Trust in officials can mean merely inductive expectation, losing positive valence

Evidence

It seems true that, when people say they trust government or the president or some other officeholder, they typically mean something different from what they mean when they say they trust a friend. Maybe what they mean is merely that the government or officeholder has the capacity to do the job well. Perhaps it includes an element of the intentions of the trusted, but only an inductive sense of these and not a sense that the government or its officials specifically care about any citizen’s interests. If trust reduces merely to this inductive expectation, however, it loses its usual positive valence. In this relatively hollow expectations sense, I can trust an official to act against my interests or to follow policies I oppose. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 775

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘I trust the official’ can mean ‘I expect them to act against me’ — hollow trust that strips the concept’s positive valence — is a genuinely surprising and dense redefinition.

Related

• Trusting institutions typically means inductive expectation, not concern for one’s interests (similarity 0.92)
• Most citizens hold inductive expectations about government rather than grounded trust (similarity 0.82)
• Institutionalized government stabilizes citizens’ inductive expectations, not strong trust (similarity 0.82)
• Trust requires presumptive knowledge that most citizens lack about officials. (similarity 0.81)
• Trust in government is trust in capacity, unlike interpersonal trust (similarity 0.80)
• Distrust of government rests on logical inference about incentives, not induction (similarity 0.80)
• Governments cannot satisfy the encapsulated-interest account of trust. (similarity 0.79)
• Ungrounded faith in government benefits the powerful, not the faithful (similarity 0.79)
• Trust reduces to knowledge while trustworthiness is motivational (similarity 0.78)
• Trust in government is really quasi-trust or confidence, not trust (similarity 0.78)
• Trust is rational expectation about the trusted party’s self-interest (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Trust is defined by the reason for expectation, not the expectation itself #expands (0.85) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 428
• Trust is merely evidence-based expectation while trustworthiness is motivational #expands (0.82) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 178
• Trust requires belief in the other’s motivations, not mere behavioral expectation #qualifies (0.80) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 101