The third form of spillover argument is essentially about the creation of a disposition on which people then act even without direct reasoning in particular instances. This is roughly Oliver Williamson's (1993) view, as discussed in chapter 3, that trust is not generally calculative. There is calculation or at least solid reasoning somewhere in the past but not in this moment when I am dealing with you. This raises the question of whether there is calculation when I first meet someone or whether my disposition is applied generally to virtually any and everyone, including those newly met and those never to be met again. To assess whether the dispositional (or spillover) thesis is correct would require psychological data that go beyond the correlations between measures over time of trust in government and participation in group activities. This is a fundamentally important issue on which we have inadequate knowledge.

QUESTION: The author notes we lack adequate psychological data on whether dispositional trust extends to newly met or never-to-be-met individuals — a genuinely open empirical question.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 739