Surprisingly, much of the literature on trust hardly mentions trustworthiness, even though implicitly much of it is primarily about trustworthiness, not about trust. Consider four striking cases. First, under the guise of discussing trust, the philosopher Bernard Williams (1988) gives an account of the possibilities of general trustworthiness, from which trust is merely inferred. Second, the economist Roland McKean (1975) ostensibly addresses the economics of trust, but his actual problem is that of trustworthiness. It is not trust itself that is the collective good in his account but trustworthiness. Creating institutions that help secure trustworthiness thus helps to support or induce trust.

DEFINE: Highlights the conceptual slippage between trust and trustworthiness in the scholarly literature—two distinct concepts often conflated.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 171