Trust sits between faith and confidence, where evidence is balanced by affectivity.

Evidence

To some extent, the institutions of industrial society justify a theoretical stance in which the personal-impersonal distinction remains blurred. But a study such as this one, of life on the margins of the modern state, requires that the difference between levels of social experience be kept in sharp focus. A similar problem arose when anthropologists turned to the analysis of kinship in stateless societies. Here the largest political groups, such as clans, are often represented as being like families. Yet Fortes (for example 1958).showed that the political and domestic levels were often contradictory and should be kept analytically separate. An anthropological approach to the problem of trust would insist on no less a degree of analytical discrimination. To summarize, I situate the notion in a set of belief concepts bounded at the extremes by faith and confidence, where the variable significance of evidence or proof is matched by a compensating level of affectivity. As such, trust is located in the no man’s land between status and contract, the poles of primitive and modern society in evolutionary theory (Maine 1861). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2425

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines trust as bounded by faith and confidence, with variable evidence matched by affectivity, and located between status and contract.
• XREF: This trust-as-evidence-tradeoff connects directly to Luhmann’s account of trust reducing complexity and to Hardin’s observability constraint, which the reader is using this book to triangulate.