Have You Got Trust Issues?

Do you trust your government? Do you trust your neighbors or the strangers you meet on the street? Do you trust the media? Or your teachers? Who we trust is changing. And trust in our institutions and our fellow citizens is in steep decline. That's according to the World Happiness Report https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2025/trusting-others-how-unhappiness-and-social-distrust-explain-populism/. Who we trust can have a huge impact on our behavior and our happiness. So what's behind the dramatic changes in how we trust? And can we learn to trust in a smarter way? We ask advice from Rachel Botsman, the Trust Fellow at Oxford University's Saïd Business School and author of How to Trust and Be Trusted https://www.pushkin.fm/audiobooks/how-to-trust-and-be-trusted. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:32Laurie Santos?

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• 1:47Speaker 00

  Pushkin.

• 1:52Laurie Santos?

  Welcome to the second of our two-part series focused on the 2025 World Happiness Report. In the last episode, we talked about the decline of shared meals, but in this episode, we'll turn to a chapter that focuses on a different decline. In it, the French economists Jan Algen, Karin Blank, and Claudia Senick look at the changes in social trust, particularly the decreases in trust that so many of us have observed post-pandemic. The economists find that there's been a huge reduction in social trust globally, and they argue that these changes in trust have led not just to a big hit on our collective happiness, but also to increases in what they call antisystem thinking, with people rejecting traditional political parties and turning to populism. I wanted to understand how to make sense of these findings and the implications they're having for well-being

• 2:37Laurie Santos?

  worldwide. So to help me out, I decided to turn to one of my favorite experts on the science of trust.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Hi, everyone. My name is Rachel Botsman. I've been studying trust for over 15 years now, and the latest book is called How to Trust and Be Trusted. Intentionally a two-way title because that's how trust works. We trust other people, and then we want others to trust us as well. And you can get it on Audible, Spotify, or Pushkin FM. People tell me that it's really changed the way they trust others and others trust them, and that was the reason for making it.

• 3:11Laurie Santos?

  And so, as a trust expert, I'm curious your reaction to the fact that there's an entire chapter of the World Happiness Report devoted to trust. I mean, is that something you think is long overdue? Or is that something you are surprised by?

• 3:21Speaker 03

  I'm surprised it's taken so long to make that connection, if I'm honest, because I mean, I've always struggled with the word happiness, but satisfaction and joy is very much tied to social trust. So not just the people we have in our lives, but how much we can trust ourselves to take risks and explore new things, how much we can take risks in new relationships, how much confidence we can place in systems and society. So yeah, there's a very strong correlation there. So it's not a surprise, but surprised it took so long.

• 3:51Laurie Santos?

  I mean, when you read the report, was there anything particular that you found especially striking?

• 3:56Speaker 03

  I found it very alarming looking at

• 4:00Speaker 03

  The it's not even a decline, it like falls off the cliff in interpersonal trust. So that's the trust in families, friends, coworkers, people close to us. The mark is twenty twenty, so you think hmm, that's the pandemic, but there's no recovery from it. I could understand if it was social trust, like trust in strangers and other people, but the fact that there's no repair in that close circle. And for me, this ties into what I think is a huge societal problem that's not getting enough attention. And it's not just loneliness, it's that people are spending more time alone and at home than ever before.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Yes, I worry about loneliness as an epidemic, but I feel the rise of the antisocial society, our ability to be with other people, even people close to us and want to go out and connect with people. That was what I found the most alarming in the report.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Let's just start by defining trust. Um, you've had a kind of curious definition of it, one that I I haven't seen, this idea of this confident relationship with the unknown. What do you mean there?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a so a confident relationship with the unknown describes the need or the existence for trust. So if you know the outcome of something, or if you know how something's going to turn out, or there's very little risk in a situation, you don't actually need a lot of trust. It's in those situations where there is a really high unknown, or there is a lot of uncertainty where you need the most trust. And that's why there's such a strong tie between trust and uncertainty, which is the flip of how many people think about trust. So I ask many people to define trust and the answers you get back are typically around

• 5:46Speaker 03

  stability and expectations, things like reliability, uh, which I find really interesting that we're so wired on that sort of solid side of the spectrum, and that's what we attach trust to versus trust is needed in those unknown situations.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  It's also needed across all kinds of different contexts, and I think this is something you've so nicely pointed out in your work. Give me an example of the different domains in which we see trust and where trust seems to be. Matter.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  One of the things that really frustrates me is when you hear these very generalized ways of talking about trust. Oh, trust is in a state of total decline, right? That's the media headline and it's really not helpful. It's not helpful for our own states. It's not helpful for society or any system because I think of trust in different circles. So I'll give you a couple because they might ring true. The first is sort of more academic. You can think of institutional trust. So that's trust you place in institutions. The legal system, healthcare, education, government, whatever it might be, that's trust in institutions, that's trust in an entity. Then you have what we call interpersonal trust. This is the trust that really impacts us day in, day out. It's our family, it's our friends, it's our close circle, our coworkers.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  And those bonds are really, really important. They're the ones I'm actually most worried about. And then more broadly, we have social trust and that is the trust that we can place in strangers, that people we don't know. Our belief in things like integrity and moral good. So they're the sort of three academic ways of framing trust. Another way of framing trust is to think of trust in yourself, trust in others, and then the trust they placed in you. So that's more of like concentric circle approach. And trust issues can arise in any three of those circles. So some people find it very difficult to trust themselves, but can trust others easily. Others find that people naturally trust them for some reason,

• 7:37Speaker 03

  but they don't necessarily trust other people. So I find those circles really interesting to think about.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  They seem to be so important for happiness, but also really dynamic, right? You know, if you don't trust yourself, then what's that gonna lead other people to think of you and things like that? I mean, it must be really complicated to kind of get at some of these dynamics.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  And constantly evolving. So trust is not like this fixed asset. I don't like it when people talk about banking trust, you know, like it's a reservoir. They change with age, they change with experience, they change with environment, and most importantly, they change with context. Trust is so, so contextual and this is the part that we often miss.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  And so it seems like trust in all these different dimensions is super important for our happiness. But it seems like there's also two problems that we could have with trust, right? One is the idea of being too trusting. And then you know, you kind of get let down by the people around you, maybe even by yourself. Right. The second is this idea of being not trusting enough, right? Kind of not realizing that other people actually have your back and the uncertainty is not as scary as you think. And so I wanted to go through each of these in turn, maybe starting with this idea of being too trusting. In part because my understanding is that this is one of the reasons you got interested in trust in the first place. Share with me this story of what happened in your childhood where folks in your world were maybe too trusting.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think people often think of it as a problem, but it is. And the interesting thing, there is actually a high correlation between people who are very trusting and that consider themselves emotionally intelligent and intuitive. And the reason why is you are told that you're very good at reading people, that you can pick up on signals. So if you're someone that says, oh, I have very strong intuition about people. And that's something I felt from a really young age. And the story I tell in the book, I guess everyone has an origin story and mine is around a nanny that turned out to be a drug dealer that used our family's car, our Volvo nonetheless. A getaway car in an armed robbery.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  It's like a very like true crime trust origin story.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  The thing that's crazy about the story is that she lived with us for a year. It wasn't like she moved in and she did this in eight weeks. And she was this incredible nanny, like my memories of her were that she played with us. She was very attentive. She was a really good cook. She was very peaceful, but she had a complete other life that my parents discovered over time.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  And so I'm sure that looking back, there must have been some red flags about this nanny that you maybe would have questioned the extent to which you would have trusted her. As you look back, what are some red flags in this situation that you've kind of generalized to other situations and which we might wonder whether we're trusting somebody too much?

• 10:12Speaker 03

  I think that's the red flags as a child, but now my parents have told the story. They realized that when they hired her, they're both entrepreneurs and they were in a very intense time of building their companies and traveling a lot. So making trust decisions when you're under pressure is high stakes trust decisions, like who to leave your children with. Often leads to bad decision making because you want to believe that person. So that's the first lesson.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  And that one, I have to say, is like so important, right? I feel like there's so many situations in which just like the convenience of being able to trust somebody, just like you're like, I can't even question this right now because I just like have to make this work. So I'm just going to assume everything's going to be fine. You could totally see how that plays out in so many different domains.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Most hires at work, right? Like it's just left too late and convenience, no pun intended, often trumps trust. So we'll often give our trust away if it is convenient. That is a real life lesson. The second thing is, I think, the way when I asked them like, because there was no email, there was no video calling, there was no social networks at the time. You know, why did you believe this person? And they said it was things like she had a Scottish accent. And she said that she even came to work wearing a Salvation Army uniform because she said she really liked helping people and that she played the piano and the tambourine. So it's all these stereotypes of who is trustworthy. Accents are a really big influence on that.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  So that's been a life lesson in when I'm meeting someone, what signals am I tuning into? And so many signals really play to our biases. So we will look for people that are familiar or fit that kind of stereotype. So that's number two. Number three is listen to your children because

• 11:58Speaker 03

  I knew they were being lied to and I noticed things going missing around the house. I noticed on Wednesdays, we'd go to this strange flat and there was a strange man. And there was something that just didn't add up. And I would say to mom, these people come around and they talk about strange things. And I would get told off not to make things up. So trust children because they are really observant and they often don't have an agenda in the same way that adults do. So I'd listen to that feedback more.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  It also seems like you just need to perspective take a little bit, like get a really outside perspective, a bit of a distance perspective. Sometimes you can be, that can be your child, but I bet sometimes that can just be like. Another person who might not be in the tight situation you are, might not have noticed like the same things that you're noticing about how cool this person is and this Salvation Army, you know, you know, uniform they're wearing and so on. It seems like we often get into trouble when we trust our gut and don't take outside input when it comes to trust. Is that, does the research bear that out?

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Totally. I mean, they say trust has two enemies, bad character and poor information. And it's when we either don't slow down to get enough information, or as you say, Laurie, like, we don't get a different perspective. And I'm sure one of mom's friends, like, when she said that she just found all this money under a tree in a park, like the money tree, that someone would have said, those exist.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  That sounds sketchy. It sounds a little sketchy. Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  So let's walk through the things that really maybe are good indicators of trust, like these sort of so-called traits of trustworthiness, as you talk about them. Can you break these down for us?

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Yes. So, and I'm gonna say, I think some of them need updating. So this is based on social science that now has been tracking traits for 40 years. And these traits are changing, which I think is really interesting. The capability side, so you have, imagine two parts, you have capability, which is really about what you do. And then you have character, which is why you do things, but really importantly, how you do things. So how would you describe, Laurie, what you do?

• 14:00Speaker 00

  I would say that I'm a podcaster, I'm a teacher, you know, I try to be really there for my students. I try to use evidence in a really capable way, like, I have lots of things that make me capable, but also maybe I'm like a warm person, right? I want to take care of my students and help my listeners and so on.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  So there, you're talking about capability and character. So the capability, if you imagine, is your competence. So you have the skills, you have the expertise, you have the knowledge, you have the resources, you have YOAS and Institution. You have all these things that allow you to do what you say you're gonna do. So you're really credible on those things. But maybe there's some other things, I don't know, what's something you completely can't do? Like, you're terrible at?

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, so many things. Driving.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  I can't drive either.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Biking, biking, I'm really bad at bike, I don't know how to bike. Most physical things, I'm very clumsy, fall a lot, skiing, not great, yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  That actually makes you more trustworthy because you can be honest about things that you do. And then you're really comfortable saying, don't ever get in a car with me or don't ride with me. So that's your competence. What you're talking about with your, with your students, wanting to be there for them consistently. I'd imagine that you're this person that likes them to know that they can depend on you. That's the reliability trait and that is really, really important when it comes to trust. So you know, those like really inconsistent people that are high energy and they show up sometimes and then they completely disappear, there's no follow through. So that's it's on the capability side. And then on the character side, we have empathy, which you spoke about. I prefer the word compassion. You know, empathy doesn't really talk about the action side, the follow through.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  And then the last trait, which I think is the most important trait is integrity. And that's all about your interests being aligned with the best interests of other people. So you, the professor, your interests are aligned with the interests of the students. You, the host, the audience feels that this isn't self-serving, that you are there to be generous and to care about them and their learning. So that's what we talk about when we talk about trustworthiness.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  And I imagine that in these different domains of trust, the importance of say capability, this kind of combination of competence and reliability versus character, this combination of compassion and integrity, that might go up and down depending on what you need, right? Like I might not need a surgeon filled with a lot of character. I just really want him to be very competent and capable. But a best friend, I might really, you know, I don't necessarily care that my best friend does her job, but I really want her to be really empathic when it comes to, you know, helping me with my problems and so on.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  It's a really important, it comes back to context and it's such an important point because I don't know if you've heard, actually my dad said it the other day. He's, he's having something done to his hip and he's, I really don't feel like the surgeon cares. I was like. Yeah, but he's a great surgeon, right? Like, he's gonna fix the hip. And I think that has become an expectation on sort of a feeling-led society is that sometimes we can place too much emphasis on compassion and empathy. And that person can seem incredibly kind, but not capable. So this is why I think this alchemy of traits and thinking about the particular situation is it's almost like a compass for making really good decisions about people.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  And so if you're a person who's maybe meeting a new surgeon for the first time or a new business partner or a new love interest, and you really want to kind of make sure you're trusting appropriately, what are some strategies you'd use to do that?

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Well, I think the business situation is probably the easiest. And it's also where most people go wrong, because most people start with the competence piece. If you think about most job interviews or promotional interviews, like, so, tell me what you've done, tell me about your experience. Like, they are the easiest things to get from a resume or a reference check. And the number of interviews that don't get to the why and the how. The how is really interesting, like how people approach things, how they break down problems, how they are in difficult conversations. So I would like focus questions around that. The second thing that I would do is really try to understand someone's interests, intentions and motives. Not like, why do you want the job?

• 18:08Speaker 03

  But where are they really coming from? And again, asking yourself this question of, does that align with the role? Does that align with the organization? Because it's when you have that misalignment in a professional or a personal context that trust issues can arise. So you can even think of, I'm a bit uncomfortable saying this, but like in dating situations, like if someone really doesn't want children and the other person wants children, right? There's a misalignment there. If someone doesn't want a long-term relationship, if someone doesn't want a monogamous relationship, someone doesn't want to live with you. It's that misalignment that really is the problem. Now, you're not going to get there on the first date, it'll probably scare someone away. But over time, if you feel like there's trust issues emerging, there's probably some unsaid conversation around,

• 18:52Speaker 03

  I want this one thing and you want this other thing, and we're both too scared to say it.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  And then how do we overcome the biases that we talked about earlier? Is there anything we can do to get that perspective? Maybe not fall for familiarity and some of the other biases we talked about?

• 19:08Speaker 03

  It's so hard. I mean, if someone can come up with a solution around that, then tell me. But I think it's really obvious advice. It's becoming aware of what those biases are. For you, what does familiarity look like? What are the signals? And that's different for different people. So some people are very influenced by looks and appearance. Other people are really influenced by cultural background and accents. Other people are really influenced by education. A way of tuning into this is when you meet people for the first time. Where do you focus? Do you notice what someone's wearing? Do you notice what they're saying? Where does the conversation orientate itself as well?

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Like, these are really powerful signals as to what is important to you that may be where your biases are rooted.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  You've also suggested doing something that we talk about a lot on the Happiness Lab, which is like, take a pause, take a breath. How can taking what you've called a trust pause be helpful here?

• 20:07Speaker 03

  So a trust pause, it's something I invented for myself.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  All research is research, right?

• 20:16Speaker 03

  I tend to move quickly, do things quickly, think quickly, speak quickly. And I just realized there were certain situations where slowing down and really asking myself, was this person, this piece of information, this situation, this partnership, did they actually deserve my trust? And it's really placing value on your trust, that you have trust to give. And you don't have to give it to everyone. I found that to be quite empowering because in certain situations, you go, you know what? I'm gonna just hold back a little bit. Or it's not like a self-protection mechanism. It's just saying, I don't think I want to give you my trust at this particular moment.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  And you can think about that even in the context of online information. Like when you just share something without reading it, that would benefit from a trust pause.

• 21:12Laurie Santos?

  So far, we've talked about cases where we trust a little bit too much or a little bit too early. But when we get back from the break, we're going to discuss the other problem when it comes to trust and happiness. Trusting too little. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

• 21:29Laurie Santos?

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• 22:58Laurie Santos?

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• 23:43Laurie Santos?

  Rachel Botzmann, author of How to Trust and Be Trusted, is an expert on the science of trust. But I was curious how she thinks about the opposite. What is distrust?

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Oh, so the first thing I'd say is there's a difference between low trust and distrust. And that's really important to understand. So low trust can just be you don't have enough information, like you're new to a situation or a relationship. It's not necessarily a bad thing. And also, this is why I hate a lot of polls and surveys. If you try to live your whole life in a high trust state, it'll be pretty exhausting, right? Like, there's certain things that just don't require a high degree of trust. So that's the first thing I would say. Distrust, it's very difficult to define. I have not yet come up or seen a definition that I really like. But the way I think of distrust is more through the lens of behaviors.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  So I find it helpful to think of these three Ds. So when someone is distrusting, you tend to see this spectrum play out, where you see a defensiveness set in. And that defensiveness is because you have made yourself vulnerable or you've placed something of value. And in some ways, you feel that's being exploited or it's not being taken care of. And so the first instinct is to be quite defensive about that. Now, the thing about that stage of distrust is you can still fix the situation because the person cares. The second phase is disengagement. Disengagement is when you start to pull back. So you might have experienced this at work,

• 25:17Speaker 03

  where you're like, hmm, not really sure I trust this person or this situation or this boss. So I'm just gonna pull back. I'm not sure I'm gonna really show up or really care. And then the last phase, which is incredibly dangerous, and I think it's how we talk about distrust in society today, is disenchantment. And disenchantment means you have turned against that person, that organization, that system. And you're in a downward spiral because your only motive...

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Is to bring that thing down. You've become anti, you are pushing against. And the reason why this is so dangerous is because it can become all consuming for yourself, for others, and very, very toxic. So you see this in sports teams where someone turns against the coach. You'd see it in workplaces where they want everyone to leave. We see it wider in society where you want to turn against a party. That's how I tend to think of distrust is is moving through these three phases.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  And you mentioned sort of society, especially politics. It seems like this idea of disenchantment is running rampant. At least that's what we hear a lot from the news. But I know this is an idea that you've pushed back against a little bit, that like the this kind of the free fall of trust might not be as bad as we think. Explain why that's the case.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I find it really difficult to listen to news for so many reasons. But it's often because everything is described in free fall, including trust. So you'll see these graphs where it's just like this downward line. And from about 2020, it's like falling off a cliff. That's across the spectrum, actually, the institutional, the social and the interpersonal trust. To me, that is problematic because the way I think of trust is more like energy, that it's not getting destroyed, it's changing form. And so what might look like low trust or distrust to you is just someone trusting differently. And once you see this, it explains so many things and it stops so much judgment.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  So it doesn't even have to be between political parties. You see it within generations where people will say, well, that Gen Z or Gen Alpha, they just don't trust anymore. That is not true. Their trust is sideways, like they trust their peers and friends and influencers because that's where they get their information. They don't trust upwards. So thinking of flows of trust versus amounts of trust can be really helpful in understanding dynamics in relationships and then bigger paradigm shifts happening.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  It seems like one of those bigger paradigm shifts is kind of the trust that we have that in some sense, for lack of a better word, is kind of distributed, right? You mentioned kind of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, like. You know, trusting influencers, trusting what they read on social media. Is that a cultural shift that you're seeing in this trust research too?

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Yes, it's it's huge. So what we see is like, if you imagine like an evolutionary trust, we had institutional trust. So everything was very top down and hierarchical and centralized and defined by fixed boundaries. So we used to get a newspaper or we'd turn on the TV. That's institutional trust. And technology inherently blew that up and distributed it through networks and marketplaces and platforms and now through artificial intelligence. So the easiest way to understand this is imagine a trust that for decades flowed upwards and now is distributed sideways. And this has so much influence over so many things because who we believe is trustworthy,

• 28:45Speaker 03

  who influences our opinions and beliefs, what we decide to act on in the context of health, politics, education, life decisions, wellness. This is all moving sideways and sometimes the people sharing that information are not the most trustworthy. I'm interested if actually you see this in a happiness face that, you know, it really bothers me like when I see influencers online, they're usually alone. Like, do you know what I mean? Like they wake up alone, they meditate, they have their coffee, they stretch, they run alone, right? They work alone. Just really bothers me that that's the image of happiness.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  And I think we're falling prey to a lot of the biases that you talked about earlier about trusting too much, right? Like many of these influencers have, you know, this beautiful home that they go into and they tend to be really beautiful, right? Like we're falling for these tropes of like familiarity and maybe that's some of the things we like and a halo effect, this effect where we kind of like people who have other good things happening to them. Like it is true that like we're putting putting our trust, this distributed trust winds up maybe falling prey to as many of those same biases as you just talked about in the interpersonal trust domain earlier.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's in soundbites and fragments and very carefully curated images. And I know all this stuff and I started running last year and I fell down this rabbit hole so hard. And then I realized, no one looks like that when they run. No one looks like that at 10 miles, right? Like, because I'd be like, why am I in so much pain and sweaty and disgusting? And they're all like, you know, hair swaying and stuff. And you're like, because they're making money off me. And you've just made me think of something that I hadn't thought of. But if you think about the trust you place in influencers, like just a scrolling behavior, it's a one way thing, right? It doesn't flow back to you. And so much of healthy trust is reciprocation.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  So I do something for you, which then creates the space for you to do something for me. And those loops are what form trust. These one way forms of trust, let's not call them shallow trust, but these one way forms of trust, they're breaking those loops, those possibilities for reciprocation. And that's damaging the social glue, which I'd imagine is impacting our happiness and satisfaction. I'd be interested if the research correlates to that.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  So that's kind of the over trust we put in these distributed networks, you know, to these influencers and things like that. And that's, as you mentioned, happening alongside a real kind of emergence of distrust for institutions, whether that's, you know, governments or academic institutions like the one I'm at and so on. And this was the kind of thing that the World Happiness Report was really looking at, right? The chapter of the World Happiness Report that's on trust is trying to look at this puzzle about why there's been so many kind of voting behaviors that have shifted kind of more anti-institutional, right? For candidates that maybe want smaller government or kind of want to do away with government, you know, kind of candidates that really represent these sort of views that are kind of anti-establishment. Walk me through some of the things that this chapter found and how trust was really important

• 31:46Speaker 00

  for some of these changes in voting behavior.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  The report is really interesting. I don't agree with all of the framing. Sort of at the highest level, it's basically saying the far left have high trust and higher life satisfaction and the far right have low trust and lower life satisfaction. That's like top level, which is a problematic framing for me. And one of the reasons why is they're saying that when you're in a low trust state, you tend to be anti. You invest your energy in pushing against things, the status quo, you want to break down the system. And when you are high trust, you are for, so you're more progressive. Where the report gets really interesting is when you dig further down.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  So what I found interesting is that if you stick with this far left and this far right dichotomy, the far right had higher distrust in strangers.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  But much higher trust in their private circles. Close knit, family, friends, work colleagues, really high bonds of social trust. And then on the left hand side, there are actually signs of lower interpersonal trust, higher signs of loneliness and disengagement. And that, I think, is really interesting. Essentially, what the report is saying is that the social fabric is damaged for both sides.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. And damaged and damaged in different ways that might lead to the fact that it's very hard to see across the aisle, right? Because people are thinking about trust in different ways across different sides of the political spectrum, which is maybe what's leading to a disconnect in what people want governments to be doing over time.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so this idea of high trust and low trust, that's the problem because both sides have high trust but in different things. It's not that they lack trust, they just trust differently. And this is what we see is that when you take trust away from one area of our lives, it creates a vacuum. And that vacuum has to be filled with something. And that could be different beliefs, it could be conspiracy theories, but you have to fill that void. But I think, pointing out this idea that the social fabric is damaged and that the root causes of that, that are driving trust issues and problems of happiness are insecurity and loneliness on both sides. It's those two things that are merging together to really cause a sort of reconfiguration of trust.

• 34:10Laurie Santos?

  So is there any hope that our tattered social fabric can be repaired? And if so, how can we go about creating a future where we trust each other and our institutions? We'll look at that when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

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• 36:20Laurie Santos?

  In her audiobook, How to Trust and Be Trusted, Rachel Botsman has lots of great suggestions for increasing trust in our lives. One interesting concept is what she calls a trust leap.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  So a trust leap is whenever you take a risk to do something new or to do something differently. Now, when you talk about trust leaps, people often think about big things, getting in a self-driving car or buying Bitcoin that involves like a new technology. And that is a trust leap. That is how we change behavior. But trust leaps can also be... Relatively small in our lives. So it can be choosing to put your hand up at work to do something completely differently. It can be choosing to speak up in a meeting. And one of the problems I've actually seen around trust leaps is that first of all, people focus on the outcome. So they focus on where they want the leap to go and they imagine these leaps being really, really big

• 37:14Speaker 03

  versus small, consistent ways of doing something new or doing something differently and seeing where that takes us. So that is the concept of trust leaps.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  And so I'm guessing, I know the answer to this, but what are some of the things that prevent people from making these trust leaps? It seems like part of it maybe is a bias to assume the trust leap is going to go badly in some form.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  It's interesting you say badly because we often don't even get that far. Because if you imagine a trust leap involves going from the known and the safe and the familiar. And that's, as you know, Laurie, where we all love to be, like that's where we're wired to be. And it involves like going to the unknown because that's when we discover new things. Most of us, it's so hard to move from that place that is safe and familiar that we never even really take the first leap. So it's not that we are assessing risk. We're not thinking about, oh, these bad things could happen. It's often just the getting started and breaking the leap down that is the problem.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  I love this idea because it's really about like recognizing that getting out of your comfort zone, which we, so many of us struggle with, is in some ways a trust leap, right? It's like embracing the unknown and kind of trusting yourself that it's going to be fine no matter how it turns out, even if it doesn't go perfectly as planned.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think, you know, you said you don't like being on a bike. I hate being on a bike. It fills me with dread. I don't like skiing on the edges of things because I don't like ledges, right? So often where we find it hard to take trust leaps is associated with risks. So there are some risks, like physical risks, that are really hard for me to take. Like when I swim in the ocean, my husband's Australian and we go to Australia. I'm so afraid of the sharks, but no shark's going to come in three centimeters of water, right? But those trust leaps are really, really hard, but creative trust leaps are really easy for me to take. It's a very different type of of risk. And so understanding that again can be, and it's something I talk about in the book because I really believe it can help you

• 39:15Speaker 03

  understand where you're stuck and where you like things to be comfortable and where you really find it hard to stretch yourself is usually to do with different types of risk, financial risk, emotional risk, physical risk, creative risk. They all have a very different makeup in our lives.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  You've also argued that we'd be helped in terms of finding more trust by trying to sort out our trust barriers. What do you mean by trust barriers and what are some ways that we can understand them better?

• 39:40Speaker 03

  So the trust barrier is, as you can tell, I like my metaphors. But it is the thing that gets in the way. You know, like the number of people who say, I can't move, like they've never lived in a different country or they can't move jobs or in some ways they can't get off a relationship, they can't take up a new hobby, they are describing we're being stuck, that they are in some way paralyzed and that is because there is some kind of barrier in the way. Now that trust barrier, it might be a very practical thing like money, financial security. But it can also be things like companionship. I'm just really frightened to do it alone, not to go on about running, but I wouldn't be able to run if I didn't find a friend.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Cause I wouldn't run around the parks in the dark and I'd be really scared of what was going to happen if I got lost. That's a trust barrier. And in companies, these barriers get bigger. It's actually a really useful framework if you're launching a new product or service because often what you think is the trust barrier is very different from what the customer thinks is the trust barrier. So understanding what that perception is around risk, whether it's real or perceived, can be really helpful for launching a new product or service as well.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  And I imagine there are lots of trust barriers that come up in the domain of politics, which is what the World Happiness Report is about. What are some examples of trust barriers that come up in that domain?

• 41:00Speaker 03

  I don't really sure where to begin, but a trust barrier, actually, it's a funny thing, but it can be like nothing's gonna change. So. It can result in apathy, like I'm just not going to vote, I'm going to abstain. So believing that there is no way things are going to change direction or systems are going to change. Financial insecurity, that is a massive trust barrier. Not believing there's going to be any kind of redistribution of wealth or that my life is going to get better. Trust barriers can be much closer to home. You're probably seeing in the research the number of people and it's it's a real worry that they're never going to own a home. They're never going to be able to retire.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  And so it can actually paralyze people from even getting started, even though that life stage might be forty, fifty years away. So these are real trust barriers that are impacting people's happiness and immediate decisions.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  And so what are some questions we can ask ourselves to overcome these trust barriers? I mean, some of the ones you're talking about are structural, right? I don't have enough money for a home, these things might be harder. But some of the trust barriers, like, well, I can't do it by myself. They might be easier to overcome if we consult our fears a bit. So what are some questions we can ask ourselves to overcome these trust barriers?

• 42:11Speaker 03

  It's a good question. Where did it come from? Was it something I developed or was it something that I was told as a child? It's a really big one. So if you grew up in a family that always like, be careful, don't go that far or get down from there. A lot of it starts really young, Laurie, and that's not surprising because our relationship to risk and trust is really formed around the age of four. The second thing I would ask is, again, how much of this is real and how much of this is perception? So how much of this is rooted in facts and data versus my own fears? That would be the second.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  And then the third is not necessarily getting rid of the barrier, but lowering the leap. You know, I feel so lucky to teach at Oxford, but then I have friends who are like, I'd love my child to go there. And you're like, that is a very ambitious leap for many children. Like, why don't we just lower that leap a little bit? And if it ends up like that, great. It's not about not being ambitious and wanting achievement. I just think so much pressure comes in life because we make these leaps way too high.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  And I think that that happens in politics too, right? I think both because of the misinformation you talked about, right? You know, is my information accurate? Have I gotten the right facts? But also because we make the barriers to entry so high, right? I think when we envision maybe talking to somebody from across the aisle, we picture a really extreme person on the other side of the aisle, right? You know, because that's what we see in our distributed trust networks. That's what the influencers are talking to us about. Are there ways that we can maybe overcome these trust barriers in those domains too?

• 43:52Speaker 03

  I think it's a really important point because the way it's sort of pictured is often is taking on the system or taking on the other side. And I would start by just having a conversation that makes you uncomfortable. Being comfortable with the discomfort of a difficult situation is the starting place. So I have a lot of friends that have very difficult and different views on the war in Gaza. And, you know, at my children's school, they're banned from talking about wars or politics because, I quote, "it brings up big feelings." And I have a real objection to that because what are we teaching our children? That they can't deal with that discomfort? That they can't have a difficult conversation? That they can't hold that space with another human being that maybe has a different belief or viewpoint from them?

• 44:37Speaker 03

  So, you know, you can start with your own friends and your family and people that you know at the end are just, they're going to hug and tell you that they still love you, right? And knowing that nothing changes in that relationship. There's so much we can learn just from being with that discomfort and that heat and learning that everything is okay.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  And then on the other side of that discomfort, if you push through it, might be a trusting relationship that you're going to value tremendously and it's going to make you much happier.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, or like, not to go to my children, but like, this did happen in their school where they had quite a difficult conversation around the Holocaust, where some children, you know, now don't believe the Holocaust has happened. Now, they're nine and 10, that's not coming from them, that's come from somewhere. And the fact that the history teacher then backed them up and gave this very factual assembly, they were like, wow, there's someone who cares, right? And there's information that we can trust. And he explained where he got this information from. Now, regardless of what your side you're on, that assembly would have impacted. Both sets of children, the nonbelievers and the children that this was really important, that this chapter in history was remembered. So I feel like those moments, particularly with children, it's really like, I can trust

• 45:46Speaker 03

  this person, I can trust this situation. It's really important to teach.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  So as we think back to the World Happiness Report and the importance it's placed on trust and how trust might be going down institutionally, how lack of trust is kind of affecting our politics and so much, any last advice for how people on both sides can become a little bit more trusting?

• 46:04Speaker 03

  I think too much of the conversation is around institutional trust. These are systems that 99% of us cannot fix. They are too big, they're too far out of reach, right? So I would say focus on local trust. It doesn't even have to be your family and friends. Focus on things going on in your community, in your neighborhood, in your street. And really getting involved in something like that, it can do so much for your social ties, it can do so much for the glue and make you feel in some way back in control because you can impact the people around you. So that would be my advice is just stop looking outward and upward so much at these

• 46:46Speaker 03

  big problems and letting them consume so much energy. And it's not about withdrawal, it's not saying that, I'm not saying like be at home more alone, we don't need more of that. It's about local ties and community ties and connections that you could in some way put into action tomorrow.

• 47:04Laurie Santos?

  I hope you've enjoyed my conversation with Rachel and that you've learned a bit more about what you can do to trust and be trusted more effectively. If you want to hear more, be sure to check out Rachel's fabulous new audiobook, How to Trust and Be Trusted, available everywhere you get your audiobooks. That's a wrap on our special series on the World Happiness Report. But not to worry, because the Happiness Lab will be back next week. I'll be chatting with my friend, the happiness expert Gretchen Rubin, about her secrets to adulthood. So I hope you'll return soon for the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 47:42Laurie Santos?

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• 48:10Laurie Santos?

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