What It Takes to Build—and Keep—Trust

Across countries, institutions, organizations, and communities, trust is under strain. The latest Edelman Trust Barometer describes a world in which people are turning toward smaller, more familiar circles of trust, even as business and employers remain among the institutions people still look to in uncertain times. Edelman calls this a “retreat into insular circles of trust,” with 70 percent of respondents globally “unwilling or hesitant to trust someone who has different values, facts, problem-solving approaches, or cultural background.” 

“The corrosion of trust within and across countries is one of our world’s most insidious problems,” says Dean Matthew J. Slaughter. And it is one reason, he argues, the world needs more Tuck: “Trust is not built in slogans or spreadsheets alone. It is built by people, with people, through the daily work of listening carefully, making hard choices with judgment, and acting with integrity.” 

In the following reflections, Tuck faculty examine trust across organizations, technologies, workplaces, and relationships. 

What they found? Trust can fray quickly and repair slowly. At its strongest, trust can drive meaningful change. In some cases, trust can be rebuilt. In others, the costs of losing it may be difficult to measure and harder still to undo. 

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The Cost of Broken Commitments 

Emily J. Blanchard
Professor of International Economics

Trust in global economic systems rests on a foundation of credible commitments—that the rules governing trade and investment will be stable, that agreements will be honored, and that the terms of engagement won't shift arbitrarily. With that foundation in place, firms, governments, workers, and communities can make long-horizon decisions—how to invest, where to source, what to build. When it crumbles, the damage is real, if largely invisible, and it grows over time: investments not made, supply chains not extended, partnerships not formed. 

The costs of distrust are no longer hypothetical. In the last year, U.S. policy has sharply departed from the strategic logic that governed American engagement with the global economy for decades. And notably, this pivot is by design. It rests on a bet: that whatever short-run leverage comes from upending established norms and expectations will outweigh the long-run consequences. This is a bold wager. The United States spent nearly a century as the principal architect and anchor of the global trading system and guarantor of global public goods—the market access, open shipping lanes, territorial sovereignty, and rule of law that underwrote the greatest improvements in health and reduction of poverty humanity has ever known. But the credibility of U.S. policy does not survive selective deployment. Once trading partners, firms, and citizens conclude they cannot count on American consistency, they make different decisions— and those decisions, once made, are not easily undone. 

Trust is slow to accumulate and fast to lose. That asymmetry may be among the most costly, and least measurable, legacies of this moment. 

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Trusting AI Requires Human Judgment

James Siderius
Assistant Professor of Business Administration; Harvey H. Bundy III T'68 Faculty Fellow

AI is changing trust because it increasingly sits between people and the information they use to make decisions. The issue is not simply whether people “trust AI.” It is that AI changes what they are being asked to trust: a recommendation, a data pipeline, an organization’s incentives, and the human judgment surrounding a given system. 

In organizations, for example, better AI can make trust more fragile. As the system becomes more capable, workers may check it less carefully. That can build superficial trust (i.e., “the AI usually gets it right”) while eroding the deeper foundation of trust: the human expertise needed to know when it is wrong. 

Leaders should therefore worry not only about AI errors, but about whether AI use is weakening the capabilities that make oversight credible. A similar issue arises on platforms. AI can personalize information in ways that feel useful, but users may wonder whether recommendations are helping them choose or quietly steering them toward what benefits the platform. 

Trust breaks down when people cannot tell whether the system is informing them or exploiting their attention, beliefs, or vulnerabilities. So leaders should not ask for blind trust in AI. They should build trustworthy systems: clear roles for when AI advises versus decides and visible accountability for outcomes. And when incentives are misaligned, there may be a role for governance or regulation that corrects the system to serve those affected by it. 

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Repairing the Social Fabric at Work 

Adam M. Kleinbaum 
Professor of Leadership and Organizations

As geopolitical tensions reshape the global economy, AI mediates more of our daily communication, and the post-pandemic reorganization of work continues to unfold, the social fabric of contemporary life is fraying. As a result, the world we live in today has become less interactive than it used to be. 

For the past five years, a tug of war has played out between employees who value the flexibility of remote work and managers who want people back in the office. In the hybrid world that resulted, many people now interact narrowly with their immediate co-workers, rather than engaging more broadly with colleagues across the organization. 

These informal interactions matter enormously. Engaging with a wide range of people creates valuable opportunities to build trust and to foster the kind of serendipitous exchange that drives innovation and collaboration. This is especially important for people who aspire to leadership, because leadership is fundamentally about aligning and inspiring people—both are far harder to achieve from a distance.

Whether due to remote work or the reality of organizations distributed across geographies and time zones, people simply aren't spending as much face-to-face time together as they would benefit from. Company offsites are one powerful antidote. Even brief, well-designed gatherings can do what daily virtual work cannot: build genuine trust, surface who knows what across the organization, and remind people that their colleagues are full human beings rather than video thumbnails. 

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Trust Begets Trust

Daniel C. Feiler
Associate Professor of Business Administration

An oft-underappreciated mechanism of trust is reciprocity. Trust is not only earned; it is elicited. Leaders who extend trust—by delegating meaningfully, sharing information, or signaling confidence in others’ judgment—often create the conditions for trust to be returned. The mechanism is partly relational, but also inferential: when a leader demonstrates trust, it updates others’ beliefs about the leader’s expectations and the norms of the environment. The reverse is equally true. Leaders who default to control or skepticism may unintentionally generate the very unreliability they seek to guard against. Further, distrust can be a particularly sticky state. Once we become wary, we shift into self-protection, thereby limiting the ability to observe the trustworthiness of others that has the potential to disconfirm our skepticism.

Effective leaders understand when trust and distrust will be self-reinforcing and those expectations self-fulfilling—and act accordingly. Many modern leaders do not seem to understand these dynamics well. 

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Designed to Be Trusted

Tami Kim
Associate Professor of Business Administration

For decades, social media platforms have argued that, as “technology companies,” they fall outside the legal scrutiny that applies to issues like filtering harmful content, curating news, and their psychological impact on users. And this argument has largely worked, especially given laws such as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which offered them broad protection. But I think they are starting to face a reckoning.

In late March, we saw a Los Angeles jury find Meta and Google liable for creating psychological harm due to the ways in which they designed their platforms (e.g., infinite scrolling fostering addiction). Just one day prior, a New Mexico jury found Meta responsible for endangering children by exposing them to harmful content.

This is a step in the right direction. At the same time, I can’t help but feel that it is unfortunate that this accountability is being driven by courts rather than from within the organizations themselves. As these decisions suggest, every design choice social media platforms make can have outsized implications for users. And importantly, regardless of how these platforms define themselves, my research suggests that users increasingly see them as critical infrastructure for speech and public discourse, informing their expectations about how these platforms should behave.

Ultimately, trust in digital environments is tied to design. The more these platforms deny that their design choices fundamentally shape users’ experiences, the more they risk eroding user trust.

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Where Safety Becomes Trust 

Tianna Barnes 
Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Trust is fundamentally rooted in a sense of safety. When perceptions of risk are low and social anxiety is reduced, individuals feel more at ease, creating the conditions for trust to develop over time. In organizations, trust tends to emerge through two primary pathways: task-based and relationship-based. Some employees build trust through consistent, reliable work interactions, while others require relational connection and interpersonal certainty to feel secure in their environment. 

In today’s workplace, the relational pathway to trust has weakened. Confidence in leaders’ commitment to employee well-being and job satisfaction has declined, disrupting trust development. As a result, when employees lack trust in their leaders and organizations, engagement and commitment often suffer. 

Research on workplace identity highlights two key drivers of this disruption. First, a lack of belonging: employees need to feel both connected to others and accepted for who they are. Second, a lack of identity safety: many individuals do not feel comfortable expressing themselves authentically at work, a challenge that is particularly pronounced among emerging generations. When authenticity is constrained, employees engage in effortful impression management, which drains cognitive and emotional resources that could otherwise support performance. 

Rebuilding trust requires reimagining workplace culture to prioritize both belonging and authenticity. This can include flexible work arrangements, opportunities for meaningful small-group connection, and open, two-way feedback between employees and leaders. Ultimately, when employees feel comfortable, valued, and connected, trust is more likely to develop—strengthening relationships with colleagues, leaders, and the organization as a whole. 

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Building Trust into Supply Chain Forecasts 

Brian T. Tomlin
William and Josephine Buchanan Professor of Management

Uncertainty is an ever-present reality in supply chain management. 

Executives make investment decisions in operational assets—factories, inventories, transportation modes, and more—based on qualitative beliefs and quantitative forecasts regarding future demand levels. Oftentimes, downstream firms in a supply chain (those closer to end customers) have better information about future demand than do upstream firms, but these downstream firms are reliant on the operational investments made by upstream firms. 

Downstream firms (let’s call them manufacturers) can help upstream firms (let’s call them suppliers) by sharing their demand forecasts, but because forecasts are often communicated as single points, it has long been known that manufacturers have a self-interested motive to inflate or exaggerate their forecasts to try and induce suppliers to build higher inventories and capacity levels. Suppliers, understanding manufacturers’ ulterior motives, don’t trust the forecasts given them, and this lack of trust reduces the value of supply chain cooperation. This trust-challenge is the problem my co-author and I explore in recently published research (Management Science, February 2026). We demonstrate that a manufacturer should not share their demand forecast with a supplier simply as a single point; they should also share their confidence level in that point forecast. The reasons are twofold. 

First, and somewhat obviously, the supplier benefits from a quantification of the uncertainty its pending investment faces. Second, and this is crucial, by sharing information about its confidence level, the manufacturer enhances the credibility of its communication and fosters supplier trust in the forecast. Both supply chain parties benefit from the resulting increase in trust. 

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Broken Glass: What It Will Take to Rebuild Public Health Trust 

Lindsey J. Leininger
Clinical Professor of Business Administration; Faculty Director, Center for Health Care

I think of institutional trust like a glass coffee table, once intact, now shattered by the sledgehammer that was the pandemic. The total amount of trust hasn't disappeared; it's fragmented. It now lives in smaller shards: your kids' school nurse, the local pharmacist, the digital microinfluencer your neighbor loyally follows. 

For those of us in the trust-rebuilding business, the work is about getting out the glue gun. Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy offers a useful frame: "It's hard to hate people up close." Personal connection is the strongest form of superglue, and the most effective rebuilding efforts are those forging bonds across the pieces, not broadcasting from above them. 

Promising examples include conversations between MAHA moms and institutional public health leaders, and the work of Braver Angels, which convenes people across the political divide for compassionate conversation. These relationship-building efforts are slow, small-scale, and unglamorous. But they are ultimately sturdier than flashy media campaigns and more honorable than fear-baiting. They work because they are built on empathy, not authority. 

Personal bonds are one kind of glue. Shared understanding is another, and scientists bear a particular responsibility for it. We need to help people understand that science is a self-correcting method, not a fixed set of facts. Trust is rebuilt heart first, but it holds only when the head comes along too. 

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The Human Side of Technology Adoption

Michelle A. Kinch 
Assistant Professor of Business Administration

The velocity at which companies are integrating new technologies into job design is stunning. 
Technologies promise productivity, efficiency and information processing at unprecedented scale, but in many ways, these promises are not yet realized. This is, at least in part, because the people who have been doing the work must trust that the new technology is going to profit them personally. 

Complex technologies can create uncertainty, which breeds anxiety and mistrust. Leaders across industries have used tactics such as forcing the use of AI and pursuing AI substitution for what used to be human tasks. These actions serve to heighten worker mistrust—particularly as automation increases the distance between human connection. Some companies have even experienced backlash from their customers as a result. Of course new technology should not sit on a shelf. Our economy, society and indeed our very existence depends on these advances. But leaders ought to introduce technologies in ways that are palatable: involve frontline employees in the testing and rollout, listen and respond to feedback to build and maintain trust among all stakeholders—employees and customers. Helping employees feel a sense of ownership and greater control can increase buy-in that leads to lasting and satisfying change. 

This story originally appeared in print in the Summer 2026 issue of Tuck Today magazine.