The dynamics of trust and non-trust

The cultural nature of persons society relationships The set of relations of persons and societies is not unitary but multiple. There are correspondences between levels, rather than similarities. These relations operate with a high degree of redundancy. In the ideational domain, human actions are made meaningful by actors, resulting in the invention of society as what is considered to be ‘objective reality’: Psychological characteristics of persons feed into the ways societies are created, leading further to the metagenesis (Koch, 1986, p. 10) of individual consciousness. This process of emergence of both personal subjectivities and societies’ systems of values, prejudices, and other social representations is based on the actions of real human beings (Valsiner, 2003a, 2003b). It cannot be reduced to the psychological functioning of any individual or a population of individuals. Individuals are not mere replicas of any society (or its texts, or of their language), nor are societies viewable as ‘hyper-persons.’