Trust grows in discontinuous stages, not steady increments

Evidence

But there are two qualifications to be added to this rule. One must not infer that during the learning process trust can grow steadily and expand uninterruptedly into more important and consequential matters. To that extent experimental research in social psychology, which is concerned solely with minimal and trifling risks, affords a misleading basis for generalization. Changes in what is at stake and shifts in the balance between anticipated advantage and possible loss build into the learning process thresholds which make for qualitative differences – for instance, when the person who trusts is risking not only himself but also others, his family, his work, or his country. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 203

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Explains why Stevens’s leap to total devotion — skipping staged thresholds — is sociologically anomalous; real trust breaks at thresholds when family or country are at stake.

Related

• Experience-based trust in trifling risks does not scale up to high-stakes trust (similarity 0.85)
• Trust thresholds are historically contingent, not natural or objective (similarity 0.84)
• Trust formation requires gradual step-by-step temporal adaptation (similarity 0.83)
• Trust is learned and generalized across a lifetime, not mechanically acquired (similarity 0.83)
• Trustworthiness persists only while future gains from the relationship outweigh defection (similarity 0.82)
• Optimism about others’ trustworthiness is self-reinforcing through gained experience (similarity 0.82)
• Excess knowledge that trust is being built can itself collapse it into distrust (similarity 0.81)
• People trust less as the stakes of the entrusted matter rise (similarity 0.81)
• Individual-level rational-choice accounts of trust fail as general explanations (similarity 0.81)
• Trust forms sequentially by reducing social complexity over discrete steps (similarity 0.81)
• Trust clues only reduce risk, never eliminate the leap of faith. (similarity 0.81)
• Trust emerges from gradually escalated reciprocal exchanges in ongoing relationships (similarity 0.80)
• Trust endures through absorptive credit until critical thresholds are crossed. (similarity 0.80)
• Jointly negotiating trust is more mature than passive emotional reliance (similarity 0.80)
• Trust structures may later givver way to simple confidence (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Trust forms sequentially by reducing social complexity over discrete steps #corroborates (0.75) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 194
• Trustworthiness arises from many small open stages rather than single sovereign strokes #qualifies (0.60) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 223