# Benkyokai on Trust with Jiro Kokuryo

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 1998-12-26T00:00:00Z


Reference Bibliography:
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity
Toshio Yamagishi and Midori Yamagishi, Trust and Commitment in the United States and Japan
Benkyokai December 26, 1998
Reference Bibliography:
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity
Toshio Yamagishi and Midori Yamagishi, Trust and Commitment in the United States 
  and Japan
The Gift
The Potlach, the Kula... The obligation to give, accept, reciprocate...
"According to Malinowski, these vaygu'a follow a kind of circular 
  movement: the mwali, the bracelets, are passed on regularly from west 
  to east, whereas the soulava aways travel from east to west."
Now the gift necessarily entails the notion of credit. The evolution in 
  economic law has not been from barter to sale, and from cash sale to credit 
  sale. On the one hand, barter has arisen through a system of presents given 
  and reciprocated accordining to a time limit. This was through a process of 
  simplification, by reductions in periods of time formerly arbitrary. On the 
  other hand, buying and selling arose in the same way, with the latter according 
  to a fixed time limit, or by cash, as well as by lending.
From ancient Roman law.. nexus... "The thing pledged is normally without 
  value; for example, sticks are exchanged, the stips in the 'stipulation' 
  of Roman law..." "Above all, they are still the residues of formerly 
  obligatory gifts, that were owned because of reciprocity."
"It is our western societies who have recently made man an 'economic animal'. 
  But we are not yet all creatures of the genus."
Trust
"The accumulation of social capital, however, is a complicated and in 
  many ways mysterious cultural process."
"many neoclasically economists have come to believe that economic method 
  they have discovered provides them with the tools for constructing something 
  approaching a universal science of man." "rational choice theory"
 "In the words of one economist, 'The first principle of Economics is 
  that every agent is actuated only by self-interest" 
"Jeremy Bentham; that utility is the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance 
  of pain."
"But this type of formal definition of utility reduces the fundamental 
  premise of economics to an assertion that peole maximize whatever it is they 
  choose to maximize, a tautology that robs the model of any interest or explanatory 
  power. By contrast, to assert that people prefer their selfish material interests 
  over other kinds of interests is to make a strong statement about human nature."
spontaneous sociability
"Durkhem labeled 'organic solidarity'"
"Geertz's own definition of culture is 'an historically transmitted pattern 
  of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed 
  in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop 
  their knowledge about and attitudes towards life."
US/Japan/Germany have large companies because of protestant and secularism/iemoto/guilds
saddle shaped family intensive state intensive do not scale, except Korea which 
  was intentional
US communities breaking down. Japanese system changing with recession...
State can control and affect greatly how culture grows and is used in economy.
"Social apital is like a ratchet that is more easily turned in one direction 
  than another; it can be dissipated by the actions of governments much more readily 
  than those governments can build it up again. Now that the question of ideology 
  and institutions has been settled, the preservation and accumulation of social 
  capital will occupy center stage."
Trust and Commitment in the US and Japan
"purely selfish utility maximizer postulated by economists"
"Trust can thus be defined as a bias in the processing of imperfect 
  information about the partner:s intentions. A trusting person is the one 
  who overestimates the benighity of the partner's intentions beyond thelevel 
  waranted by the prudent assesment of the available information."
"Perception of the risk or the subjective social uncertainty may be higher 
  among those who mostly deal with insiders in committed relations than those 
  who are regularly in contact with outsiders. In this sense, commitment may actually 
  reduce the level of trust in outsiders, and a s a result, those who mostly stay 
  in the security of committed relations experience higher subjective social uncertainty."
"Reputation can provide an extra assurance for committed people to deal 
  with social undertainty involved in the deals with outsiders."
"reputation often works as a sanctioning mechanism against dishonest deeds"
"People may often refrain from misconduct because they are afraid of getting 
  a bad reputation."
"we suspect that informational role of reputation is more imortant in 
  American society, whereas the sanctioning role is more important in Japanese 
  society."
"Whereas knowledge-based trust is limited to particular objects (people 
  or organizations), general trust is a belief in the benevolence of human nature 
  in general and thus is not limited to particular objects."
"Americans consider honesty more important than do Japanese"
"On the other hand, knowledge-based trust is conceptually distinct from 
  assurance, which is another derivative of committed relations."
"committed relations are in fact expected to reduce development 
  of knowledge-based trust."
balance between committed relationshis and general trust...
"Japanese society currently faces the problem of creating that balance 
  in respoonse to the pressures of opening-up of the society and the economy, 
  whereas American society faces the problem of maintaining it in the face of 
  increasing social uncertainty."




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