There may also be systematic distrust that sustains a destructive equilibrium. For example, familial trust can turn exclusionary, so that outsiders may become actively distrusted. Various studies of impoverished peasant subsistence communities in southern Italy, Mexico, and Peru suggest that people in such communities sometimes develop what the political scientist Edward Banfield (1958) calls amoral familism (also see Aguilar 1984; Westacott and Williams 1976; and, for a brief survey, Govier 1997). Family members stick together and both lie to and distrust others.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 469