How does trust work? It’s multi-faceted.
First, there’s congruence.
You say this is how you are, I see you behaving in ways that reflect that. This isn’t something I want to farm out to technology, it’s too easy to game anything that tried to quantify congruence.
Then, there’s connection.
I can’t trust someone who clearly has indifference or disregard for me. There’s no technology that proxies for this.
Next, we can throw in social context, or transitive trust.
When someone behaves negatively to other people with whom I can identify, I am likely to lose trust. This one is problematic in its nature because sometimes people are stuck in in-group thinking where doing bad things to someone we think of as ‘bad’ may feel correct to us, but I would argue that most of the time, there’s a violence and dominance in that behaviour that also provokes fear, rather than trust. If I see someone punishing someone I don’t like, I may feel like it’s warranted, but I also lose trust in the person performing the action.
We may have become inculturated with a kind of paternalism or patriarchal perspective that leads us to see punishers as protectors. My guess is that at heart, we know punishers are operating by invoking fear. First they came for…
We can also consider whether people we trust also trust other people and use their trust as a basis for our own.
Should we assume trust?
There’s a norm I’ve seen many communities and companies trying to establish of “trust until the trust is broken.” On some level, it’s a good strategy, a game theory that works. But it also feels like an approach developed by people who don’t regularly have to watch out for danger. Who don’t experience trust-breaking frequently, even in places where everyone has the best intentions.
To suggest that trust is about some kind of contractual, verifiable, identity-based thing feels like what is broken in the whole system (meaning the drive to quantify everything and extract its value). The way many technologists are talking today about trust is- basically a paradigm of imperialist, heteronormative, white supremacist patriarchy. (Though I’m not sure those labels are continuing to serve me, they have been a helpful lens).
Of course, trust is hard. Fundamentally, it starts by being able to trust yourself. It might be that a requirement for this kind of self-trust may be to go through the pain and heartbreak of seeing where one is not trustworthy to oneself. To notice how, to speak for myself, I have carried maladaptive lessons from trauma, how I have tried to avoid feeling shame by coming up with justifications, how I have been unwilling to look at my part in the systems I see as broken.
For communities to build trust, we need to start by creating containers that allow people to self-reflect without judgement. Witnessing this in others turns out to be highly trust-building. Offering welcome and checking our judgement builds trust for ourselves and others. It lets us be vulnerable, it lets us notice when we might want to rush to judgement and sit with that impulse, getting curious about what in ourselves we’re running from.