Most of the discussion of a disposition to trust (for example, Rotter 1980) could easily be read as supposing that people can be relatively optimistic about others generally, perhaps for reasons of early experience, as discussed in chapter 5. If this is the meaning of trust as dispositional, then it is not generally a theory of trust but merely an explanation of why some take risks more readily than others do or why some read the risks as less serious than others do. Hence the dispositional view is about marginal variations in trusting in the face of whatever evidence of trustworthiness is available. The view that trust is purely a disposition and that it is therefore unrelated in any specific instance to the object of the trust (trusting B to do X) is surely irrelevant to the experience of trust for most of us most of the time—

DEFINE: Clarifies what dispositional trust actually means — not a theory of trust itself but an account of marginal variation in trust behavior.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 874