Professor Thomas Müller challenges the idea that trust can be planned, measured, or engineered in an age dominated by algorithms, ratings, background checks, and AI-driven decision-making. | Photo Credit: Kavya Pradeep M.

What is trust, really? And when we say, ‘I trust you,’ to another person, what does that mean?

It means that we reduce the complexity of the world we live in, that we free ourselves from the urge or need to control everything. And on the other side, we accept that we can be hurt when we trust others.

You contrast rational choice theories with this idea that trust is uncontrollable. If I were to explain this to a young person who has been raised on metrics, ratings, and reviews, what would uncontrollable trust mean to them?

I don’t think that growing up with metrics automatically influences the ability to trust or not. But I would explain that trust contains pre-reflective parts—we trust before we can think about it. It just happens. There are many examples. Children do not decide if they want to trust their parents or not, assuming it’s a normal family and nothing dramatic or traumatic happens. They just trust. And when you fall in love, you just trust. You don’t make rational decisions, even if there may be good implicit reasons why you fell in love or why you trust.

Let’s say I scroll through someone’s social media—their Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn—and I read some reviews before I meet them. Am I lowering risk, or am I building trust? How would you categorise those activities?

No, you’re trying to control. Maybe you want to be sure about the quality of the relationship or what you can expect from the other person. That might make it more difficult to trust them because you’ve checked the surroundings. If we just meet, then trust can happen. But if you’ve checked all these things, you’re always relating them to the person who is in reality in front of you. And that might be a problem—not necessarily, but it might be.

Thomas Müller argues that ratings, reviews and verification badges create an illusion of safety, while genuine trust cannot be measured or scored. (Representative Image) | Photo Credit: Uma Shankar Sharma/Getty Images

My next question is slightly loaded, but I’ll ask anyway: Is slow trust stronger trust, or would the opposite be true?

I don’t know if the categories of fast and slow trust are appropriate. I don’t think we can trust very fast or very slow. It just happens, or it doesn’t.

Happens organically.

There’s no metric, no time, no path that we have to walk and then trust will come. It comes, or it doesn’t. But on the other hand, if it’s shattered or broken, it will not come back so fast. Even if there are reasons that would justify trust again, once it’s lost, it’s very difficult to return to trust or to a trusting relationship.

Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Maybe not forever, but it’s difficult to rebuild.

We’ve spoken about the speed at which trust can be formed and how it happens organically. I want to delve deeper into that. Is instant trust genuine, or is it just a projection of hope?

This is a difficult question. I don’t know if there is instant trust. We know from psychology, from people like Erik Erikson, that there is a phenomenon we call basic trust, but there’s ongoing discussion about whether this is something instant, like a gift parents give to a child, or something inborn. I think it’s a kind of interpretation of how parents—sensitive parents—handle their very young children. If trust can grow, if children see their parents trust in the world, in other people, in institutions, if they don’t have fear of meeting different situations or people, and they have a secure relationship with their parents, then it might be easy for them to trust.

You also distinguish trust from reliability. How would you describe the difference between the two?

If someone is reliable, they’re reliable in the sense of competencies, skills, or special abilities. For example, a pilot who flies a plane—we rely on him or her to have enough training, to have been checked, and to follow all the rules. But we don’t have to trust this person. Normally, we don’t even meet them. So it’s enough to rely on them. If we have many experiences with reliability—for example, with an airline or a shop—then trust can develop, but it’s not necessarily connected. Reliability can be enough.

We rely on skills and abilities. On the other hand, reliability is always a part of trust, but it’s not connected to abilities or competencies. When we trust, we rely on the other person having the goodwill not to hurt us. So, reliability in the phenomenon of trust has a moral or emotional dimension, while reliability without trust is connected with abilities and skills.

We’ve spoken mostly about people and human connections so far. I want to shift gears and talk about institutions along the same parameters. Can institutions be reliable but not trustworthy, in your view?

This is a big question in trust research: Is trust a phenomenon that only exists between humans, or are we able to trust institutions? Of course, it depends on the experiences we have with institutions. Do we trust the police? Do we trust the media? Do we trust schools? Or is it always certain people that we connect in our mind or experiences with the school, the police, or politics?

On the other hand, institutions stand for certain values. They stand for certain structures, and they have certain responsibilities. So maybe it is also possible to trust in these responsibilities or structures, even if we don’t know anyone who works at the police or if we don’t know any politicians.

The academic says that even if we do not personally know the people within an institution, we may still place trust in the values and responsibilities it represents. (Representative Image) | Photo Credit: Oscar Wong/Getty Images

We live in a time when trust in legacy media houses is dwindling at a remarkable rate, here in India and around the world. Could you speak about that? From what you’ve seen and read over the last 10 to 15 years, how and why is trust in legacy media houses declining, and what impact does that have on social media and young people today?

There’s a big opportunity—we can call it an opportunity—for social media or other media to manipulate people. We can observe that more and more people are losing trust in institutions like the media. There might be several reasons. One may not want to deal with ambiguity or the complexity of the world. They want to have clarity—to know what is right or wrong—not a critical or sceptical view of certain circumstances.

In my observation—and I may not be right—I think more and more people trust the mistrust and form themselves into new communities, new parties, and try to found institutional structures in those communities or groupings. So mistrust, or trusting the mistrust, seems to be a kind of signature of our time. And serious media is maybe a victim of this development.

Stemming from what you said, what happens psychologically and politically when distrust becomes the default? Can a society even function without trust at all?

From the sociological perspective, people would say no—it does not function, or it does not function in the way we know it so far. As an educationist, I would say mistrust is an attitude toward looking at the world, and trust is an attitude toward looking at the world. They’re not opposites. But if you mistrust, the world gets narrow, and your chances to learn, to explore, to see new things are much more limited than when you trust. You can be hurt, but you can also explore wonderful things on the other side.

We can’t have a complete conversation about trust without including AI. Today, we have dating apps, credit scores, background checks, and reputation platforms. With all of these, we’re outsourcing judgment to platforms. What are your views on that? Is it good or bad?

Maybe not good and maybe not bad—somewhere in between. The question is, where does the credibility come from so that we are allowed to trust what AI helps or supports us with? And the question is, what are the contents that create AI? Who is creating that? Are these contents that AI uses to give you an answer or to support you in a certain question created seriously or reliably? Or are they not? And this is what we cannot control.

Yes.

Normal people like you and me can’t control it.

And there’s a lot of lack of clarity about this.

That’s totally true.

Can trust even survive in an ecosystem designed to optimise, measure, and commodify relationships?

I’m not sure if it can survive or not. Coming back to trust, or trusting the trust, might help us survive the complexity that we create with all these things you’ve mentioned. If we grow up in an atmosphere that is full of trust with our parents and surroundings, if we learn that trust is a value and that life goes on even if we have bad experiences with trust in between, then it might help a lot to overcome all these challenges.

Going back to algorithms, do algorithms change the meaning of what an arranged marriage is versus a love match? You spoke about arranged marriages as opposed to love matches during the seminar at the Madras Institute of Developmental Studies.

I wanted to make clear with that picture—the love match and arranged marriage—as a kind of symbol to explain that in the trust discussion, there are perspectives that want to convince us we can decide to trust or not to trust. I can understand it from a political view or an economic view that it would be very helpful or interesting if we could promote decisions to trust. That means we reduce control, we collect a lot of information, and then we decide, yes, I will trust, or I will not trust.

I tried to bring in the perspective that trust has an emotional dimension and a pre-reflective dimension. As I said before, we trust before we think about it. There are reasons why we trust, but we are not aware of these reasons. I think it gets dangerous if we bring up reasons why we trust from the implicit to the explicit, because then we bring it into reflection. Then we think about it. Then we think if our trust is justified or not. And then we may damage relationships that have been very trusting for many years. In my opinion, it’s better to keep the reasons—the good reasons—for why we trust in the implicit.

You also warn against the functionalisation of trust. When governments, corporations, or platforms manufacture trust, what are they actually producing?

I don’t know if they really manufacture trust. Maybe they manufacture reliability if they are successful and if they are good. But can they really promote trust? I’m not sure. I would say they can’t do it. We can be reliable, as we talked about media or journalism, serious journalism. You can show your sources and where you got the information. This is how you show your reliability. If you do it in a good way, and if I want to verify it and I see, oh, they were right with this information and the sources were done very seriously, then maybe I will trust a media house. But we can’t force it, we can’t promote it.

I would also say trust depends on practice and not on the spoken word, because it could be a lie—we can’t know. If people want to promote trust, they say, ‘Oh, trust us, we are the best insurance, we are the best clinic or hospital.’ But whether it’s justified or not cannot be seen by talking about it. It can be seen by what people do or don’t do. So trust is justified by practice and not by promoting it, by talking about it or going around and saying, ‘I am the most trustworthy politician you can find or journalist you can find.’

For Gen Z or young millennials navigating relationships, friendships, and working situations in these hyper-connected spaces, what is one misconception about trust you think they should unlearn? There’s a lot of content out there about trust—some from mental health professionals, some from self-styled influencers.

Trust is a wonderful risk, and it’s worth taking the risk. Even if we fall or even if the trust is shattered, I would recommend not to stop trusting people, not more and not less.

Trust can’t be fully controlled, and we’ve established that. It’s just a quality of trust. For better or for worse, we can’t fully control it. So what is the healthiest way to approach trust since we can’t control it?

Maybe the best way is not to think that there is a recipe or a technology, and then we can reach trust. It’s an experience that one has to make in life. From my personal view, I have worked with a lot of families and children where there is no trust—a lot of mistrust—because these children have experienced very traumatic situations. So, if we come back to the healthy way or the best way, that means having parents who are sensitive to the needs of small children, who know about boundaries for children, and who know about how children can explore. Circumstances where children can learn to trust the world in which they live.