Trust is a threshold on a probability distribution, not a binary state.

Evidence

Tis definition circumscribes the focus of our interest in trust in several ways.’ Firstly, it tells us that trust is better seen as a threshold point, located on a probabilistic distribution’ of more general expectations, which can take a number of values suspended between complete distrust (0) and complete trust (1), and which is centred around a mid-point (0.50) of uncertainty. Accordingly, blind trust or distrust represent lexicographic predispositions to assign the extreme values of the probability and maintain them unconditionally over and above the evidence? … Next, the’ ‘definition stresses the fact that trust is particularly relevant in conditions of ignorance or uncertainty with respect to unknown or unknowable actions of other! … In this respect, trust concerns not future actions in general, but all future. actions which condition our present decisions. Thirdly, by postulating that our own actions are dependent on that probability, it excludes those instances where trust in someone has no influence on our decisions. Finally, it limits our interest to trust between agents and excludes that between agents and natural events. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2714

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames trust as graded probability along a 0-1 continuum with a 0.50 uncertainty midpoint, and blind trust as evidence-resistant extreme assignment — a precise scaffold for modeling how the epidemic drives agents toward those extremes.
• XREF: The graded trust scale thickens the Luhmann analysis: when sight fails, agents stop updating on evidence, sliding toward the blind distrust extreme exactly as the novel’s Hobbesian descent depicts.
• DEEPTHINKING: Blind trust/distrust as lexicographic, evidence-insensitive maintenance of extreme probability values is a dense behavioral claim worth sitting with against the novel’s regression.