Survey trust questions conflate encapsulated-interest trust with generalized trust.

Evidence

People are asked to respond to survey questions such as “Do you trust most people?” and “Are people generally trustworthy?” (See the appendix for questions that are commonly asked.) Unfortunately, such questions are insufficiently articulated to distinguish trust as encapsulated interest from generalized trust. In actual fact, I trust most of the people I deal with at least in those matters over which I have dealings with them. Had I not eventually trusted them, I would have stopped dealing with them as much as possible. … Do I trust the vastly larger number of people with whom I have no dealings in those matters? No—but this is not a harsh answer. Most of these are people I do not even know and have no reason either to trust or to distrust. Unfortunately, if we begin to articulate our questions precisely enough to get at such discriminating differences, we virtually have to explain what we are seeking to those we survey (or those whom we put through experiments). We thereby give them theoretical understandings they did not have, and we elicit answers or experimental responses to those understandings rather than to their normal experiences. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 795

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s stated project of integrating Saramago’s blindness epidemic with Hardin’s trust theory — the survey’s failure to distinguish concrete from diffuse trust mirrors how the wife’s sighted monitoring of specific others differs from trust in an anonymous collective.
• DEFINE: Distinguishes encapsulate-interest trust from generalized trust in exactly the vocabulary a Luhmann/Hardin synthesis needs.