Unfortunately, forgone trust can entail enormous losses if it blocks establishing a longer-term relationship … Distrust produces an aggregate of lost opportunities, each one regular and predictable. Trust leads to an aggregate of some real losses plus some real gains. Overall, the gains from acting on trust may far outweigh the losses from doing so, because the gains from any given relationship are repeated over and over again while the loss in any relationship tends to end because we correct our misjudgment that the other was trustworthy and we take no further risks on an untrustworthy person. Hence the gains from trust can far outweigh the savings from distrust, as they typically do in many groups or societies, especially including prosperous societies. In deciding whether to take a risk on another's possible trustworthiness, therefore, we should look to the potential gain from a longer run of repeated interaction and weigh that gain against the loss from a single risk of cooperation. Because of this asymmetry between potential losses and gains, we can further suppose that it is relatively easier to flip from trust to distrust than to create trust where there has been distrust for very good reasons of the risks at stake.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 436