The importance of trust in personal life and social existence is self-evident，but the available researches do not seem to enable us to more truly understand trust itself. By critical reflection on the different conceptualization approaches and their drawbacks of previous empirical studies on trust，this paper finds that trust is not merely a cognitive judgment phenomenon based on result prediction，benefit calculation or rational choice，but a social fact that has its own cognitive，behavior and emotional dimension. Trust even essentially is a social emotion. Correspondingly，the essence of the so-called crisis of trust is by no means just widespread mutual distrust that based on rational calculation or cognitive judgment，but the existential anxiety or fear which pervades all the society. The roots of such anxiety or fear are inappropriate social structure arrangement，irrational social institution design and unfriendly social existential atmosphere，so the governance of the crisis of trust is not only to deal with a ‘social ill’，but a ‘sick society’.