Trust is merely one reason for confidence in taking cooperative risks, and trustworthiness is merely one reason such risks can pay off. In the large contemporary literature on trust, the clear point of wanting more trust is that trust eases the way to cooperative social relations (Luhmann 1980; Putnam 1993; Fukuyama 1995; and many others). Similarly, much of recent experimental work on trust is an outgrowth of earlier identical or nearly identical experiments that focused on cooperation. Cooperative relationships constitute a broader and more inclusive category than trusting relationships—generally a much larger category. At the end of the day, therefore, when trust has run out, we still need to explain most cooperation in other ways. A large part of the explanation of such cooperation in the face of obstacles to trust rests in the social structures of norms and institutions that can be explained as devices to get us around such obstacles.

XREF: Connects to institutional economics and social capital literature — Putnam, Fukuyama — where trust is often treated as the primary mechanism of cooperation.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 781