How people who don’t have much reason to trust each other can figure out how to work together.
Henry Farrell has been looking at this for a long time. This piece on how “doing bad things together creates bonds of trust” has been nagging at me since February. “Elon Musk and the Power of the Bro.”
A variant enables a con artist to discourage the mark from squealing because he or she has been made complicit.