Distrust is self-reinforcing because it selects for untrustworthy partners

Evidence

The failure of early investment by my parents and others need not correlate with the untrustworthiness of my associates in later life, but it might. The very fact that I have a hard time trusting even those who would turn out to be trustworthy may mean I fail to establish ongoing cooperative relations with such people and therefore disproportionately face short-term relations with people who, on average, are less trustworthy, thus reinforcing my attitude of distrust or wariness. Trusters and the trustworthy may interact chiefly with each other, leaving distrusters and the untrustworthy with reduced opportunities for successful interactions. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 547

Categorization

• XREF: A pessimistic mirror of Luhmann’s familiarity-building loops — distrust creates its own locked-in equilibrium just as trust does. Also echoes Coleman’s closure logic.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely surprising and dense causal claim: the untrusting self-select into short-term relations with the untrustworthy, making their pessimism empirically warranted — a self-fulfilling prophecy that is not merely cognitive bias but structurally induced. This deserves slow, careful thought.