A voice crying in the wilderness

Trust is a reciprocal relationship. We believe things said by people we trust – but we trust people who say things we already agree with. So it becomes self-reinforcing. Given that, how can we manipulate trust? Should we be manipulating trust? What are the grounds, the basis on which we evaluate truth? We take things on board to the extent that they correspond with the way we think things are already. But if what is said does not correspond to our pre-existing beliefs or experience, we are more inclined to reject it.
That I guess is it in a nutshell, and put like that it all seems a bit self-evident – well, to me it does. But is that actually the way people see the world more generally? Ah, but who are these ‘people’?
The point, I think, is that no individual’s responses are predictable in that way. Or maybe they are to some extent. This is always the way, isn’t it, you can go by what the probabilities tell you is most likely to happen, but it doesn’t mean that that is what actually will happen.
In any particular case, circumstances lead to a particular resolution. Which does not disprove the rule for all other cases, just says that this is what happened in this case, because of this.
Yet if we look at the classical scientific method, one instance of disproof should lead to the rejection of the general rule. Except that, it doesn’t. Within normal science, we look for the reason which caused the rule to be broken in this instance, and are quite likely to assume that something went wrong in that particular instance, that the sample was contaminated, or there are some circumstances that we are not aware of, and that that extreme example should be rejected and omitted from the findings. That is how science works. Or a new explanation is found for that particular case. We still work on probabilities – most cases indicate this, so we can ignore the one which indicates that.
Where is all this leading me? I don’t know. To the profound, or the banal? Or maybe a bit of both.