Trust is broken. Here’s how we rebuild it

rebuilding trust – Gallup data shows Americans place very low trust in institutions, including businesses, television news, and Congress. The piece argues the real problem isn’t disagreement over facts—it’s the collapse of shared belief about what’s real. Drawing on evolutionary

The first thing that stood out after moving to former Eastern Bloc countries wasn’t just politics. It was conversation—how quickly conspiracy theories surfaced as if they were everyday weather. The official story, people seemed to feel, was never fully trustworthy. So they built their own narratives to explain nearly everything.

America isn’t far from that mood. An annual Gallup survey finds very little trust across almost every institutional class, including businesses. When respondents were asked which institutions they trust “a great deal” or “quite a lot. ” only 15% said they trust large corporations. 11% trust television news. and just 10% trust Congress.

It doesn’t stay at the level of attitude. Trust is what makes collective action possible. Without it, people don’t only disagree on solutions—they stop agreeing on what’s real. If leadership means getting people to act together, then rebuilding trust can’t be treated as a messaging problem. It has to be rebuilt as a social mechanism.

That’s where the question becomes sharper: how is trust created in the first place, and what happens when institutions stop being connected to the communities that rely on them?

Religion, trust, and the cost of believing

The traditional theory among intellectuals has long been that religion originated in superstition—an attempt by early societies to cope with random forces they couldn’t control, like rain and drought. Religion, in this view, was a way to interpret the world.

Evolutionary psychologists argued against that explanation, pointing to a fatal flaw: religion is expensive. It takes tremendous resources and human effort. If religion were merely superstition, nonreligious societies should have been able to outcompete religious ones. And that didn’t happen.

The prevailing evolutionary theory of religion today is different. It suggests religion enabled collective action. The adornments, chanting, singing, and clapping aren’t side effects—they’re part of the point. If people can come together to perform elaborate rituals. they can also coordinate on other complex tasks. like organizing hunts. building structures. and executing coordinated attacks on enemies.

The catch is trust. Every form of collaboration depends on people playing different roles. In a church service, there are priests, congregants, a choir, altar boys, and more. For the whole thing to work. everyone has to accept their own role and trust that others will accept theirs too. When that trust breaks down, collective action breaks down with it.

Even in modern life, that instinct doesn’t disappear. People go to great lengths to signal identity and the role they expect to play. They buy particular brands, adopt labels, and introduce themselves through categories—“as a so-and-so, I think this-and-that.” Some wear uniforms. When others accept those identities, trust feels easier to maintain. When they don’t, trust collapses.

When groups synchronize, trust scales

Network science offers another way to see why trust matters—especially when coordination must happen at huge scale.

In 1665, Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens noticed that two pendulum clocks in a single case would synchronize their behavior. Scientists later observed similar synchronization in fireflies blinking, crickets chirping, pacemaker cells in the heart, and even in lasers and semiconductors.

Synchronization, in this framing, is collective action at a massive scale. The argument drawn from network science—explained in the book Cascades—is that these informational cascades don’t require centralized control. They’re driven by small groups, loosely connected, united by a shared purpose.

The story becomes concrete inside organizations. Imagine a sales team working in sync—until logistics problems start destroying trust with clients and sales. Shipments go missing, and despite their best efforts, the team can’t explain why.

Then a brother-in-law starts working in the logistics department. Any time sales sees a problem, they call him. Over time, the sales team and friends begin going on golf outings with the logistics group’s buddies. What used to be informational distance between departments becomes almost nothing. Work begins to synchronize.

In network terms, those people act as boundary spanners—bridging structural holes in a network and reducing informational distance. The network science finding is that this process scales almost infinitely, enabling synchronized action across massive networks.

The hidden work of role and identity

But the sales-and-logistics story isn’t only about information. It’s also about the deeper question of identity.

Consider a church service again. Different people must assume specific roles. At the same time, congregants have to set their individual identities aside so collective action can happen. People may arrive as doctors, lawyers, educators—yet, for the purpose of the ritual, those identities need to become secondary.

Every leader faces the same challenge in an enterprise. You need people to take on specific roles—salespeople and logisticians, engineers and accountants. You also have to account for how people identify with region or product group. For the mission to function, everyone needs to accept an integrated identity aligned with the shared purpose of the enterprise.

That’s where boundary spanners come in again—built at scale through network-based strategies.

Facebook. for example. originally designed its six-week engineering boot camp to help it scale by immersing new engineers in its methods and codebase. What it found wasn’t just onboarding efficiency. Boot campers formed bonds with their cohort that persisted long after they moved to disparate parts of the company.

Experian found a similar pattern through “Le Tour de Experian” bike rides built to benefit charity. Employees who participated formed bonds spanning organizational boundaries, which then led to professional collaborations. So the company created Employee Resource Groups and Clubs to build connections across a wider variety of interests.

Other organizations encourage high-potential executives to rotate across divisions. Still others use seminars and best-practice programs. The shared point is that leaders have to deliberately create connections that cut across boundaries. When they do, communication improves—but the bigger change is the trustful bonds that make collective action possible.

Trust in institutions breaks when communities feel outside

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 made this fracture visible in a personal way.

Dr. Anthony Fauci became a household name. He signaled institutional authority—standing behind a podium, wearing a white coat, speaking with passion about the “science” of the disease and its spread. He asked people to change behaviors: wear masks and distance themselves from neighbors.

For many, it didn’t land as shared authority. It didn’t feel like connection. Fauci appeared distant, like a figure from Kafka’s Castle—someone outside their community dictating behavior. Others wearing similar white coats and claiming similar credentials felt closer on social media. even when they offered very different advice. In the eyes of many, Fauci became a nefarious figure.

The shift didn’t begin with one person. Earlier mobile phone and social media days brought a sense that technology could undermine authoritarian institutions—an idea associated with color revolutions and the Arab Spring. But as Moisés Naím has noted in The Revenge of Power. authoritarian governments have learned to undermine democratic institutions using the same tools.

The mechanism, in that description, combines “populism, polarization and post-truth,” with leaders claiming they represent “the real people” against corrupt elites, experts, institutions, immigrants, and other outsiders.

When people reject information from institutions they feel alienated from, leaders can’t rely on authority projected from above. Power no longer flows primarily from the top down; it emanates from the center of networks. And power, in that setting, is gained through connecting outward.

That means leading through small groups—not through mass media or high-flying campaigns with clever slogans. The route back to trust requires connection that respects and affirms people’s identities, not just institutions’ claims to expertise. It also requires earning belief, not merely planning and directing action.

We’re not only seeing low trust in numbers. The Gallup results—15% trusting large corporations, 11% trusting television news, and 10% trusting Congress “a great deal” or “quite a lot”—sit inside a broader breakdown in how society coordinates.

Rebuilding trust, then, isn’t about asking people to accept an official version of reality. It’s about building the connections that make collective action possible again—through boundary spanners at scale. through bonds that cross role and identity. and through community-linked leadership that feels less like a podium and more like a shared mission.

trust Gallup survey large corporations television news Congress collective action network science boundary spanners organizational trust Facebook boot camp Experian Le Tour de Experian COVID-19 Anthony Fauci The Revenge of Power Moisés Naím