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What actually builds—and breaks—trust?
There’s no more important question right now.
As the tidal wave of AI-generated misinformation about the Iran war has shown, we’ve entered an era in which we literally can’t believe our own eyes. Everywhere we look, we’re not sure what to trust: Is that influencer real or fake? That viral video? Did my boss write that heartfelt yet stilted congratulations email, or did Chatty G?
In Super Skill, I wrote about how trust has become the currency of the AI Age. As AI masters technical tasks like coding and data analysis, our value at work will increasingly come from our ability to build trust and strengthen relationships with other humans.
We know that stories supercharge trust, triggering the release of oxytocin and literally putting our brains in sync. And a new study from one of the most groundbreaking researchers in trust reveals counterintuitive ways trust is built—and the subtle ways we sabotage our relationships without realizing it.
How you may be unwittingly eroding the trust in your relationships
In this week’s episode of our podcast, The Art of the Zag, Shane Snow and I sat down with renowned University of Purdue professor Dr. David Schoorman to explore the science of trust and how we can avoid the fatal mistakes that wreck our relationships.
Here’s the 1-minute teaser:
It was one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve had in the past year. Download it now. But for those of you who prefer to read (yay, literacy!), here are the five most fascinating things we learned:
1. If you don’t convince people of this one thing, they’ll never trust you.
Over the past quarter-century, Dr. Schoorman’s influential research has found that the key to trust is benevolence. No matter how honest and competent a person is, we’ll only trust them if they believe they have our best interests at heart.
This is why so many politicians fail; they can have the best resume and talking points, but they’re doomed if voters don’t believe they care about them. (A dynamic that’s dogged Democrats in rural America for years.)
It’s also why some brands fail while others succeed. Just look at OpenAI and Anthropic right now.
In late February, Anthropic stood up to the Pentagon—refusing to allow them to use their technology for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. As the US government moved to sever ties with Anthropic, OpenAI rushed to take its place.
In the aftermath, OpenAI uninstalls spiked 295%. Employees revolted, and their head of robotics quit. (No killer robots for Caitlin!) Meanwhile, Anthropic soared from outside the top 100 to #1 on the Apple App Store charts, and CEO Dario Amodei became a folk hero for standing up to the government.
If you want someone to trust you, don’t focus on facts, figures, and your own competence. Instead, tell a story that convinces them of your benevolence.
2. Location-sharing apps may be sabotaging your relationships.
Sixty-two percent of Americans know and use location-sharing apps like Find My Friends, including 75% of Gen-Z. And it’s causing more harm than you think, according to Dr. Schoorman’s latest research.
“When you ask your good friend to allow you to track them, you are saying to them effectively, I don’t trust you,” Dr. Schoorman told us.
But wait—haven’t we heard for the past decade that transparency is the key to trust? It turns out that’s only true to a point. Eventually, we cross a line in which excessive transparency becomes a “control system” that destroys trust. Case in point: Tracking your partner and friends all the time.
And as Dr. Schoorman reveals in the episode, the same dynamic plays out at work with bosses increasingly monitoring employees through surveillance software, Slack activity, and social media.
Are there scenarios in which location-sharing is crucial for safety? Of course. But if you want to build trust with your family, friends, and colleagues, one of the easiest things you can do is turn off Find My Friends.
3. Withholding trust is a one-way ticket to betrayal
Do you know anyone who likes to say, “You have to earn my trust”? Maybe it’s something you’ve even said yourself.
Often, people say this with pride, signaling that they’re not gullible or easy to trick. But Dr. Schoorman’s research has found that people who withhold trust are much more likely to fall into a trap that damages relationships.
“The conventional way when we think about trusting somebody—and I’ll call that somebody the trustee—we tend to worry: Is the trustee going to let me down? Is the trustee going to betray me?" Is the trustee not going to deliver? It’s not always the trustee who screws up the relationship. Sometimes it’s the trustor—the person doing the trusting.”
That’s because a scenario like this often plays out:
You decide to trust someone on your team to get an important task done over the weekend.
You enter the “vulnerability phrase” as you wait for the outcome: Will they get the work done?
Even though they usually pull through, you get nervous that they won’t complete the work, and you seek additional information to soothe your anxiety, checking their Instagram.
You see that they’re going on a weekend trip, which makes you more anxious.
You act on that anxiety by asking another person on your team to also do the assignment.
The original person you assigned the work finds out, and trust is broken—not because they failed, but because you didn’t trust them to succeed.
Those with a promotion-focused mindset—inherently trusting and focused on the upside of a situation—are much less likely to fall into this trust-killing trap. Even if you’re a prevention-focused person, resist the temptation to soothe your anxiety.
4. Remote work and AI are eroding our ability to trust our colleagues
Most knowledge workers love to champion the benefits of remote work, but it’s also eroding our trust and relationships with colleagues in subtle ways.
One of the most effective ways to build trust is by sharing stories—particularly vulnerable stories that establish trust through the “vulnerability loop”:
Person A takes a small risk by sharing something vulnerable; they admit a mistake, express uncertainty, or tell a personal story.
Person B detects this signal and is compelled to reciprocate.
Person B reciprocates by signaling their vulnerability.
Person A detects this signal, and a new dynamic has been established. Person A and B feel closer and trust each other more.
The problem: Remote work starves us of opportunities to tell those stories.
We used to share personal stories over lunch or happy-hour drinks. Now, our interactions with colleagues are limited to Zoom meetings where we show up five minutes late, exchange 15 seconds of banalities about the weather, and then talk about some shit that could have been an email.
AI is making this even worse. We don’t know whether the Slack and email messages we’re getting are authentic. A recent study by researchers at the University of Florida found that when bosses use AI to write messages, direct reports perceive them as insincere.
All of these impersonal interactions have a slow, corroding effect over time.
“Every time there’s an exchange, there are judgments made about, ’Do I trust this person more or less?’” Dr. Schoorman explained. “Trust builds slowly. It builds through these exchanges. And the more exchanges you have, the faster you can build trust. So you need to multiply those exchanges.”
Some simple solutions:
Avoid overusing AI in day-to-day communication with your colleagues and customers, especially in personal messages, such as congratulating them on an accomplishment or a life milestone.
Build a culture of storytelling in your team by carving out dedicated time for bonding through stories. I’ve often made this a ritual, inviting someone each week to kick off the weekly meeting by sharing a story about themselves.
Look for opportunities to allow your remote team to bond in person. At A.Team, we had a highly distributed remote team across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America. Once a year, we’d bring together the entire team at our A.Team Summit at small, rural resorts in Portugal and Italy for a week of bonding and building together. We structured every dinner and activity to invite people to share their story with different members of the team, and the effect was powerful: The in-person bonds we built carried through to remote work throughout the year. It was an investment, but the improved team cohesion and productivity more than made up for it.
Our conversation with Dr. Schoorman was an absolute masterclass in trust. You’ll also learn:
The surprising reasons Americans are much more trusting than any other country
Why your boss probably trusts you more than you trust them (and the surprising reason behind it)
Why Tiger Woods’ PR team tried to reframe his affairs as an addiction, and what it reveals about the psychology of betrayal
How to win over someone with a prevention-focused mindset
The “Terminator Test” for determining trust
Thanks for spending five minutes of your day with me. Tell great stories!
-Joe
I’m the best-selling author of The Storytelling Edge and Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age and the fractional CMO at Pepper. Share this post with a friend who’d find it interesting!
