Trust depends on relationship history, not on personal character

Evidence

In all of these interactions, trust is relational. That is to say, my trust of you depends on our relationship, either directly through our own ongoing interaction or indirectly through intermediaries and reputational effects. If we have no or only a passing relationship, we are not in a trusting relationship. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 65

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the load-bearing definitional claim of the chapter: trust is relational (a three-place predicate — I trust you regarding x) rather than a property of the trustee.
• XREF: Central to the reader’s Hardin/Luhmann synthesis: relational trust presupposes persistent observability of the relationship — precisely what the epidemic’s blindness erases except for the wife.