Trust requires a risky advance where the trusted party could plausibly profit from betrayal

Evidence

First of all there has to be some cause for displaying trust. Some situation has to be defined in which the person trusting is dependent on his partner, otherwise the problem does not arise. His behaviour must then commit him to this situation and make him run the risk of his trust being betrayed. In other words he must invest in what we called earlier a ‘risky advance’. One fundamental condition is that it must be possible for the partner to abuse the trust; indeed, it must not merely be possible for him to do so but he must also have a considerable interest in doing so. It must not be that he will be likely to toe the line on his own account – in the light of his own interests. In his subsequent behaviour the trust put in him must be honoured and his own interests put to one side. For this shelving of interests to serve as confirmation of trust, it must attain a certain level – it must present itself as a sort of missed opportunity, and not merely as the temporary postponement of a betrayal of trust. All these elements in combination might constitute the first sequence in building up trust. From this we can already draw one important conclusion – that the process demands mutual commitment and can only be put to the test by both sides becoming involved in it, in a fixed order, first the trusting and then the trusted person. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 195

Categorization

• DEFINE: Operationalizes what a ‘risky advance’ is: dependency plus a partner with genuine interest in betraying, making the shelved interest a confirmation signal.
• XREF: Directly connects to Giddens’s ‘facework’ and to Stevens’s total investment in Darlington — a risky advance never reciprocated.
• STORYSTEM: A story engine: a servant/pet/protégé whose displayed trust is never honored because the master’s ‘shelved interests’ amount to no real missed opportunity — the betrayal is nonexistence rather than action.