Almost everything written on trust recognizes the possibility of accounting for much of what we commonsensically call trust with a rational-choice, expectations theory. Much of the literature, however, including contributions by the economists Oliver Williamson and Robert Frank, the philosophers Baier, Becker, and Hertzberg, and the theologian Buber, suggests or even insists that there is something left over. Some of these people seem to want to say that the rationalchoice elements or cases of apparent trust are not trust at all. Williamson (1993, 479) says that what he calls personal trust is "nearly noncalculative."

XREF: Connects to debates between rational-choice theory and social norms/relational accounts across sociology and economics.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 367