What does it actually take for a hospital, a research institution, or a public health agency to deserve the trust of the communities it serves? Consuelo H. Wilkins has spent her career asking that question — not as a philosopher, but as a physician who sees patients and as a researcher who has built the tools to measure whether trust is really there. Prof. Wilkins is Professor of Medicine and Senior Vice President at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, where she also holds the Mildred Thornton Stahlman Chair in Rural Health. She led the development of Vanderbilt's Racial Equity Plan, and her team created one of the first measurement tools designed specifically to capture how historically excluded communities perceive trustworthiness. In this conversation, she argues that institutions get the direction of trust the wrong way round: they ask to be trusted before demonstrating that they are trustworthy. She reflects on what it feels like to sit across from a patient who does not trust the system behind the white coat, why so many institutions respond to broken trust with the wrong remedy — the glamorous ad campaign that avoids the underlying grievance — and what the Covid pandemic revealed about the transparency and humility so often missing from public health. She also explains what the numbers show about the specific fears Black and Latino communities bring into medical research — fears clustered around secrecy, being misled, and loss of control over their own data - and why lumping all marginalized groups together is a mistake that leads to interventions that do not work. Along the way, she offers a hard-earned lesson from leading Vanderbilt's Racial Equity Plan: equity work only endures if it is embedded across every function of an institution. Because when political pressure arrives, isolated initiatives are the first to fall.

Most people think philanthropy is about money. John Loudon, Executive Director of the COmON Foundation and one of the best-known philanthropists in conservation and nature preservation, with a career spanning three decades across Europe and Africa, thinks it is about trust. In this episode, we talk about what happens when trust is missing from giving, how philanthropy becomes distant, data-driven, and ultimately ineffective. And what it looks like when trust is genuinely present. John brings two stories to illustrate this. One from Malawi, where a community that had been depleting a national park for survival became its guardian angels once their real need - water - was met. Trust made that possible. And one from the Baviaanskloof in South Africa, where 125 years of goat farming had turned a valley into a near-desert, and where two years of conversation among farmers, guided by Otto Scharmer's Theory U, brought it back to life. The solutions came from within. Nobody arrived with a plan. Nobody needed to — because trust was already in the room. John also introduces a concept most funders have never heard of — Key Transformative Indicators — and explains why he measures success not in outputs but in signs of change. Why is giving harder than fundraising? And why the most important thing an outside organization can do when it arrives in a struggling community is put away its plan, start listening, and earn the trust that makes everything else possible.

In this replay of a 2023 interview, Severin de Wit speaks with Tom Tyler, professor of law and psychology at Yale and founding director of the Justice Collaboratory. A psychologist teaching in a law school — a rare combination — Tyler argues that legal systems are built on assumptions about human nature that are seldom tested against what psychologists actually know. His research points to something striking: people comply with the law more because they trust it than because they fear it. And what builds that trust is not whether you win or lose your case, but how you were treated along the way — whether you were heard, treated with respect, and felt the process was fair. This is the idea of procedural justice, and it has both a decision-making side (voice, neutrality, consistency) and a relational side (dignity, sincerity, genuine attention to people's concerns). The conversation ranges across criminal justice, civil and administrative law, prisons, and policing, including how police officers who feel fairly treated by their own superiors go on to treat the public more fairly. Tyler explains why a system built on fear requires policing forever, while one built on trust makes communities stronger: people cooperate, testify, engage with their neighbours, and invest in where they live. He also has warm words for the Netherlands, citing the Ombudsman's adoption of procedural justice principles and the influence of empirical research on Dutch policy — and a challenge for the legal world everywhere: take empiricism seriously as a tool for improvement. A thoughtful, evidence-based case for why trust isn't just a different model of legal authority, but a superior one. [ Due to the holiday season, we are publishing this interview again. It was first published on September 6, 2023, as episode 76]

In this replay of a 2023 interview, Severin de Wit speaks with Economist Benjamin Ho - Professor of Economics at Vassar College and author of Why Trust Matters: An Economist's Guide to the Ties That Bind Us. What if trust isn't just a feeling, but something humans have been calculating for thousands of years? Ben Ho uses game theory to explain why we cooperate at all, why we keep promises that cost us, and why the words I am sorry almost never work the way we expect. Ben explains why an apology only repairs trust when it carries a real cost. He shares what an experiment with Uber revealed about late rides and unhappy customers, and why Bill Clinton never apologized over Monica Lewinsky - exposing the hidden trade-off between being liked and being respected. The conversation travels from early hunter-gatherer societies, where the first written records were accounting rather than poetry, to the Paris Climate Agreement - a deal built almost entirely on trust rather than enforcement. Ben makes the case that trust is the quiet infrastructure beneath markets, contracts, and treaties. Take it away, and none of it holds. [ Due to the holiday season, we are publishing this interview again. It was first published in May 2023 as episode 63]

Imagine standing in a busy train station, asking strangers to answer a few questions. How many people would you need to approach before five say yes? In a now-classic study, Vanessa Bohns predicted twenty. The actual number was ten. People were almost twice as likely to agree as she expected, and two decades and more than 14,000 requests later, the finding still holds. We consistently underestimate how often others will say yes to us, and how hard it is for them to refuse. This is really a conversation about trust. We tend to assume that when someone agrees to a request, they have thought it through and decided the person asking can be trusted. Vanessa's research suggests something different. People often say yes in the moment because saying no is hard, not because they have decided to trust. The judgment about trust comes later, sometimes much later, and sometimes the trust we thought was there was never really there at all. In this episode we talk about why gratitude letters mean more than we expect, why Monica Lewinsky could call the same relationship consensual in 2014 and question it in 2018, how a single phone call from Countrywide Financial moved Moody's to reverse a credit rating overnight, and why telling people they have the right to refuse changes almost nothing, but giving them the words to do so changes a great deal. We also look at how moving so much of our professional and political life into email and text quietly erodes the trust we build with each other. Vanessa Bohns is the Braunstein Family Professor and Chair of Organizational Behavior at the ILR School at Cornell University. She is the author of You Have More Influence Than You Think, and her next book, Should I Say Something?, is out later this year.

We tend to think of trust as something that grows where people agree. Where neighbors share values, where voters share a party, where a city sees itself as forward-looking and inclusive. The more common ground, the more trust. That, at least, is the intuition. San Francisco complicates that picture. Eighty per cent of voters belong to the same party. Almost everyone calls themselves progressive. The city is wealthy, diverse, and proud of both. And yet, by one well-known measure, it is also among the least trusting cities in the United States. The deepest political conflicts are no longer between left and right. They run between people who all believe they are on the same side. Our guest today has spent years thinking about why. She grew up in a modest stucco house beneath Sutro Tower, watched her neighborhood empty out in what was later named "white flight", and went on to become a political theorist. Her current book project asks the mirror image of the famous question Thomas Frank posed about Kansas. Not what is the matter with the American right, but what is the matter with the American left, and what San Francisco, as its laboratory, reveals about the limits of progressive politics. She identifies four kinds of leftists in the city, traces the school board recall and the Chesa Boudin recall to something deeper than pandemic frustration, and reaches back to a nineteenth-century French idea - solidarism - for a way out. Her argument about trust is unusual: that distrust, the willingness to challenge entrenched power, is sometimes what makes genuine trust possible later on. Our guest is Margaret Kohn, Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and the author of the forthcoming book What's the Matter with San Francisco?

We tend to distrust people who lead with their emotions. In business, in politics, in negotiation. Someone who gets angry, who shows empathy, who wears their feelings openly is seen as a liability. Not quite serious. Possibly dangerous. Our guest today disagrees. Quite fundamentally. He has spent years studying how people actually make decisions — under pressure, in competition, in cooperation. And what he finds is that emotions don't cloud judgment. They are part of how judgment works. Trust is not a calculation with feelings getting in the way. Trust is a feeling — one that shapes the calculation from the start. He has conducted experiments showing that a single hormone can make people more trusting than they should be. How mistrust becomes self-fulfilling. And how a toxic workplace doesn't just harm the people inside it, it spreads outward into society. He calls it social pollution. Our guest is Eyal Winter, Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the author of Feeling Smart: Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think.

Wikipedia serves 11 billion pages a month and almost nobody questions it anymore. But how did millions of anonymous strangers, unpaid and from every culture, manage to build the world's largest encyclopedia together and keep it honest? The answer, according to Jimmy Wales, is trust — and trust by design. In this conversation, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and author of The Seven Rules of Trust, talks about what it actually takes to build trust at scale. We discuss why assuming good faith works better than suspicion, why civil conversation is rare online but does not have to be, and what the Nixon checkers speech teaches us about transparency. We also look at how organizations can recover from a trust crisis, and why, more often than people think, they can.

Every day, millions of people trust retailers to decide what ends up on their table. But that trust extends far beyond the products themselves. It touches supply chains, leadership decisions, sustainability, and the values that guide a company, often under pressure and out of public view. In this episode of TrustTalk, we speak with Dick Boer, former CEO of Ahold Delhaize and now a board member and advisor to several large companies, who led one of the world’s largest food retail companies through major transformations, including a global merger and the aftermath of a corporate crisis. He reflects on how trust operates at every level of retail, from food quality and sourcing to employees, customers, and society. Dick Boer shares candid insights on the dilemmas leaders face when values collide with commercial pressures, why trust must be actively rebuilt after a crisis, and how leadership culture differs across countries. He also discusses the importance of purpose-driven leadership, the role of transparency with boards and teams, and why trust in leadership ultimately begins with building the right team. Looking back on his career, he reflects on the hardest lessons he learned about trust, the importance of staying grounded as a leader, and why openness, honesty, and the courage to make difficult decisions are essential to maintaining trust over time.

David Bersoff, Head of Research at the Edelman Trust Institute, has spent decades measuring trust across the globe. His most striking finding right now isn't that trust is collapsing, it's that our trust circles are shrinking. We've reached a point where people who think differently, vote differently, or read different sources can barely get into each other's trust circles. When those circles stop overlapping, the bridges between us disappear, and democracy starts to strain. In this conversation, David unpacks what he calls insularity: the homogenization of trust to the point where 7 in 10 people hesitate to trust someone who is simply different from them. He also explains why trust isn't disappearing overall but becoming dangerously uneven, with the gap between those who feel institutions work for them and those who feel the system is stacked against them widening every year. We dig into why employers have become the unlikely safe harbour of trust, what "certainty bubbles" can teach businesses navigating uncertainty, and why trust brokering, helping groups understand each other rather than trying to change each other, may be the most realistic path forward in today's climate. David also shares three things most people fundamentally misunderstand about trust: that just because you experience trust every day doesn't mean you understand how it works; that there are different kinds of trust, in ability, in motivation, in integrity, each granting a different licence to the people or institutions that earn them; and that trust is something you have to actively strategise around and build on purpose. It doesn't simply come from being a good company or doing your job well.