Trust is an essential ingredient of any functional social system. From families to nations, to global organizations, without trust everything becomes a lot harder. When trust between people is lacking, a lot of time and effort needs to be spent on formalizing understanding and safeguarding agreements. Constant vigilance is required to ensure actions are taken as agreed on and intentions and communications stay aligned with the official purpose and missions of the social entity people are part of. When things gets worse, the lack of trust can cause organizations to fail and fall apart.

You would think, therefore, that wise leaders all over the world, recognizing this danger, are working tirelessly to fix this issue. Yet, if we are to believe the Edelman Trust Barometer, over the past decades, trust has continued to decline.

Why?

One reason may be that science, business, and politics are trying to fix the problem where it is the most visible: on the world stage, inside international markets, between nations, across regions, … But trying to repair the damage where it appears is a fool’s errand when the real cause happens on a much smaller, more localized scale.

Trust is something that exists between people that know each other well enough to feel they can rely each other, predict each other’s actions, and understand each others’ motivations, beliefs, and convictions. Trusting people we know well and regularly deal with comes natural to us. The more we interact with and rely on the people that are close to us, the more confident we become that we can trust them to help us when we need it, just as we become more inclined to help them when they are in need of us.

Local trust tends to grow outwards and upwards. People that live in high-trust communities are much more inclined to extend that trust to ‘others’ – visitors, strangers, other groups they are not directly connected to – as well as to the larger social structures they are embedded in. It is as if trust can become a habit, and habituated local trust can grow into habituated global trust, if given enough encouragement.

But even local trust needs constant maintenance. People need to be in regular contact with each other. They need to engage in shared activities, where they can help each other, work on shared goals, share stories and ideas, and regularly reconfirm the confidence they have in each other’s intentions and actions. When they stop regularly getting together, their habitual, automatic trust in each other gradually weakens.

When local groups fragment, trust bleeds out of their systems. When people become more focused on their individual needs and desires; when they stop sharing and collaborating on a regular basis, trust stops being the default attitude towards others. When local trust vanishes, the habit of trusting anything at all quickly follows. The more isolated we become in our highly privatized individual worlds, the less inclined we are to trust the big, anonymous and somewhat abstract world outside.

It seems the root of our global problem is a local phenomenon. What does this tell us about how we can solve the global trust issues? That is something for a future post.

Trust me, I will get back to you soon.

©2026 Bard