Everyday impersonal encounters demand trust backed by standardized normality tests

Evidence

Equally characteristic of modern society are those borderline cases of personal trust which occur not at the level of large organized systems but within simple, everyday interaction systems. Such instances are frequently short, involve different participants, are impersonal and are unlikely to be repeated, but they nevertheless not infrequently involve considerable risk. A clear example is the problem of risks and trust involved in a taxi ride. Due to lack of time and lack of background knowledge the participants have to depend on highly standardized ‘tests’ of the normality of the situation – and on a sufficiently normalized environment which makes the risk, although serious, appear unlikely. In this context it is particularly worth noting that a breakdown in the environmental premises cannot be cushioned by building up trust within a small system, but at best involves reorganizing the way one approaches the taxi. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 204

Categorization

• XREF: The taxi ride is a vivid instance of Giddens’ ‘faceless commitments’ — trust in expert systems and normalized environments rather than in persons.
• SHARE: The taxi-ride analysis is a compact, concrete case of Luhmann’s system trust that would land well with the reader working on Stevens’ devotion to institutional roles.