Correcting pessimistic distrust requires new experience or countervailing theory.

Evidence

A full account of rational trust must be grounded in reasons for expecting another to fulfill a trust and in reasons for holding general beliefs about trustworthiness. These are addressed, respectively, by the incentive account of trustworthiness that justifies and explains trust and by the commonsense account of the learned capacity to trust. The commonsense learner is little more than an inductivist who generalizes from the past to the future, as in the model of figure 5.1. To break the hold of a bad and misleading past, the inductivist requires a lot of new experience or a bit of theory that runs counter to prior experience. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 602

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Hardin/Luhmann integration: the inductivist commonsense account operates purely on past observations, mirroring Luhmann’s familiarity-based trust that collapses when monitoring (visual observability) vanishes. — connects to: Erring toward optimistic trust is easier to correct than erring toward pessimism. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 529; Distrust is self-reinforcing because it starves itself of corrective information; Distrust is self-fulfilling and cannot be invalidated by experience (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the two pillars of rational trust: the incentive/encapsulated-interest account and the commonsense inductivist account.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 602

Broader Connections

• Distrust is self-fulfilling and cannot be invalidated by experience #contradicts (0.90)
• Distrust is self-reinforcing because it starves itself of corrective information #expands (0.85)
• Self-fulfilling distrust becomes individually rational and resistant to disproof #contradicts (0.85)
• Optimism about others’ trustworthiness is self-reinforcing through gained experience #corroborates (0.80)
• Reducing distrust is different from generating trust #expands (0.75)