Importance of trust in problems of collective action

Cooperation is not only made possible by (political) coercion, but often also presupposes
'trust'
🞆 I lend my car because I trust that the other person will drive carefully
and return it to its proper place on time
🞆 I clean up the beach because I trust that others will do the same
🞆 Negatively stated: 'I only pay my taxes correctly
manner if I know others will too'
● "Trust is the belief that others will do what can be expected of them" (i.e. : does not itself
stem from 'rational calculation')
● Social contingency: we can never fully predict what actions
others will choose:
🞆 Informing, monitoring, observing, etc, can partially resolve this but when do you have
enough information?
🞆 Trust: 'powerful device for saving information and the cost of
information'
Encouraging citizenship and mutual trust

Trust is always related to kind of guess we make about the future, when we have trust we
can still coordinate our behavior among ourselves because we trust that the other will do
what you can normatively expect from him
E.g. taxes
If there is good trust in a society, e.g. you trust that the other citizens will also pay their taxes
correctly, then you will too. This ensures that the overall level of taxes may go down because
everyone is paying correctly and this is ultimately better for everyone. Because if everyone
tries to avoid paying their taxes, the overall level of taxes might be higher.

Social dilemmas.
● Lack of trust or distrust leads to the fact that people will be reluctant to contribute to
cooperation or public goods
● Social dilemma ("social trap")= social situation that is suboptimal for everyone,
but where no social actor has sufficient incentives to change it (e.g. corruption, tax evasion,
etc.)
● Although everyone would gain if "all" would "cooperate" and
all adhered to a common standard, this does not happen because people do not trust that
'everyone else' will do their part/obey a common standard
Criticism

Criticisms of RCT
1) Simplistic and one-dimensional?
2) Little attention to sociological-institutional context : 'rational choice' is a sociological
variable, not a constant
3) Exaggerated idea of rationality : 'satisficing' rather than 'maximizing' (Herbert Simon)
4) What about actors' self-descriptions?
-Actors (individuals, but also organizations) are not always and in all circumstances 'rational'
-Their preferences are not always clear, nor 'individual', but usually depend on a specific
social situation
1) Rational choice theory assumes that behavior of actors is best understood from
maximizing own action returns, that is not how real people and organizations act and think, is
it? = makes a huge simplification of the real actions of people and organizations and hardly
corresponds to what happens in empirically complex reality
2) They assume that actors act purposefully in all circumstances, depends on the social
context whether they will behave purposefully depends on the way a particular domain is
designed
3) They assume that we as individuals can only be rational if we have transparent info feed
all the possibilities of action we have, those conditions are very overdriven because in most
situations we have gene

idea of exactly what we want and how our preferences compare + no idea of costs and
benefits, usually not maximizing but satisfying.
4) Difference between factual reasons and motivations given by actors themselves to
motivate their behavior, often difference between that of best solution and that which people
choose themselves