Since in most cases the objective situation contains features to which both attitudes could be fixed, what is more decisive than anything is an indeterminate preconception about the selective tendency and the direction of symbolic fixing – often the result of a chance first impression. It picks out the critical variables, the evidence which counts, and, with these, also defines the criteria whose variation in the objective situation takes on the character of a threshold experience and suggests the change from trust to distrust or vice versa.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 274