Excess knowledge that trust is being built can itself collapse it into distrust

Evidence

In some cases a post hoc inference will suffice; it might even be that ignorance of particular aspects does no harm, i.e. does not obstruct progress towards trust, but this can hardly be decided without empirical research. However, the process may become more liable to break down where relevant circumstances are not known, even if the requisite behaviour has been followed in the initial phases. It can also become more liable to break down through an excess of knowledge, such as when the participants mutually infer that the process is being employed in order to build up trust. For in such instances, motives are unavoidably put in question, and such questioning can easily turn into distrust. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 196

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this explain why overt gestures of trust in institutions backfire, feeding cynicism?
• XREF: Relates to Giddens’s point that reflexive awareness of systems can corrode the very trust they run on.

Related

• Trust breaks down both from ignorance and from awareness that trust-building is being attempted (similarity 0.92)
• Trusting always exceeds available evidence; reasons for trust are retrospective self-justification (similarity 0.85)
• Trust arises not from powerlessness but from lack of full information about others. (similarity 0.85)
• Trust requires some prior information and cannot arise from nothing (similarity 0.84)
• Trust can be deliberately created by fabricating distrust (similarity 0.84)
• Trust clues only reduce risk, never eliminate the leap of faith. (similarity 0.83)
• Trust exceeds available information and remains irreducible risk (similarity 0.83)
• Trust can be deliberately simulated and codified far beyond its natural sources (similarity 0.83)
• Trust structures may later givver way to simple confidence (similarity 0.83)
• Distrust needs less information than trust to form. (similarity 0.83)
• Trust grounded in false knowledge cannot be an intrinsic good (similarity 0.83)
• Trust is willed action taken despite an information deficit. (similarity 0.83)
• Trust substitutes knowledge of system structure for unavailable information about others. (similarity 0.82)
• Failed trust is answered with still more trust, not less. (similarity 0.82)
• Distrust arises from inconsistency or symbolic discrediting of trust (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Trust operates through uncommunicated inferences rather than explicit justification #expands (0.55) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 164
• Trusting always exceeds available evidence; reasons for trust are retrospective self-justification #expands (0.50) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 150
• Distrust arises from inconsistency or symbolic discrediting of trust #contradicts (0.40) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 268
• Deceitful trust, once established, obliges its user into genuine trustworthiness #complicates (0.35) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 246