Misplaced trust damages the trusting person’s presented self-image as well as their interests

Evidence

For even bestowing trust is an act of self-presentation. The person who trusts presents himself as someone who is by his nature inclined to bestow trust. If the trust then turns out to be misplaced, the person who trusted is not only disappointed, but in some circumstances also exposed to ridicule. It then becomes obvious that he was too stupid to see through the situation, that he let himself be taken advantage of – a victim of the equivocal ethic which says that one should trust, but not too blindly. At this point, it comes to be something which depends on practice and expertise in self-presentation. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 293

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Explains Stevens’s catastrophic endgame: having staked his self-presentation on Darlington’s goodness, he must defensively re-present and reinterpret the misplacement rather than abandon the trust.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the fear of ridicule for misplaced trust explain why Stevens keeps defending Darlington ‘till the end’ — loyalty as self-presentation protection?

Related

• Trust itself is an act of self-presentation exposing the truster to ridicule if misplaced (similarity 0.91)
• Trusting a person gives a moral hostage to fortune, making trust psychologically consequential. (similarity 0.83)
• Trusting makes every small event symptomatically significant and trust fragile (similarity 0.82)
• Trust exceeds available information and remains irreducible risk (similarity 0.81)
• System trust resists individual disappointments, unlike personal trust. (similarity 0.81)
• Trust requires interactive self-presentation, not mere predictable distance (similarity 0.80)
• The ethical view of trust only endorses trust when it is unnecessary (similarity 0.80)
• Self-presentation sustains broader trust than emotional attachment by maintaining boundaries rather than fusing identities (similarity 0.80)
• Winning trust requires participating socially and absorbing others’ expectations into one’s self-presentation (similarity 0.80)
• Fixed, stable selves earn trust only in unchanging environments. (similarity 0.80)
• Self-presentation presumes minimum trust, and trust expands possible actions and accumulates as capital. (similarity 0.79)
• Trust requires a risky advance where the trusted party could plausibly profit from betrayal (similarity 0.79)
• Trust requires some prior information and cannot arise from nothing (similarity 0.79)
• Being trustworthy carries no risk while being trusting exposes one to exploitation (similarity 0.79)
• Personal trust rests on expecting others to keep the personality they display (similarity 0.79)