Trust formation, like money and science, grows reflexive under social differentiation

Evidence

It is to be supposed that with growing social differentiation other elementary mechanisms, as well as those which require more advanced conditions, will become reflexive – the fact that money can be bought is as well-known an example as the study of scientific study by means of reflexive disciplines such as epistemology, logic and methodology. The mechanisms of self-presentation and of trust formation are also subject to this tendency to reflexivity, even if reflexivity in this context takes on a less clearly differentiated form and so is not so easily recognizable. Here it takes the form of increasing functional awareness, of seeing through the foundations and functions of the creation of trust in society. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 252

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors Giddens’s reflexive modernization — expert systems and trust becoming self-aware. Directly serves the reader’s Luhmann-to-Giddens bridge.