In Why should you trust other people if they consistently disappoint you? I wrote that it makes sense to hold to contradictory beliefs:
People are to be trusted and people are not to be trusted.
I discovered that whether people are to be trusted is a function of high hopes your expectations are. In other words, for small things, you should trust people because it’s easier to uphold the agreement, rather than disappoint it, and vice versa for bigger things. So, there is a relationship between how high the stakes are and how much you should trust other people.