I once had an acquaintance of whom many people said, with genuine force, that he was a person you could trust. Alas, that depended on who “you” were. Many people did not trust him at all because they thought him deceitful and manipulative. The latter group included people whose interests often conflicted with his and whose future value to him he had seemingly written off. He could be richly and deeply trusted by those who shared enough of his interests, not at all by those who did not. He was almost mythical in his capacity to put people into two distinct classes. On a cynical reading, he was not trustworthy on the encapsulated-interest account. He was merely reliable to those whose interests he happened to share.

DEFINE: Illustrates the encapsulated-interest account of trust: trustworthiness is not a fixed trait but conditional on shared interests.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 157