As societies grow more complex, trust shifts from shared worldviews to specialized competence.

Evidence

The jump from general and common assumptions of belief to personal trust can no longer bridge the ever-growing gap and the increasing length of the chains of selective processes. Trusting other people no longer readily includes accepting their view of the world as authoritative. One has to learn to put up with different interpretations of the world, linking one’s own behaviour nevertheless to the selections of others. Trust then becomes, so to say, privatized, psychologized and thereby individual-tolerant; or else its function is narrowed down to certain types of communication in which the other person is demonstrably competent. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 208

Categorization

• XREF: This is precisely Giddens’s move from ‘facework’ commitments grounded in shared lifeworld to ‘faceless commitments’ in expert systems — the exact distinction the reader is building toward.
• DEFINE: Defines the mechanic by which personal trust decomposes into system trust as world-views pluralize.