Trusting others’ trust in you multiplies action possibilities but at double risk

Evidence

Or I can trust the trust of others in me. This makes it possible for me to base my plans of action on the trust of others, whether it be to disappoint it or to discharge the resulting obligations. I can, for example, dismantle my own cautious strategies of self-presentation, if I am sure that the other person ‘will know what I mean’ if I criticize, tease or annoy him. This increasing of the potential of trust involves, like every reflexive process, a double risk – firstly in that I, myself, can suddenly doubt whether the trust of the other person really goes as far as I had supposed, and secondly in that the other person, without my noticing it, loses trust in my good intentions and my ‘not so intended’ action begins to undermine the relationship. On the other hand, the advantages of such double trust are obvious. It makes possible actions which could not come about by means of simple trust alone. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 260

Categorization

• XREF: Trust in others’ trust of me is the interpersonal facework analogue to Stevens’s reliance on his institutional standing — though Stevens’s version is system-trust, while this is the personal form. — connects to: Risky personal trust overtures presuppose and expand the trustor’s freedom — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 1301
• DEEPTHINKING: The double-risk structure — doubting the other’s trust while they silently lose trust in you — is a genuinely dense account of how reflexive trust compounds vulnerability.