Trusting institutions typically means inductive expectation, not concern for one’s interests

Evidence

It seems true that, when people say they trust government or the president or some other officeholder, they typically mean something different from what they mean when they say they trust a friend. Maybe what they mean is merely that the government or officeholder has the capacity to do the job well. Perhaps it includes an element of the intentions of the trusted, but only an inductive sense of these and not a sense that the government or its officials specifically care about any citizen’s interests. If trust reduces merely to this inductive expectation, however, it loses its usual positive valence. In this relatively hollow expectations sense, I can trust an official to act against my interests or to follow policies I oppose. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 775

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes institutional ‘trust’ from interpersonal trust as an inductive, valence-free expectation rather than a caring commitment.
• XREF: Connects directly to Hardin’s encapsulated-interest conception of trust and to its boundary condition: institutions lack the encapsulated interest that grounds personal trust.