The secret to actually trusting each other

Among all the mental calculations and decisions we make each day as complex social beings, we choose, actively or implicitly, to trust. By staying in our relationships, we trust our partners won’t betray us. By showing up at the stop, we trust that the bus will arrive. By making the reservation, we trust our friends will show up for dinner.

But that trust is fraying.

A 2019 Pew Research Center report on trust found that 71 percent of respondents thought interpersonal trust — in other words, confidence they had in their fellow citizens — had waned over the last two decades. The share of Americans who generally trust one another has dropped to 30 percent since the 1970s, when half of Americans placed trust in others, the authors of this year’s World Happiness Report found. Conversely, each successive generation is less likely than the one before to value honesty. This mistrust extends beyond interpersonal relationships: Hardly a quarter of respondents in a 2024 Pew survey said they trusted the government to do the right thing.

There are a multitude of factors prompting this rise in distrust. Some have suggested economic inequality, technology, and increasing diversity in the US (along with ethnic segregation) are to blame. But a major contributor seems to be political polarization. The 2019 Pew survey, for instance, found that over 40 percent of Americans don’t trust others to cast informed votes in elections or to have civil conversations with those who have differing opinions.

Trust is a necessary component in every relationship. Without it, we’re unable to be vulnerable, to share our dreams, to hold secrets, to feel safe. Hardly anyone would prefer to be made the fool — healthy skepticism can prevent you from clicking on a phishing link in an email or joining a multilevel marketing scheme — but a life of cynicism isn’t preferable either.

“There are a lot of people who claim that they don’t trust anybody,” says Peter Kim, a professor of management and organization at the USC Marshall School of Business and author of How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken and Repaired. “But if that were the case, how could anyone possibly function? You have to be able to trust that when you’re walking down the street, someone won’t shoot you. You have to trust that the meals you order at a restaurant haven’t been poisoned.”

Trust, according to Oliver Schilke, a professor and director of the Center for Trust Studies at the University of Arizona, is a willingness to make yourself vulnerable to another with the expectation that their actions will be beneficial to you. Research has established that when weighing whether to trust someone, people generally make judgments about their competence, benevolence, and integrity.

Within the first few minutes of meeting someone, we make assessments based on these three factors, Kim says — and that first impression is usually positive. We generally trust others, at least initially. What do we base these judgments on? Others’ appearance, how they speak, whether they grew up in the same hometown, their reputation, whether they look like us. But these cues are imperfect, Kim says. The more we get to know new colleagues, neighbors, friends of friends, the more information we have to go on. We learn whether our initial trust was accurate based on their actions, whether they actually prove to be a trustworthy person. Or we get burned and discover maybe they weren’t.

Are we all born inherently trustful? To determine whether this inclination to trust comes from nature or nurture, Schilke and his colleagues studied adult twins and found that genetics plays a role in how trusting we are, but not how distrusting.

Distrust, the researchers found, is a unique experience, shaped by past experiences throughout life, especially childhood — parents and peers influence who you’re wary of. Those who have experienced betrayals early in life report lower levels of trust as they age. If you had a negative experience with a specific type of person — a teacher, a romantic partner, an authority figure — you may be more likely to find all people who share those characteristics untrustworthy. “This is something that we do without thinking,” Schilke says. “It’s essentially a form of stereotyping. If that one person treated me bad, the other person that’s similar is going to do the same thing.”

Trust, on the other hand, is inherited through genes. “Some people are just genetically more trusting than others,” Schilke says. Trust can be inborn, while suspicion is learned.

Past behavior is informative when it comes to who you trust, Schilke says. If a friend consistently cancels plans at the last minute, you can assume they’ll behave similarly yet again. But we also make calculations about the future when we decide to trust someone. If you expect to have a long-term relationship with someone, whether by choice or happenstance — maybe you work on the same team or live in the same neighborhood — the more likely you are to place trust in them. When you’re stuck with a person for the foreseeable future, you hope they want to keep the peace. “There’s a reason to think that this person will be more trustworthy because they don’t want to screw up that future relationship,” Schilke says.

Indeed, trust is specific to the people in a particular relationship. In a study, Jaimie Arona Krems, an associate professor of psychology and the director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research, and her co-authors found that even when someone is generally dishonest, if they haven’t betrayed our confidence, we still trust them. “You might be really untrustworthy, kind of rogue toward most people,” Krems says, “but if I can trust you and you don’t share my secrets, well, that’s really valuable to me.” In other words, someone’s reputation says a lot, but their actions toward you as an individual are important, too.

Once trust is granted, people generally work hard to maintain it. “When we’re trusted, very few of us use that as an opportunity to exploit other people,” Kim says. Popular wisdom online and off encourages us to be on guard, that bad actors and scammers lurk around every corner, waiting to take advantage of the naive. Of course, betrayals occur and trust is sometimes broken. But a fascinating interplay between the lending and keeping of trust is that once we believe we’ve earned someone’s trust, we become more trustworthy. “Most of us, when we’re trusted, we want to prove them right,” Kim says. “We want to prove that we’re worthy of the trust that we’ve been given. There’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that occurs.”

When it comes to breaches of trust, we tend to attribute these actions to incompetence or ill intent, Kim says. Someone spilled your secrets either because they’re loose-lipped, or because they want to embarrass you or see you fail. In reality, a person’s motives are never so clear-cut. Assuming someone acted out of malice “is the kiss of death in any relationship, even longer-standing relationships,” Kim says, “because it’s almost impossible to overcome that kind of attribution.”

The more familiar the person who betrayed your trust, the more likely you are to assume incompetence rather than malice because you’re motivated to maintain the relationship. This is why people may make excuses for their partners after infidelity. Strangers or people with whom you have no intention of preserving a relationship, on the other hand, you might perceive as bad actors with no integrity.

However, it’s likely the betrayer didn’t know what they were doing was wrong, Kim says. Maybe the person you were casually dating thought it appropriate to continue seeing other people, but you didn’t. If your predetermined rules of engagement don’t align with another’s, you may see minor breaches of trust as a lack of integrity, Kim says.

The recent trend toward increased isolation could also have implications for trust. Those who feel socially isolated become hypervigilant for social threats, like conflict and rejection, research shows — they see the world as a dangerous place and therefore go to great lengths to protect their own safety. If you see others in your community as inherently suspicious or dangerous, you’re less likely to engage with them, furthering the cycle of isolation and loneliness. Ironically, though, lonelier people tend to be more trusting because they may yearn for social intimacy, even though they don’t expect others to be trustworthy. They may fear their conversation partner is judging them or is dismissive, leading them to further withdraw.

Distrust doesn’t only apply to the perception of others — it extends to ourselves. If your trust has been betrayed enough times, you can begin to question your own judgment, wondering how you could have been so naive, missed the red flags. “And that mistrust of ourselves can often lead to us just questioning whether or not we could ever trust again,” says licensed marriage and family therapist Moe Ari Brown, a love and connection expert at the dating app Hinge, “whether or not we can even trust ourselves to make the right choice.” You might believe that the safest thing to do is to isolate to avoid pain.

This impulse is a form of self-protection, Brown says. But without interrogating the source of the insecurity — often a past breach of trust — and some self-compassion that you (and those with whom you interact) are worthy of a vulnerable, honest relationship, you might find it difficult to open up. “You can’t make yourself feel trusting,” Brown says. “It really is a process that happens through consistency over time — consistency on your part to remain open, even when you want to close.”

But complete distrust creates a chasm between all people and closes off the ability to form meaningful relationships. If you struggle to see minor breaches of trust as evidence of human fallibility, you might assume everyone acts in bad faith and be more likely to prematurely end relationships. “People who never trust also don’t receive feedback,” Schilke says. “If you don’t make the first step, you don’t learn who can be trusted or not. They’re not even exposed to that learning experience.” High trusters, on the other hand, may get burned every now and then, but they gain information from the betrayal: I’ll never do that again.

Vulnerability and trust are mutually beneficial forces, each one feeding the other. Sharing a secret and trusting that the other person won’t spill breeds more intimacy, greater closeness, research shows. When the secret-keeper proves trustworthy, you’re more likely to confide in them again. The secret-keeper, meanwhile, is secure in their role as a confidante and trusts you more, too. To build trust, you’ve got to open yourself up to potentially being hurt. “Being vulnerable to someone else is a first step,” Krems says. “Yes, it can be scary, but that means that they might be more likely to be vulnerable to you then.”

Blind trust isn’t exactly ideal either. A healthy dose of distrust is what compels us to not leave our wallets unattended in a crowded bar and to lock our doors. A level of discernment is protective against these malicious forces.

You don’t need to extend full confidence in another to be a little more trusting. Trust is contextual — you trust your doctor to give medical guidance and a mechanic to service your car — and incremental. You may not want your new neighbor to pet sit for a week, but you do trust them to water your plants for a few days. Trust is a ladder in that way: each kept promise, each show of loyalty gives way to another.

Even if you are betrayed — intentionally or not — we can choose not to assume the worst, that maybe someone made a mistake, to remember, according to Kim, that people want to be virtuous and trustworthy. But we might need to clarify what trust means to us. You can tell someone you want to be kept in the loop about certain decisions about work. You can agree not to see other people early in a relationship. We can choose to keep trusting and understand that most people don’t want to exploit goodwill; they want to respond in kind. “If you seem like you’re looking after them,” Kim says, “they will reciprocate.”