First, trust is generally a three-part relation that restricts any claim of trust to particular parties and to particular matters. Second, trust is a cognitive notion, in the family of such notions as knowledge, belief, and the kind of judgment that might be called assessment. All of these are cognitive in that they are grounded in some sense of what is true. These cognitive notions—and trust, in particular—are not a matter of choosing: we do not choose what is to count as true, rather we discover it or are somehow convinced of it. Hence we do not trust in order to accomplish anything, although our trust might encourage us to enter beneficial interactions. (We may well choose to be trustworthy in order to encourage others to cooperate with us.) Generally, we wish to explain cooperation or its failure by reference to trust. To make the cooperation itself a matter of trust would make the thing we want to explain the explanation of it. Thus we wish to keep trusting and acting from trust cleanly separated. Finally, acting on trust typically involves risk.

XREF: Contrasts with game-theoretic and rational-choice accounts of trust that model it as a strategic choice, the common framework in economics and political science.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 81