My prior experiences with trust may have been so charmed that I optimistically take the risk of cooperating with this new person. On the other hand, they may have been so disastrous that I pessimistically avoid that risk. The new person is no different in the two cases; my prior experiences, unrelated to him or her, are the source of difference. Hence my experience molds my expectations of trustworthiness. If my past experience too heavily represented good or poor grounds for trust, it may now take a long run of contrary experience to correct my initial expectations. Indeed, even my capacities for assessing trustworthiness will reflect a commonsense learning process.

XREF: Connects to schema theory and confirmation bias in cognitive psychology — how prior expectations shape interpretation of new evidence.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 525