Trust requires presumptive knowledge that most citizens lack about officials.

Evidence

As argued in chapters 1 and 3, trust is a fundamentally cognitive notion. To trust or to distrust others is to have some presumption of knowledge about them. For the vast majority of people in the world, including those whom we are likely to encounter, we know essentially nothing about their specific motivations toward us. That is also true of most of the people in our government: We do not know enough to trust them. If we are confident of their behavior in some context, that is because we generalize inductively from the behaviors of many of their peers or because we infer from the organizational incentives they face that they are more than likely to be trustworthy in that context. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 716

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the cognitive/encapsulated-interest definition of trust as presumption of knowledge — the precise notion the reader needs for a Luhmann/Hardin integration.
• XREF: connects to: People mostly fail to understand how their own institutions work. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 1046