The first two cases belong typically to the domain of personal trust. I can trust my own trust in another person if I attribute to my own trust the ability to motivate others, and if, furthermore, I find out the ways in which my partner is affected by being trusted. With this in mind, I can create for myself an additional motive for trust. This engenders more opportunities for trust in the face of increasing risk. 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.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 260