Dr. Matthew Pawlak

Trust is an important for establishing, maintaining, and developing interpersonal relationships and an essential factor for creating thriving communities. However, society is facing crises of trust; trust in government, religion, experts, and news media is in decline, while misinformation flourishes online. As a result, we find two interrelated problems: on the one hand, there can be too much trust when trust is misplaced in an object that is not trustworthy. The rise of conspiracy theories is a good example of this. On the other hand, there can be too little trust when people are unjustifiably sceptical of something that has been shown to be trustworthy. We saw this with the anti-vaccine movement during the pandemic, and in this case a refusal to trust in medical science became a life-or-death decision for many people. 

From these examples we see that trust is not a good thing in and of itself, but only when the thing we trust is itself trustworthy. Understanding trust is therefore more important than ever, so we can learn what we can still trust today, and what is trustworthy. To explore these dynamics, this seminar series will look at the following questions: 

Questions: 

What is trust? 

How is trust established? How is trust broken? 

What are the best strategies for building and rebuilding trust? 

How do we decide whom to trust and what is trustworthy? 

In this seminar series, experts connected with Trust & Society – The Global Network on Trust will share insights on how trust is understood and studied in different fields. We start by looking at how trust is defined in philosophy, theology, and the social sciences. From there, we explore how trust is built, broken, and repaired. Finally, we take this knowledge and apply it to case studies where different groups and organizations have tried to build trust. This will enable us to develop our own “Trust Lab,” where we can put different strategies for building trust to the test and learn together what works and what doesn't.