Trust is always context-specific, never genuinely generalized

Evidence

In any real-world context, I trust some more than others, and I trust any given person more about some things than about others and more in some contexts than in others. I may be more optimistic in my expectations of others’ trustworthiness on first encounters than you are, but apart from such a general fact I do not have generalized trust. I might also typecast many people and suppose some of the types are likely to be trustworthy and therefore worth the risk of cooperating with them, other types less so, and still others not at all. However, this is far short of generalized trust. It is merely optimism about certain others. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 320

Categorization

• XREF: Directly refines the reader’s Luhmann/Hardin integration: Hardin’s encapsulated-interest model means ‘generalized trust’ in Saramago’s Blindness is really just optimism, not trust proper — useful for distinguishing the wife’s role from a genuinely trust-based order.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘generalized trust’ by negation: it is merely optimistic assessment, not trust in the encapsulated-interest sense.