Trust breaks down both from ignorance and from awareness that trust-building is being attempted

Evidence

However, we have as yet only covered one initial possibility, and, even then, only the course it outwardly follows. There are, in addition, cognitive and normative aspects which cannot be arranged at will into some arbitrary sequence but must follow a definite order. It does not suffice for the process simply to take some particular course. The participants must know the exact situation and they must know from one another that each knows it. The building up of trust therefore depends on easily interpretable situations and not least, for that reason, on the possibility of communication. 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

• XREF: The failure mode where participants infer trust is being built — ‘motives unavoidably put in question’ — is exactly what Giddens’s facework addresses and what Stevens’s studied formality conceals, though it is also the reflexivity trap Luhmann identifies.
• QUESTION: Worth digging into: how reflexivity about the trust process itself converts trust into distrust — does this extend to institutional/system trust where the ‘willing suspension’ of scrutiny is structurally easier?
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that knowing one is being trusted-toward can itself destroy trust is a genuinely paradoxical, counterintuitive mechanism worth sitting with.