Trust is learned and generalized across a lifetime, not mechanically acquired

Evidence

As an attitude of this kind, trust – and here too we see that it is not simply a mechanical consequence of influences from the environment – has to be learned, just like any other kind of generalization. The underlying assumptions of this learning process are laid down in infancy. In the family, trust in its earliest form finds its first confirmation in a world which is rendered less complex through social institutions and through the particular successes of trust between family members. Of course, the learning process does not end there. New situations and new people are continually posing new problems of trust throughout life. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 156

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Giddens’s faceless commitments — Luhmann here grounds the micro-origin of system trust in family socialization, the base from which institutional trust later generalizes in Stevens’s case.