In many accounts of trust, including Coleman's (1990, chapter 5) strictly rational account, one might suppose those who are to trust are all interchangeable in the following sense: given the same incentives (potential objective payoffs), we would all trust to the same degree. There is an important prior element, however, that some might think of as psychological: we may have different capacities for trust. This issue should not be treated as psychological in the sense of irrational or not rationally justifiable but, rather, as essentially epistemological and hence as pragmatically rational.

DEFINE: Reframes differing trust capacities as epistemological and pragmatically rational rather than irrational psychological variation, challenging the interchangeable-agent assumption in rational accounts like Coleman's.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 598