Familiarity, confidence, and trust are substitutable self-assurances with limits

Evidence

Of course, the relative emphasis on familiarity, confidence, or trust is not simply prescribed by social structures or cultural imperatives. To a large extent this remains a matter of definition, and particularly with respect to confidence and trust one can choose to see the relation — the decision to see the doctor — as either unavoidable confidence in the medical system or a matter of risky choice. Belonging to the same family of self-assurances, familiarity, confidence, and trust seem to depend on each other and are, at the same time, capable of replacing each other to a certain extent. It is not possible, of course, to completely replace with yourself something on which you also depend. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1402

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the three-tier distinction between familiarity, confidence, and trust as a family of replaceable yet partly non-substitutable modes.
• XREF: Feeds directly into the reader’s synthesis: when observability collapses (blindness), confidence and trust are forced to substitute for the lost familiarity, defining the doctor’s wife predicament.