TrustTalk - It's all about Trust

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 Seni...

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,...

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 somethi...

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 cos...

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 underestimat...

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. T...

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. An...

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...

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...

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...

When we disagree with someone, it's tempting to assume the problem is simple: they're irrational, biased, or misinformed. But what if human reasoning doesn't work the way we think it does? What if reasoning isn't primarily about finding the truth on our own, but about exchanging arguments with others? In this episode of TrustTalk, we speak with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier of the CNRS in Paris...

When the United States openly pressured Denmark over Greenland, the immediate dispute faded fast. The damage to trust did not. This episode looks beyond Greenland to a bigger question: what happens when the world’s most powerful country starts behaving like an unreliable partner? International law, trade agreements, and security alliances only work if states believe others will still play by the r...

Trust is often talked about as if it were bad weather, something that just happens to us, beyond anyone’s control. But what if trust doesn’t disappear by accident, and what if its erosion has very concrete causes? In this episode, Ruben Beijl, co-author of Time for Trust (Tijd voor Vertrouwen), discusses how trust is built through participation and erodes when participation is only symbolic. Drawi...

My guest today, Gert Tinggaard Svendsen challenges one of the most common myths about high-trust societies: that trust is cultural or “in the DNA.” In Denmark, he argues, trust is built, not inherited. It grows from institutions, incentives, and everyday experiences of fairness. He defines trust in practical terms: the likelihood of being cheated. When corruption is low and the rule of law applies...

On Christmas Eve, Santa Claus joins TrustTalk to discuss trust, doubt, and why listening to ourselves and to others matters as we look ahead to a new year, referring to Rudyard Kipling’s poem "If" on how to be confident without ignoring the doubts of others.

Our guest, Mara Revkin, a leading scholar of governance and justice in conflict zones, talks about how civilians make trust decisions when the state collapses and armed groups take control. Drawing on fieldwork and survey research in places such as Mosul, this conversation challenges the idea that trust in wartime is driven by ideology or belief. Instead, it shows how trust under extreme condition...

Trust isn’t tested in calm moments; it’s exposed when leaders face uncertainty, conflicting demands, and real human consequences. This episode traces that reality across multiple organizations and industries. We look at Boeing, where leaders underestimated the depth and duration of a crisis that reshaped global aviation trust. We examine Nokia’s Bochum layoffs, a case that shows how a single restr...

Trust isn’t tested in calm moments; it’s exposed when leaders face uncertainty, conflicting demands, and real human consequences. This episode traces that reality across multiple organizations and industries. We look at Boeing, where leaders underestimated the depth and duration of a crisis that reshaped global aviation trust. We examine Nokia’s Bochum layoffs, a case that shows how a single restr...

Our guest, Kathryn Judge from Columbia Law School, explores how trust quietly sustains the financial system and why it becomes most visible when things start to break. She explains that in finance, trust means acting despite incomplete information. Depositors often have little insight into the health of their bank, yet they continue to keep money there, relying on signals, habits, and confidence....

Trust in institutions, says Chris Long, professor at St. John’s University in New York City and a leading scholar on trust, control, and institutional contradictions, erodes when there’s a gap between what organizations say and what they actually do. These “institutional contradictions”,  when stated values and real-world behaviour diverge, create confusion and cynicism among citizens and employee...

Few people stand closer to the intersection of politics and justice than prosecutors. In this episode, former federal prosecutor and Columbia Law School professor Dan Richman discusses why public trust is both the backbone of the justice system and its most fragile component. He explains how prosecutors have a uniquely delicate role in a democracy: they help build public trust, yet depend on that...

Our guest in this episode is Lord Jonathan Sumption, former Justice of the UK Supreme Court, acclaimed historian, and one of Britain’s leading public voices on law and democracy. The conversation explores the uneasy boundary between law and politics. Sumption reflects on the long history of the U.S. Supreme Court as a political actor, from the Lochner era’s resistance to worker protections, throug...

Our guest is Charles Feltman, founder of Insight Coaching and author of The Thin Book of Trust . Charles has spent decades helping leaders and teams strengthen their ability to lead through trust. He explains how trust is not built in theory but in everyday situations where it can grow or erode, in vague requests, unclear feedback, or the rush to move too fast at work. His framework is simple: tru...

My guest, Tiziana Gaito explores what happens when a company caught in a sustainability scandal loses the trust of its stakeholders, and isn’t even believed when trying to make amends. Rather than offering a simple story of repair, it delves into the deeper dynamics of distrust: how it forms, why it lingers, and what makes it fundamentally different from trust that’s merely been shaken. The conver...

Our guest today is Roger Mayer, one of the most influential scholars in the field of trust and co-creator of a widely cited model of organizational trust. After attending Roger's presentation at the FINT Conference in Genoa, Italy, podcast host Severin de Wit sat down with him for a conversation on the evolving nature of trust and the surprising role that suspicion plays within it. The conversatio...