The Social Control of Impersonal Trust

TLDR

The study investigates how societies regulate impersonal trust, focusing on the role of trust guardians and the paradox that these guardians are themselves trustees, and how efforts to ensure agent fidelity can generate new problems. The authors find that the procedural norms, structural constraints, policing mechanisms, and insurance‑like arrangements intended to protect impersonal trust actually increase abuse opportunities, lower trustee performance, and can lead to misallocation of resources and further trust after failures.

Abstract

How do societies control trust relationships that are not embedded in structures of personal relations? This paper discusses the guardians of impersonal trust and discovers that, in the quest for agent fidelity, they create new problems. The resulting collection of procedural norms, structural constraints, entry restrictions, policing mechanisms, social-control specialists, and insurance-like arrangements increases the opportunities for abuse while it encourages less acceptable trustee performance. Moreover, this system sometimes leads people to throw good "money" after bad; they protect trust and respond to its failures by conferring even more trust. The paper explores the sources and consequences of the paradox that the guardians of trust are themselves trustees.