> The Political Divide May Be Less About Whether People Deserve Goodwill Than About What Evidence Is Required Before An Unknown Person Receives The Benefit Of The Doubt

Human social evolution has progressively increased our capacity to cooperate beyond intimate relationships, but individuals and cultures differ in the mechanisms they use to make that expansion possible.

One strategy extends interpersonal and moral priors relatively freely across social boundaries: strangers receive much of the same initial benefit of the doubt as familiar people. Another strategy extends cooperation primarily through known relationships, shared identity, reputation, and proven membership in trusted communities.

Modern impersonal institutions provide a third mechanism. They allow people to cooperate with strangers without necessarily trusting those strangers personally, because law, contracts, markets, regulation, reputation systems, and enforcement reduce the consequences of misplaced trust.

Contemporary liberalism tends, on average, toward the first and third mechanisms—universalistic moral assumptions plus confidence in impersonal coordination—whereas conservatism tends relatively more toward the second—particularized trust grounded in relationships, shared norms, and bounded communities.

Less expansively:

Political differences in social trust may be better understood as differences in how people allocate the benefit of the doubt under uncertainty than as differences in their fundamental beliefs about whether human beings are good or bad.

People with a more universalistic orientation tend to extend moral standing, empathy, and provisional trust farther beyond familiar or ingroup relationships. People with a more parochial orientation tend to place greater evidentiary weight on familiarity, reputation, shared identity, and group membership before extending the same confidence.

These differences may be reinforced by differing reliance on impersonal institutions: people who have greater confidence in universal rules, regulatory systems, and other forms of structural assurance can cooperate with strangers while accepting greater interpersonal uncertainty.