues in trust are relational; competence is fixed
• Much academic literature on trust is actually about trustworthiness
• Much apparent contractual dealing is actually regulated by informal trust devices
• Much everyday trust emerges from reciprocated, ongoing relationships rather than from isolated exchanges.
• Mutual trust cannot develop in unequal, nonreciprocal power relations
• Mutual trust is self-sustaining partly because each party benefits from the relationship continuing.
• No consistent analytical case exists for trust beyond encapsulated interest
• Noncognitive accounts of trust reduce it to a one-part relation without expectations
• Noncognitive trust cannot be empirically separated from learned trust in behavioral data
• Norms of honor only bind when violations are publicly observable
• Norms work mainly through external sanctions, not internalized motivation
• Not trusting others can free ride on the collective benefits of everyone else’s trust.
• Not trusting someone usually means actively distrusting, yet ignorance yields neither state
• Observed trustworthy character solves commitment problems beyond pure self-interest
• One can invest only in reputation, never directly in trustworthiness
• One cannot be obligated to trust in the absence of supporting evidence.
• One-shot trust depends on the trustee’s statistical expectations about borrower types
• One-shot trust in strangers appears to resist the encapsulated-interest account.
• One-time hospitality is pure gift, not an investment in reciprocity
• Ongoing relations make the trusted party’s own interests compel fulfilling trust
• Ongoing relationships are what constitute society, not mere individuals
• Ongoing relationships make defection costly through forgone future gains
• Only encapsulated-interest accounts ground trust in prior trustworthiness judgments
• Only incentives, not investment, can genuinely change trustworthiness.
• Opening with cooperation is rational self-interest, not mere morality
• Optimal trusters materially outperform both distrusters and excessive trusters
• Optimal wariness always incurs the cost of missing rare trustworthy partners.
• Optimism about others’ trustworthiness is self-reinforcing through gained experience
• Optimism about trust is rewarded only in relatively trustworthy social conditions
• Ordinary trust is narrowly scoped while love-based trust spans broadly
• Organizational trustworthiness reduces to individual interests and incentives.
• Organizationally-aligned incentives make state agents untrustworthy to their clients
• Overlapping relationships in close communities generate both knowledge and incentives for trust.
• Overt risk calculation can undermine the trust it is meant to secure
• Parents should err toward instilling optimistic trust in children
• Parents should instill optimism about trust because optimists learn faster
• Partial interest-sharing still leaves conflicts that can override love
• Past government abuse gives victims good reason for diffuse, unspecific distrust
• Past government abuse justifies wary distrust of any officials
• Pateman shows agreement between unequal parties is inherently suspect
• Peer policing and graduated penalties sustain taxi cooperation in Naples and Milan
• People build trust gradually through limited initial exposure
• People can be opportunistic in some domains while staying honest in others
• People can will future actions indirectly by engineering external stimuli that trigger internal responses
• People cannot will themselves into dispositions that will later act against their interests.
• People trust less as the stakes of the entrusted matter rise
• Perceiving that one is trusted increases one’s actual trustworthiness
• Personal intermediaries are the default route to new trust
• Personal well-being often depends on the enjoyment of specific others
• Polite concealment of true feelings can actually build trustworthy commitment
• Polite deception can actually build rather than undermine trust
• Political vagueness substitutes identification for programmatic trustworthiness
• Poverty-driven trust in family can produce active distrust of all outsiders.
• Power asymmetry blocks trust because the weaker party cannot credibly threaten exit
• Power holders can deliberately manufacture distrust conditions to secure control
• Power inequalities block trust because the strong lack encapsulated interest
• Precisely articulated survey questions contaminate respondents’ natural answers
• Predictable regularity of behavior does not amount to trust
• Predicting behavior from rational self-interest offers firmer ground than assuming ideological irrationality.
• Prison design deliberately provokes distrust to block prisoner solidarity
• Promises fall into three kinds with different legal enforceability
• Promises to genuine strangers are rare and require strong enforcement devices.
• Prosperity requires instinctive assessment of others’ trustworthiness beyond institutions
• Protective institutions reduce the trustworthiness we must demand of fellow citizens
• Protestant ethics shattered kinship bonds that blocked modern economies
• Protestant sects shattered kin-based bonds enabling modern economy
• Public commitment makes future fulfillment costly to renege on by invoking present social constraints
• Pure inductive knowledge cannot justify claims about the future.
• Purely profit-driven relationships test the minimal conditions of encapsulated-interest trust.
• Rampant distrust existed in 1943 America during wartime unity
• Rational assessments of trustworthiness cannot be grounded in purely infantile behavioral learning
• Rational preferences operate over whole states, not single proxies
• Rational trust requires both trusted’s incentives and truster’s knowledge
• Reciprocal trust creates mutual incentives for trustworthiness
• Reciprocal trust multiplies each party’s incentive to be trustworthy
• Reciprocated cooperation teaches one to internalize others’ interests
• Reciprocity motivations can be self-reinforcing where further interactions are plentiful
• Reducing distrust is different from generating trust
• Relationships built on self-interest are later recast as morally grounded
• Relationships can grow from pure interest into richer trust without abandoning self-interest
• Relationships that must escalate invite trust disruptions that mimic endgame effects
• Reliable competence arises from knowing one’s own limits
• Religious and insurance concerns are already eroding public trust in genetics.
• Relying on another’s regular habit is not trusting in the strong sense.
• Relying on collective trustworthiness is a collective, not merely individual, problem.
• Repeated failure of trust forces revision, a minimal rational constraint.
• Repeated interaction gives even one-way trustees incentive to cooperate for future loans.
• Repeated interaction transforms the incentives of a one-way trust game
• Repeated one-way trust differs structurally from the iterated prisoner’s dilemma
• Repeated-interaction gains let trust outweigh distrust despite occasional great losses
• Reputation effects can substitute for direct iterated exchange in producing trustworthiness
• Reputational incentives in markets generate quality that centralized quotas could not reward.
• Reputational incentives, not only reciprocity, make thick relationships foster trust
• Reputations work as future-oriented constraints that bind their holders
• Researchers claiming trust decline may be biased by their own urbanizing life changes.
• Rich ongoing relationships do not automatically produce trust under leadership competition
• Rising expectations rather than falling competence drive declining trust in leaders
• Rising information about government behavior drives declining trust
• Rising stakes and nonrandom relationships drive cooperation toward structured social groups
• Sanctions for violating communal norms are total exclusion, not tit-for-tat withholding
• Sanctions make trustworthiness a matter of self-interest rather than personal concern
• Scarce advancement makes prosperity a zero-sum positional good
• Science and professions maintain trustworthiness through incentive structures and reputation
• Science produces truth through competitive reputation incentives, not pure altruism.
• Scientific fraud may be substantially more common than documented cases suggest.
• Scientists pursue truth by actively seeking invalidation of their beliefs
• Secret deliberation often produces better institutional decisions than public openness does.
• Secret repeated exchanges can be sustained purely by relationship value without contract law.
• Self-interest-based relationships become psychologically experienced as moral commitments
• Separating personal from firm resources curbs distrust from kinship mediation
• Shared interests alone do not constitute trust without relationship valuation.
• Shorn hair and a convent made Ukifune’s exit physically monitorable to all
• Simple risk calculations do not constitute trust.
• Single-play trust games yield defection, but repeated play can change interests dramatically
• Skilled deceivers exploit trustworthiness signals for strategic gain
• Small close communities run on norms, while urban networks run on trust
• Small communities enforce generalized reciprocity rather than one-on-one exchange
• Small-unit loyalty embedded in familiarity produces courage under fire
• Social backing from a whole society makes commitment trustworthy across time
• Social capital is variously defined as relationships, networks, and cooperation-enabling capacity.
• Social codes produce differential trust expectations across relationship types
• Social conventions and organizational incentives can make people trustworthy
• Social institutions emerge to substitute for trust relationships that cannot work
• Social institutions function through trust only at the individual micro level
• Social norms persist because group members have interests in sanctioning violators
• Social order can emerge from distrust rather than trust.
• Social order produces the conditions that generate trust, not vice versa
• Social order rests on shared coordination that can tip abruptly into disorder
• Social outcomes depend on joint causation, making individualist rule-following wrong for policy
• Social science must not rest on unexamined personal intuition
• Soviet centralization produced distrust by replacing market signals with personal blame
• Stable open government with countervailing institutions is needed to stimulate trustworthiness
• Standard survey measures of generalized trust actually gauge perceived decency, not trust
• Standardized driving-side coordination is ordinary interest alignment, not moral commitment.
• State coercion works only because most citizens comply voluntarily
• State unreliability cascades into mutual distrust that blocks cooperation
• Staying with an abuser reflects lack of options, not trust
• Stereotyping functions as a starting baseline for updating trust estimates
• Strangers, not cheaters, are the main obstacle to trust.
• Strength of character alone can sustain dramatic commitments
• Strong motivations cannot be ignored but only trumped by contrary motivations.
• Subordinates under a powerful superior may come to distrust one another
• Survey ‘trust in government’ reduces to confidence, not interpersonal trust
• Survey answers about general trust reflect low-stakes dealings, not deep trust.
• Survey claims of generalized trust conceal strict contextual limits
• Survey measures of generalized trust are misdescribed artifacts of vague questions.
• Survey reports of trust in government actually measure confidence in capacity
• Survey trust questions conflate encapsulated-interest trust with generalized trust.
• Suspicion of others is well-grounded because people change and misrepresent
• Sustained commitment usually depends on external social institutions for enforcement.
• Target-driven reform rewards bureaucrats while distrust of frontline workers degrades services
• Television eroded government trust through visceral imagery, not civic displacement
• Television made citizens know too much to trust officials
• The capacity to assess trustworthiness is a skill that yields material advantage.
• The capacity to trust others is as important as being trustworthy
• The claim that trust is necessary, ubiquitous, and unavoidable overreaches
• The evolution of cooperation hinges on whether cheaters are detectable
• The Habsburgs deliberately destroyed trust in Naples to maintain control.
• The idea that breaking a promise is self-contradiction rests on a false linguistic analysis
• The literature mislabels trust as moral when really trustworthiness is moral
• The Mafia institutionalized distrust itself as a mechanism of control
• The main trust problem is lacking ongoing relationships, not dealing with cheaters
• The mere background possibility of sanctions transforms all lending relations, not just individual loans.
• The network of exchangers, not trust itself, is the enabling social capital.
• The right to be sued gives one power to make credible promises
• The social contract idea persists despite centuries of influential critique.
• The standard US trust-in-government measure actually taps political cynicism.
• The strongest commitments are those backed by self-interest rather than willpower.
• The television generation accounts for 10-15 percent of the group participation decline
• The thesis remains untested despite available experimental designs
• The threat of ending an exchange is what enforces trustworthiness
• The unreliability of human expectations drives most great literature.
• The Yamagishis define trust as faith in another’s moral character, not self-interest.
• Theories of trust as a good really describe trustworthiness, not trust
• Thick relationships are one source of trust knowledge, not its definition
• Thick-relationship trust is a special case of encapsulated interest
• Three of four trust theories require cognitive assessment of the trusted
• Time-separated commitments cannot couple present and future motivations into a single net motivation
• Tit-for-tat strategies make contingent cooperators prosper while defectors get excluded
• Totalitarian regimes can sustain themselves by deliberately cultivating pervasive distrust.
• Trust alone can leave one a victim of complexity rather than its manager
• Trust and distrust are asymmetric in motivation and epistemology, not mirror images
• Trust and distrust both reduce uncertainty but shape action differently
• Trust and distrust shift asymmetrically across behavioral thresholds
• Trust arguments often assume benign societies that may not exist
• Trust as a distinct social phenomenon emerged only under modern conditions of risk
• Trust as knowledge cannot be morally required
• Trust as mere incentive compatibility would make the concept otiose.
• Trust becomes overdetermined when interest, morality, and friendship align
• Trust belongs to belief states, while risk-taking is the separable action.
• Trust belongs to knowledge, so it cannot be offered, demanded, or withheld
• Trust between nations is a fallacy-of-composition metaphor, not literal trust
• Trust can be at issue even when a partner’s behavior is highly predictable
• Trust can be engineered by institutional barriers that remove attack options
• Trust can be extended to create an obligation in the trusted
• Trust can be one-way and riskless for one party while costly for the other
• Trust can ride on mistaken identity and third-party prestige
• Trust cannot be adopted at will without changed circumstances
• Trust collapses when escalating stakes make an ongoing interaction feel one-shot.
• Trust constitutes anarchic order rather than being produced by it
• Trust declines can persist for a generation without preventing later social progress
• Trust depends on relationship history, not on personal character
• Trust emerges as a result of cooperation rather than an element of social capital.
• Trust functions as social capital enabling collective purposes.
• Trust grounded in false knowledge cannot be an intrinsic good
• Trust has no obligation structure because the trusted party assumes no binding duty
• Trust in government is really quasi-trust or confidence, not trust
• Trust in government is trust in capacity, unlike interpersonal trust
• Trust in large-scale government should focus on capacity, not intentions.
• Trust in officials can mean merely inductive expectation, losing positive valence
• Trust involves beliefs about the other’s incentives toward me, not mere expectations
• Trust is a byproduct of institutional enforcement and expected incentives.
• Trust is a cognitive state of belief, not an action or purpose
• Trust is a degree of expected probability, not a separate decision layered onto risk.
• Trust is a distinctly modern concept tied to risk-awareness.
• Trust is a kind of knowledge grounded in trustworthy evidence
• Trust is a matter of knowledge and belief, not of choice or action.
• Trust is a plastic concept that requires narrow specification to be useful
• Trust is a state of knowledge distinct from acting on it
• Trust is a three-part cognitive relation grounded in truth, not choice
• Trust is a three-part relation assessing another’s intentions about some action
• Trust is a three-part relation of A trusting B to do X
• Trust is a three-part relation of agent, trusted, and act
• Trust is a three-part relation, not an ungrounded attitude of faith
• Trust is almost entirely absent from moral philosophy proper
• Trust is always a three-part relation of truster, trustee, and particular action
• Trust is always context-specific, never genuinely generalized
• Trust is an irreducible tradeoff between over- and under-constraining agents.
• Trust is an over-flexible concept that demands precise definition.
• Trust is at issue precisely when behavior is confidently predictable
• Trust is defined by the reason for expectation, not the expectation itself
• Trust is domain-specific and shifts with the trusted person’s incentives.
• Trust is encapsulated interest achievable through many incentive mechanisms
• Trust is encapsulated interest in the relationship’s continuation.
• Trust is fully strategic, requiring the truster to account for the trusted’s reciprocity
• Trust is morally neutral; mutual trust can enable atrocity
• Trust is nearly complete when one party assumes the other’s interests as their own
• Trust is normally three-part, open-ended only in very close relationships.
• Trust is not an act; entrusting is, and the two are often conflated.
• Trust is not reducible to emotion the way joy might be
• Trust is rational expectation about the trusted party’s self-interest
• Trust is wrongly conflated with promise-keeping and entrusting
• Trust itself does not secure the future; the act of turning it over does.
• Trust limits help explain cliques, familism, and ethnic exclusion.
• Trust matters precisely because relations have prisoner’s-dilemma structure
• Trust may have evolved from dense small-community interactions
• Trust operates as Bayesian belief updating grounded in cooperation experience.
• Trust presupposes grounded expectations, not the absence of them
• Trust presupposes the trustee’s competence to perform the trusted action
• Trust reduces to anticipating the trusted’s incentives toward us
• Trust reduces to knowledge while trustworthiness is motivational
• Trust relations reduce to iteration, institutions, and third-party mediation
• Trust relations scale in complexity from iterated games to thick ties
• Trust relationships self-maintain once the parties recognize mutual benefit
• Trust requires a real possibility of revising one’s beliefs, which infants and Abraham lack
• Trust requires a street-level epistemology of individual costs, not philosophical criteria of truth.
• Trust requires belief in the other’s motivations, not mere behavioral expectation
• Trust requires genuine choice, occupying the space between determinism and indeterminacy
• Trust requires knowing the other’s incentives to honor it
• Trust requires presumptive knowledge that most citizens lack about officials.
• Trust requires the appearance of embedded reputational sanction.
• Trust requires time enough for repeated interactions on which to ground it.
• Trust requires time for repeated interactions and is a cognitive capacity
• Trust rests on encapsulated interests that can be shared causally or adopted.
• Trust rests on the trusted party’s self-interest, not on their personal character
• Trust rests on the trusted person’s commitments and incentives, not just expected behavior.
• Trust rests on the trusted’s incentive to preserve the ongoing relationship.
• Trust that seems purely moral actually supervenes on prior shared interests.
• Trust theory must both define the concept and explain behavior
• Trust without demonstrable trustworthiness offers no complexity reduction
• Trust without trustworthiness can lead to destruction rather than complexity reduction
• Trust-based loose contracting requires expectations of stable long-term interaction.
• Trust-worthiness requires the trusted party to care about one’s interests, not merely act predictably
• Trust, like power and equality, is reducible to structural terms
• Trust, though biologically inherited in its optimism, stays subject to correction by experience.
• Trust’s etymology reveals a prudential, self-interested root rather than a moral one
• Trust’s meaning varies radically across ordinary-language users
• Trusters set subjective breakeven thresholds determining when cooperation is worth risking
• Trusting a government is not analogous to trusting another person.
• Trusting another requires guessing her motivations, not computing odds
• Trusting cooperation persists only while the trusted party foresees future plays
• Trusting institutions is safest when everyone else appears to rely on them too
• Trusting institutions typically means inductive expectation, not concern for one’s interests
• Trusting someone does not entail acting on that trust
• Trusting someone means their interests encapsulate one’s own interests.
• Trustworthiness assessment depends on knowledge of both past and future
• Trustworthiness begets trust via reputation and repeated dealings
• Trustworthiness beliefs are updated through a Bayesian-style learning process.
• Trustworthiness beyond the family requires networks that extend past kin
• Trustworthiness can be causally overdetermined by multiple independent motivations.
• Trustworthiness can be community-directed rather than partner-directed
• Trustworthiness can hold universally while trust cannot rationally
• Trustworthiness can rest on character or reciprocity rather than narrow interest
• Trustworthiness carries the moral burden because short-run incentives favor betrayal
• Trustworthiness collapses once a relationship’s end becomes foreseeable
• Trustworthiness enforced only by contract threats is not genuine trust
• Trustworthiness has multiple grounds that vary across different people
• Trustworthiness is grounded in the trusted’s interest in maintaining a relationship
• Trustworthiness is interest-relative, not a fixed trait of character.
• Trustworthiness is judging one’s interests as depending on fulfilling trust
• Trustworthiness is relational, not a general trait of the trusted.
• Trustworthiness needs no moral groundings to sustain trust
• Trustworthiness often rests solely on the interest in maintaining a relationship
• Trustworthiness persists only while future gains from the relationship outweigh defection
• Trustworthiness precedes and enables societal complexity
• Trustworthiness requires both shared interest and the competence to serve it.
• Trustworthiness requires social embedding that constrains opportunism
• Uncoordinated private passions can yield orderly civil institutions unintentionally
• Understanding trustworthiness must precede understanding trust itself
• Unenforceable reliance is a gamble and hope, not trust
• Unfounded faith is not the trust people ordinarily place in others.
• Ungrounded faith in government always serves interests worse than grounded expectations do
• Ungrounded faith in government benefits the powerful, not the faithful
• Universal trust can be rational in sufficiently benign worlds despite Luhmann
• Universalistic norms lose force without status-group exclusionary sanctions behind them.
• Untrustworthy actors free-ride on the generalized trust of honest markets
• Using trust does not deplete it, so trust can build on trust
• Utilitarian evaluation judges expected rather than actual consequences.
• Utilitarian reasoning generally supports honoring one’s trust commitments.
• Virtue ethics and Kantianism can morally ground trustworthiness, but not trust itself
• Voluntary agreement is impossible between parties of unequal power
• Wariness can trap people in less trustworthy relationships, reinforcing distrust
• We mainly trust those with whom we have ongoing, valuable relationships.
• Weak distrust needs only rare expected violations, not likely ones
• Well-founded confidence in collective trustworthiness is humans’ best condition
• What passes for generalized trust is conditional optimism that collapses with context
• Widespread civility and flourishing civil society reduce to shared personal trust
• Widespread trust consists of pockets of dyadic relationships, not generalized sentiment
• Widespread trust decomposes into pockets of particular trusting relationships rather than generalized trust
• With many partners, distinguishing accidents from betrayals is not worth the effort.
• Wittgenstein’s German terms for trust actually mean reliance on things
• Zero-sum environments make deceit and distrust rationally advantageous