I’m unclear why you consider low-trust societies to be natural and require no explanation. To me it makes intuitive sense that small high-trust groups would form naturally at times, and sometimes those groups would, by virtue of cooperation being an advantage, grow over time to be big and successful enough to be classed as “societies”.
I picture a high trust situation like a functional family unit or small village where everyone knows everyone, to start. A village a few kilometers away is low trust. Over time, both groups grow, but there’s less murdering and thievery and expense spent on various forms of protection against adversarial behaviour in the high-trust group, so they grow faster. Eventually the two villages interact, and some members of the low-trust group defect against their neighbours and help the outsiders to gain some advantage for themselves, while the high trust group operates with a unified goal, such that even if they were similarly sized, the high trust group would be more effective. Net result, the high trust group wins and expands, the low trust group shrinks or is exterminated. More generally, I think in a lot of different forms of competition, the high trust group is going to win because they can coordinate better. So all that is needed is for a high-trust seed to exist in a small functional group, and it may grow to arbitrary size (provided mechanisms for detecting and punishing defectors and free-riders, of course).
I don’t claim that this is a well-grounded explanation with the backing of any anthropological research, which is why I’m putting it as a comment rather than an answer. But I do know that children often grow up assuming that whatever environment they grew up in is typical for everyone everywhere. So if a child grows up in a functional family that cooperates with and supports each other, they’re going to generalize that and expect others outside of their family to cooperate and support each other was well, unless and until they learn this isn’t always the case. This becomes the basis for forming high-trust cooperative relationships with non-kin, where the opportunity exists. Seems to me a high trust society is just one where those small seeds of cooperation have grown to a group of societal size.
Taking it back a step, it seems like we have a lot of instincts that aid us in cooperating with each other. Probably because those with those instincts did better than those without, because a human by itself is puny and weak and can only look in one direction at once and sometimes needs to sleep, but ten humans working together are not subject to those same constraints. And it is those cooperative instincts, like reciprocity, valuing fairness, punishment of defectors, and rewarding generosity with status, which help us easily form trusting cooperative relationships (“easily” relative to how hard it would be if we were fully selfish agents aiming only to maximize some utility function in each interaction, and we further knew that this was true of everyone we interacted with as well), which in turn are the basis for trust within larger-scale groups.
I mean, you’re asking this question with the well-founded hope that someone is going to take their own time to give you a good answer, without them being paid to do so or any credible promise of another form of reward. You would be surprised, I think, if the response to this request was an attempt to harm you in order to gain some advantage at your expense. If 10 people with a similar dispositon were trapped on an island for a few generations, you could start a high trust society, could you not?
I’m unclear why you consider low-trust societies to be natural and require no explanation. To me it makes intuitive sense that small high-trust groups would form naturally at times, and sometimes those groups would, by virtue of cooperation being an advantage, grow over time to be big and successful enough to be classed as “societies”.
I picture a high trust situation like a functional family unit or small village where everyone knows everyone, to start. A village a few kilometers away is low trust. Over time, both groups grow, but there’s less murdering and thievery and expense spent on various forms of protection against adversarial behaviour in the high-trust group, so they grow faster. Eventually the two villages interact, and some members of the low-trust group defect against their neighbours and help the outsiders to gain some advantage for themselves, while the high trust group operates with a unified goal, such that even if they were similarly sized, the high trust group would be more effective. Net result, the high trust group wins and expands, the low trust group shrinks or is exterminated. More generally, I think in a lot of different forms of competition, the high trust group is going to win because they can coordinate better. So all that is needed is for a high-trust seed to exist in a small functional group, and it may grow to arbitrary size (provided mechanisms for detecting and punishing defectors and free-riders, of course).
I don’t claim that this is a well-grounded explanation with the backing of any anthropological research, which is why I’m putting it as a comment rather than an answer. But I do know that children often grow up assuming that whatever environment they grew up in is typical for everyone everywhere. So if a child grows up in a functional family that cooperates with and supports each other, they’re going to generalize that and expect others outside of their family to cooperate and support each other was well, unless and until they learn this isn’t always the case. This becomes the basis for forming high-trust cooperative relationships with non-kin, where the opportunity exists. Seems to me a high trust society is just one where those small seeds of cooperation have grown to a group of societal size.
Taking it back a step, it seems like we have a lot of instincts that aid us in cooperating with each other. Probably because those with those instincts did better than those without, because a human by itself is puny and weak and can only look in one direction at once and sometimes needs to sleep, but ten humans working together are not subject to those same constraints. And it is those cooperative instincts, like reciprocity, valuing fairness, punishment of defectors, and rewarding generosity with status, which help us easily form trusting cooperative relationships (“easily” relative to how hard it would be if we were fully selfish agents aiming only to maximize some utility function in each interaction, and we further knew that this was true of everyone we interacted with as well), which in turn are the basis for trust within larger-scale groups.
I mean, you’re asking this question with the well-founded hope that someone is going to take their own time to give you a good answer, without them being paid to do so or any credible promise of another form of reward. You would be surprised, I think, if the response to this request was an attempt to harm you in order to gain some advantage at your expense. If 10 people with a similar dispositon were trapped on an island for a few generations, you could start a high trust society, could you not?