About Building Trust in Communication

What does it mean to build trust in communication? When it comes to topics that affect our lives but are also being actively debated or even contentious, such as vaccines or elections, questions of trust can arise: questions of trust in the information itself, in the source of that information, or the communicator sharing it.

Though we understand its importance, trust is not easily understood. This can make efforts to build trust with one another a mystery as well.
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What is ‘trust’?

Trust is an integral part of human behavior – trust allows us to navigate conditions of uncertainty, vulnerability, and risk in our daily lives with a sense of confidence and security. 

The integral importance of trust becomes especially relevant when it comes to the way we gather and process information. Trust helps to simplify things by helping us know where to seek information, or who to ask. Given the abundance of information now available to us online, we constantly make decisions about which information we can trust, or which information we should discount or approach with suspicion [11].

Here are some observations that scholars have made about trust [13] [15]:

• Trust is fundamentally relational. To put it most simply: Person A trusts Person B with information regarding topic T [6] [16].
• Trust is something more than reliance, though it’s unclear what that more exactly is. Think about what it is to say that “I trust you” versus “I rely upon you” – there is a difference [7]!
• Trust is tightly coupled with trustworthiness, though we do at times seem to trust people who don’t seem deserving of that trust [1] [5] [7].

In other words, trust is a little mysterious. It seems counterintuitive, but trust is not necessarily derived from a consistent, reliable track record, or from a guarantee of 100% accuracy or dependability. Still, it’s good to note that, keeping the observations from scholars in mind, trust tends to be encouraged through repeated, ongoing interactions [6]. Also, factors like accuracy or dependability, which demonstrate your trustworthiness, are involved in our process of determining trust.
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What about ‘trustworthiness’?

Even though there’s not a straight relationship between trust and trustworthiness, demonstrating trustworthiness is the best path we have to gaining trust. 

This raises the question: what is trustworthiness?

Like trust, understanding what makes someone or something trustworthy is also not simple. But here are some key characteristics that we think are useful from a communication perspective of what trustworthiness involves or “what we tend to trust”:

• Trustworthiness is demonstrated by competence or ability. Partly if someone is trustworthy regarding some piece of information or act, they have the ability to judge or carry out what they say they will [6] [7] [17].
• Trustworthiness is demonstrated by integrity. This means that trustworthiness is comprised of factors such as their honesty and reliability [8] [17].
• Trustworthiness is sometimes demonstrated by beneficence or good intentions, such as when someone has the best interests at heart for me. Your sense of someone’s intentions might simply result from a sense of affinity with another due to shared identities, goals or values [10] [17] [18] [19].

When determining trustworthiness, some considerations might be more important than others. For example, this definition of trustworthiness doesn’t focus on a person’s motives but rather their ability and integrity: “To be trustworthy is to live up to one’s commitments, whilst to be untrustworthy is to fail to live to one’s commitments.” [7]

At ARTT, we approach the challenge of building trust, or building the conditions for trust, by communicating the trustworthiness of information and of ourselves. 

Whether to build trust in communication

As mysterious as trust can be, it’s important to ask about our aims behind building another’s trust. This is because:

• Trust is risky. If someone trusts you, they are dependent upon you for something. Making that ultimate decision to trust has sometimes been referred to as a “leap of faith” [1] [4] [5] [14]. So a trustworthy person should ask: “Can I deliver?”
• Mistrust can be helpful. “Ought we trust?” is in fact a great question to ask [2]. Also, it is important to ask questions about how something works if one doesn’t understand, and could be taken as a positive sign of engagement from the public [9].

So, it is a good practice to ask what the end goal is: Do I want someone to trust me? To trust a process? To trust an organization? To trust certain information? And why?
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How we think trust is important

The ARTT team shares these methods and approaches to determining trust because we are committed to supporting productive public dialogue. And we think that productive public dialogue can benefit from communication practices that are trustworthy.

This is because:

• Sharing accurate and complete information in ways that can be well understood is a responsibility. Sometimes, there is information that not everyone can understand – this can definitely be the case when the knowledge is complicated, from computers to elections, from vaccines to machines. When that information touches everyday life, everyone deserves to receive trustworthy information and guidance from others who know more.
• Communities and societies run on trust, so nurturing informed and trustworthy communication practices is a good thing. It’s through a certain amount of trust that we are able to function, let alone accomplish more imaginative and collaborative projects. As members of complicated societies, we need each other.
• Trustworthy communities and societies acknowledge individuals also need to be able make their own decisions. It matters how that information is conveyed, however – manipulation and coercion are not appropriate for a society that wants people to actively consent to and participate in public dialogue on issues that affect their personal and collective lives. This is why communication needs to treat the other person in the conversation as an autonomous individual, worthy of respect [3].

Ultimately, trustworthy communication is hard, but also needed.

What trust building asks of all of us

Given all these things, it’s no wonder that trust online can be especially hard. If trust is relational, we know sometimes it’s hard to even know if there’s another actual person on the other end to relate to. In fact, a lack of trust might in fact be a good thing – it’s appropriate that people should be asking many questions about information that they see. In some cases, perhaps we’d wish they’d ask a few more.

In the end, to ask for trust is not just a matter of clear communication. Instead, to ask for trust is to ask people to rely on you. Going down a trust-building journey is one that not just asks you to inform, or to demonstrate your competence and goodwill, but it asks you also to potentially change too, when you understand and connect.