Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good Book

The topics of what is trust and where does trust come from are worth exploring. There are some gems covered in the book, like the need to trust in being untrusting (look before you cross the street), and combatants learning to trust each other on the battlefield. The early sections on communication are interesting, as communication requires significant cooperation, but is highly suspect. But overall, the book falls short in supplying evidence. It's mostly speculative. The author is not critical enough of evolutionary theory for my taste. I find it to be too convenient, a type of post how argument that fits because one event happens to follow another. The author also assumes children trust parents. This is obviously not universal. Many children can't trust their parents to care for them. And addictive parents aren't always even predicable and therefore they aren't trustworthy in that regard. Kohn touches a bit on cultural differences in trust, but overall has no meaningful explanation for why some are more trusting and others less, or why we trust in some situations and not others--other than we trust people we perceive to be like us. Even this idea goes unexamined. He may be mistaking cultural rules of coordination for cooperation and trust.