Jamal Awil

← Trust and Trustworthiness

Optimism about strangers is tempered by actual experience. [causal]

Most people we meet and come to trust may be people we meet through others, who are de facto intermediaries in trust. This fact might make optimism about others plausible in many cases. Experience must still trump if the new person fails our optimistic cooperative gestures.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 645