The trust equation implicitly assumes honesty. It’s a second-order model: it explains how trust forms among good-faith actors, not how to detect bad ones.

Credibility, reliability, and intimacy all collapse without honesty — you can simulate them briefly, but they’re structurally unstable. Once dishonesty is detected, self-orientation effectively goes to infinity and trust snaps to zero.

So the equation is a trust amplifier, not a lie detector. Useful for healthy teams, dangerous if applied naively in adversarial or performative environments.