Following Coleman’s theory, explain the roles trust and norms play within rational choice theory.
What will be an ideal response?
Trust, while playing a vital role in making cooperative action possible, is not rooted in some type of emotional bond or moral obligation to another. It arises, or not, between individuals based on their rational assessment of the potential costs and gains which comes with relying on another. Thus, when someone says, “I feel like he is someone I can trust,” it is a calculation of risk, and not the “feeling,” that leads to this conclusion. Norms can only originate through the action of individuals, “yet a norm itself is a system-level property which affects the further action of individuals, both the sanctions applied by individuals who hold the norm and the action in conformity with the norm” (Coleman 1990: 244). On the one hand, then, norms are collectivist constructs that can lead individuals to pursue particular courses of action as the sanctions that are attached to them condition the weighing of benefits and costs and thus the likelihood of undertaking a given path of behavior. Yet, on the other hand, norms exist only as an expression of individual action.
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