Distrust is the negative of trust, not its complement, leaving room for neutral wariness

Evidence

One might think of distrust as the complement of trust, so that if I do not trust you with respect to something, I distrust you. As is implied in the opening paragraph of this chapter, I treat it here rather as the negative of trust. If I trust you, I have specific grounds for the trust. In parallel, if I distrust you, I have specific grounds for the distrust. I could be in a state of such ignorance about you, however, that I neither trust nor distrust you. I may therefore be wary of you until I have better information on you. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 432

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the crucial distinction between distrust (grounded negative judgment) and mere non-trust or wariness (absence of knowledge) — central to Luhmann’s ‘familiarity’ baseline that Saramago’s blindness disrupts.
• XREF: Connects directly to Luhmann’s baseline ‘familiarity’ — the state of neither trust nor distrust that requires observable conditions and is destroyed when monitoring collapses. — connects to: Ignorance of another’s intentions yields neither trust nor distrust; Distrust functions as an equivalent alternative to trust — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 262
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 432

Broader Connections

• Distrust functions as an equivalent alternative to trust #complicates (0.78) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 262