3 - Trust

Summary

as he trusts others, so he is trusted by others; and 'till the game is up, and a Balance made, either by Death or some other conclusive Event … it cannot be known on which Side he stands with the World.

Franklin's ‘game’ encapsulates the idea behind Robert Axelrod's famous book The Evolution of Co-operation, wherein the logic of co-operation is investigated through game theory. It is perhaps strange to see Benjamin Franklin using nearly the same terminology as a modern political scientist, but it reminds us of the always illusive nature of trust. As was demonstrated in the previous chapter, risk could be managed to some extent, but eventually trust had to come into play. Interestingly, Axelrod's ‘tit-for-tat’ game is not about punishment, as it might at first sound, but about being ‘nice’, never being the first to defect. Rather, to win the game in the long run, one needs to practise reciprocity. That is, someone has to take the risk to trust someone else, possibly without good reason. Indeed, Molm et al. argue that taking that ‘risk is a necessary condition for the development of trust’. Whilst cheating may look promising in the short term, ‘the shadow of the future’ means that co-operation should benefit everyone in the long term. The longer the shadow, the more likely actors are to be trustworthy. Franklin realised both the elusive nature of trust, and its ‘shadow’ – in this case until death. Trust was also a complicated process in which personal, institutional and general levels of trust were interlinked.

Like risk, trust is also an emotive, socially-constructed process, because uncertainty makes people anxious.