Adult distrust from childhood abuse persists even when unjustified by current conditions

Evidence

For such a person, it too often was not. The woman who was sexually abused as a child may find it hard to be sexually at ease or even close to anyone as an adult. Her incapacity to enter relations with others is merely a well-learned distrust. That ingrained distrust may exact a severe additional cost of the earlier abuse if the distrust is no longer justified by the conditions of the world she has grown into. Substantial additional experience would be required to update her assessments of others’ likely trustworthiness. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 543

Categorization

• QUESTION: This implies trust assessment is Bayesian updating from personal evidence — worth connecting to the doctor’s wife in Blindness who does update her assessment unlike the abused woman.
• XREF: connects to: Youth distrust reflects experience of an untrustworthy world, not personal flaw — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 465; Childhood emotional tones get reapplied to adult situations — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 436