Untrustworthy social reality claims can trigger doubt of one’s own sanity

Evidence

The background to the observations and proposals which follow is the clear and simple fact that, without trust, the everyday social life which we take for granted is simply not possible. Luhmann makes this point in the opening chapter of his Trust and Power (1979), and Garfinkel (1963) illustrated the importance of trusting other persons’ claims as to the nature of social reality in his (by now infamous) rule-breaching studies. In these, Garfinkel’s confederates behaved as if the nature of a social situation was other than that which it might be taken to be by the unwitting subjects with whom they were interacting. The subjects (or, perhaps more appropriately, victims) were thus presented with grounds for not trusting either their own sense of what the actual social reality was, or the reality claims of their interlocutors. The result of this for many of the subjects was bewilderment to the point that some of them even began to doubt their own sanity. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 517

Categorization

• XREF: The doctor’s wife in Blindness and the sudden collapse of a shared perceptual reality (metaphorical blindness) directly parallels Garfinkel’s breaching experiments destroying trust in perceived reality.
• DEFINE: Establishes the core Luhmann definition of trust operating in this chapter — that everyday social life is impossible without it.