Why Trust?
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An Undeceptions Podcast. Trust in America, in institutions, in each other is essential to the functioning of U.S. democracy. Yet today, trust is declining. So what impact does this have on American society? In this episode, Katerina Ava Matza and Lee Rainey help explain trust in the news media and how Americans evaluate news sources.

Trust is declining. Our work shows that people are less trustful of major institutions, including the news media, than they used to be. And your team has documented a lot of this broad change that's occurred. The news media as an industry

That's a clip from the Pew Research Center. They're looking at how the changing media landscape has affected levels of trust among Americans. And it's sobering stuff. People have lots of news sources that they trust, but they don't think that the institution of the news media and the industry of news organizations as a whole

is trustworthy. So people tend to go to sources of information that map with their point of view. And we see in our data, Americans don't trust each other the way they used to. They don't think Americans share the same facts that they used to. And so the charge to people who are in the thick of this new environment is to figure out how to help people find their way to the truth and not make it a hard job. And Americans couldn't...

It's not just the media they're distrusting. Trust generally is taking a hit. The Atlantic recently reported that back in 1972, a study found that 45% of Americans saw others as generally trustworthy. But by 2006, the number had dropped to just 30%.

You think of recent contested elections, global conflicts, pandemics, the rise of social media, and it's easy to conclude the next major study will find that trust has dropped even further. But here's a surprise. According to the Edelman Trust Index, updated in 2024, the most trusting population is China.

79% of Chinese respondents said they generally trusted government, media and business organisations. India, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia rounded out the top five most trusting countries.

Meanwhile, Australia came in 15th, the United States 22nd, South Korea at 24, and our pessimistic cousins in the UK 27th. Perhaps it's the weather. These numbers matter because trust underpins loads of our systems and institutions that are vital for functioning society.

Think of hospitals, transport, banking, law enforcement, all of these need trust. And when trust breaks down, the ripple effects are huge. Of course, trusting in the wrong thing can be disastrous.

Over $150 billion. In three days, that's how much the world's 15 largest cryptocurrencies lost in market value. It's because of the crypto exchange platform FTX, which is behind this token, named FTT. On November 6th, the token's value began to fall, losing more than 80% of its worth in the span of 72 hours. Once seen as a survivor in a struggling market,

The fall of FTX has sent shockwaves through the cryptocurrency industry. So what went wrong? That's the Wall Street Journal covering the dramatic collapse of the crypto trading platform FTX back in 2022. The founder of FTX was Sam Bankman Freed, and he'd be one of the youngest billionaires in the world.

But just before Christmas 2022, news broke that Bankman Freed had used customers' money to prop up one of his other companies when it was in trouble. $8 billion of customer funds, their life savings in many cases, simply vanished. Bankman Freed was arrested and eventually found guilty of fraud and conspiracy to launder money. It earned him a 25-year prison sentence.

This wasn't just a case of rich investors losing money. Ordinary, hardworking people had placed their trust in FTX and it went terribly wrong. So maybe trust is a bad thing.

My guest today has explored this question more than just about anyone in the world. And he reckons we can't do without trust. It's just a fact of life. We're stuck with it. Trust can be good. Trust can be bad. It all depends on what we're putting our trust in. I'm John Dixon, and trust me, this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by our friends at Zondervan Academic. You can get discounts on their special master lectures, video courses and free chapters of many of the books we talk about here on the pod. All you got to do is go to zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget the forward slash Undeceptions.

Every episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. I know your focus is on trust between humans, the relational dimension of trust.

But I also want to talk about societal and governmental. I mean, here we are in a school of government at Oxford University. So you must have lots of things to say. And having read your book, I know you do. Practically speaking, you got into this industry of trust with a bank that wanted to assess trust. Can you tell us that story of how you got into the kind of the institutional dimensions of trust?

Yeah, so actually it was an individual banker in the summer. I'd just finished my master's degree. I was in a holding pattern really waiting to apply for my

PhD. I was a grad student. I was very, very poor. That's Tom Simpson, a Royal Marine turned Oxford academic. He traded his career as a soldier for a gig as associate professor of philosophy and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. He's your real life warrior scholar.

Tom teaches and researches moral and political philosophy with a special focus on trust. In fact, he released a book on this subject in 2023. It's just called Trust, A Philosophical Study. Details in the show notes. And it was an experience working in the corporate world that kick-started his interest in trust. I was delighted to be invited to do some research assistance work for a Christian banker in the City of London yesterday.

And we kind of, he and I batted around ideas and he was interested in faith in the marketplace. I was beginning to be interested in trust. Faith and trust seem related really importantly. If you think about credere, the Latin credere, to believe the origin of the term credit, you know, which is what banking is ultimately all about. So he said, yeah, great, you know, go and do some work on faith and trust in the marketplace. What's its contribution? So I went off and started doing some reading. Obviously, I was very excited and

But this was the summer of 2008, which was the credit crunch, so financial crash and crisis that arose during that time. So I remember very distinctly sitting, listening to the radio, hearing the journalists and the presenter discussing whether we would have a payment system that afternoon and hearing the genuine nerves in their voice that that might not be the case.

And really because it would be a crisis of ultimately of trust in the heart of the banking system that people were no longer able to believe the assurances of the credit worthiness of

ultimately some homeowners in America, that was where the subprime crisis started, but the kind of loss of confidence then spread right throughout the whole system. So absolutely this institutional crisis of trust was kind of one of the animating things. Now, so this was 2008 and I was beginning to think like, trust, whoa, this is like the underlying phenomenon all around.

And I was really delighted to get research funding for my doctorate from Microsoft Research, which is the Microsoft Research subsidiary of European Labs in Cambridge, for a project on trust on the internet.

I thought, "Ah, trust just seems to be everywhere." And then in 2009, here in the UK, we had the MPs expenses scandal, where a series of very high number actually of MPs were found not to have reported their expenses correctly and many lost their jobs as a result. And this was articulated at the time as a crisis of trust.

Trust is, I mean, it's a really interesting thing to work on, particularly as an academic, because so many philosophy topics, people, the truth is just their eyes glaze over when you start talking about it. But this is one where I say I'm working on trust and actually there's usually not a follow-up question. Usually there's an observation from their own experience or life about, you know, this is the question of trust that I was debating. And some of that's at a personal, interpersonal level in immediate relationships. And then some of it is a kind of macro level. So, so many of our

collective public controversies, anxieties, concerns are articulated in these terms.

And that original research project, the bank had disappeared for a little while, didn't answer your emails. Were you starting to doubt? Absolutely. So it was itself an exercise in trust. He exactly so wasn't answering my emails or phone calls. Now, it turns out he had absolutely more important things on his plate and he was as good as his word. And I was very grateful for it. But it was itself an exercise in trust. Tom had to trust a lot in his old day job.

In the Royal Marines, he served in Northern Ireland, Baghdad, in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. Knowing who to trust was sometimes the difference between life and death. Now he uses this experience to advise the British government on issues like the ethics of using certain weaponry, cyber security and even the use of unconventional force.

Trust has massive ethical and geopolitical implications. But what is it? What is trust? Trust, very important in a relationship. It's also very important in a clinical situation. Why is trust the most important thing in making a breakthrough with a client? Maureen, stop the roll fixation for a moment and join us. Vinnie. Because...

Trust is, uh... Trust is life. Wow. That's very deep. Thank you, Vinny.

That, of course, is Robin Williams in the beautiful Good Will Hunting. He plays a psychologist who tries to help a gifted ex-prisoner piece his life together. It's one of Williams' most critically acclaimed performances. And that scene, right toward the beginning of the film, sets up fantastically what the rest of the film makes clear. Trust might be hard to define, hard to earn, but it is a

essential to human relationships. What is trust in the sense that you're meaning it? And how does it differ from mere reliance, like my reliance on the pushbike I used to get here to your office? So the distinction between trust and reliance is going to be a very important one. And one way to illustrate it, the very famous illustration was given by someone called Annette Byer, a contemporary philosopher. She remarks on the story, it may be myth, of Immanuel Kant's

who was reported to be so reliable in the timing of his walk to work each day that the washerwoman of Konigsberg would set their watches by it. Emmanuel Kant, the 18th century German philosopher, is known as the father of modern ethics. He's also been called possibly the most boring person who ever lived.

because of his rigid daily routine. Every day he left for work at the same time, taught the same subjects at the same university all his life, took his lunch at the same time, walked the same route home through the same park. He'd have dinner with the same friend every evening and go to bed at 10pm sharp. His schedule was so consistent, his neighbours used it to set their clocks.

So, Kahn, you know, gets up, walks out every day at the same time, 8.30 or whatever. Now, suppose Kahn has a lie-in, completely contrary to all past performance, and he doesn't take the walk and the washerwomen of Königsberg set their watches incorrectly as a result. What to make of that? Well,

Are they entitled to be angry at Kant for that kind of change of pattern? Probably not. He's made no promise to them. He's made no commitment. He hasn't invited their... They have relied on him, but he hasn't invited that. So it looks like, whereas had he made that promise, they may feel so entitled. And it looks like this may track a really significant distinction between

what it is to trust someone and what it is to rely on someone. So it seems characteristic of my trust of someone that I'm entitled to feel betrayed if they let me down. People sometimes talk about the reactive attitudes, the sense of sometimes resentment that you might experience, as I say, at someone's betrayal. Whereas reliance is simply acting in such a way that if the other person or the other thing, they can let you down, you depend on them for positive outcomes.

C.S. Lewis has a wonderful passage on just this thought. Part of a speech he gave at the Oxford Socratic Club in the early 1950s, he called it "On Obstinacy in Belief". To love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against much evidence. No man is our friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence against them.

Such confidence between one man and another is in fact almost universally praised as a moral beauty, not blamed as a logical error. And the suspicious man is blamed for a meanness of character, not admired for the excellence of his logic. It is one thing to discuss in a vacuum whether so and so will join us tonight,

and another to discuss this when so and so's honour is pledged to come, and some great matter depends on his coming. In the first case, it would be merely reasonable, as the clock ticked on, to expect him less and less. In the second, a continued expectation far into the night would be due to our friend's character if we had found him reliable before.

Which of us would not feel slightly ashamed if one moment after we had given him up, he arrived with a full explanation of his delay? We should feel that we ought to have known him better.

Lewis is, of course, employing this as an analogy for trust in God. But his point beautifully applies to trust in general. Trust is key not just to friendship or relationships in general, but also to epistemology, the theory of how we know what we think we know. Much of our knowledge comes to us by trusting others.

One way of thinking about it is the epistemology of testimony is the full turn of the screw, if you like, from the very early days of Enlightenment philosophy. So if you look at Descartes' central project, he is trying to found human knowledge on premises that he can identify for himself with indubitable certainty. The rejection, it's the fundamental rejection of depending on what other people tell you. So it's the rejection along the lines of...

Tom's talking about the 17th century French philosopher René Descartes, whose base certainty was summed up in that famous expression, everyone knows, I think, therefore I am.

Around the same time as Descartes, the Royal Society was founded, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. Its founding motto was Nullius Inverba, on nobody's word. For more on it, check out episode 123, True Science, with the Alastair McGrath.

The idea of believing nothing on authority held sway for 300 years, right up until the 1990s. And suddenly what happened in the 90s was this realisation that our life is deeply dependent on trusting other people for what they tell us. And the practice of science fundamentally depends on this. So you go out and conduct scientific experiments, you...

You measure, you analyze, you test your hypotheses, but then you report that. And the reporting is tested by peer review and then it's published. And the great majority of the people who then rely on that work do so on the basis of trust in the probity and the integrity of the publication process. So it's a social system that's fundamentally dependent on trust. Yeah, so you could be a world-class biologist...

And most of what you know about Big Bang cosmology, you are simply trusting.

brilliant physicists whose works you've read. And this is true for all of us all the time. So you think about just our knowledge of the world, knowledge of world events. We're fundamentally dependent on media institutions and ecosystems to report what's going on. Our knowledge of what's happening down the road. You might go and find out for yourself, you might find out on social media. So we're always dependent on trust of what other people tell us. And I wasn't sure we'd get to this question because I have it just at the back as an addendum, but we're already here.

History, the study of history, which is my academic discipline, it really, not just relying on the testimony of other scholars who have done the work. I'm doing that all the time. I haven't dug up Palatine Hill myself, so I have to rely on those who have done it. But actually, I'm trusting the testimony of all these ancient sources.

to get going in the discipline. Is this the same kind of thing? I mean, history is basically trust in testimony.

Yeah, so obviously I'm not a historian, so I wouldn't want to comment on how historians work. But how do we know that Julius Caesar existed if we can't, at some fundamental level, trust our documentary sources? So I take it that the method of the historian is to, you start with documents and then you test one against each other. You test them for internal coherence, test them for external attestation with inscriptions and other forms. And you come to a judgment about who's reliable.

So the historians are kind of making assessments as to who is a reliable witness. So the character of the testifier becomes significant for thinking about my justification I have for believing what they say.

Yeah, that's basically how history works. There are some hard facts, coins, buildings and so on, but most history is built on the testimony of our sources. We might not trust everything in the sources, but without some level of trust, we can know almost nothing about the past.

But this is true for most subjects, for most of us. I mean, unless you're an actual astronomer observing the cosmos, like our phone-a-friend astronomer Luke Barnes. G'day, mate. Virtually everything you, dear listener, know about the universe, you know because you trust someone who told you about it.

Anyway, two dominant approaches to trust have emerged in recent centuries. And to help us understand them, Tom has two more Enlightenment thinkers for us to think about. David Hume and Thomas Reid. David Hume, obviously a famous critic of religion, Christianity in particular. And he has this very significant essay called Of Miracles in his inquiry concerning human understanding.

Hume's claim in that is, he says, the wise person, or the wise man in the language of the time, proportions his belief to the evidence.

And because of this, he then claims that it is always more rational to believe that someone is lying to you than that miracle has occurred. No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless its falsehood is more miraculous than the miracle. Yeah, amazing. So what he's doing is he's got a particular claim about what is rational or not to believe in questions of directly theological significance and practical significance to our lives.

based on a theory of how you should govern your belief, actually in general, but also specifically in relation to testimony. And then Thomas Reid comes along and makes exactly the point that we've just been discussing, which is how could life exist if we weren't able to have, in reading terms, a default assumption of trust in what other people say. Now, Hume says you start with the evidence and then you build up and take someone on their word. Reid says you start with trust and then this is defeasible according to counter-evidence.

And this is really a debate between what's come to be called reductionist versus anti-reductionist theories of testimony. Different contexts will also impact this process. So some contexts like the courtroom,

There's no offence, there's no sense of interpersonal offence in the courtroom if my testimony is scrutinised and tested. In fact, you expect it to be, that's the point of the courtroom environment. An academic seminar, similarly, you expect to be tested. You don't expect simply to be taken at your word. And then there are other contexts in life where actually

There's a sense of expectation that when I give my testimony, to call that into doubt is to call me into doubt, is to question my character and probity at that point.

It's weird. Hume's idea that we should be sceptical from the start about testimony is super common at the superficial level, but at the more fundamental level, hardly anyone operates that way in daily life. Instead, most of what we claim we know about history, science, our friends, our family, the daily news, we picked up because we trusted those who reported it.

So stay with us as we try to solve the trust dilemma.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. We have a backup experiment. If you're seeing through this hole, through the next hole, and seeing the light at the backboard, or at 17 feet off the water, the earth is flat.

If he's holding it up at 23 feet high and we're seeing the light, well, that's because it's curved. So I should only be able to see it when it's at 17 feet. Okay, go ahead and drive down there, Enrique. You're going to hold the light there? Enrique, how high is your light? 17 feet. I mean, you know, it's just... We don't see you, Enrique. Lift up your light way above your head. Interesting. Interesting there.

That's from the hit 2018 film Behind the Curve, a fly-on-the-wall documentary that follows the lives of flat-earth activists.

This is a guy trying to prove the Earth is flat by shining a torch through two holes at distance, at precisely 17 feet above the ground. The light doesn't shine through the next hole because the Earth is curved and 17 feet at one point on Earth is not a straight line to 17 feet at another point on Earth.

This guy accidentally proves himself wrong. You've got to love empirical testing. Except in this case, the guy refuses to accept his results. He's a flat earther to the end.

By the way, just something for your back pocket. It is not the case that people in ancient and medieval times ignorantly believed in a flat Earth. I mean, some did, but most didn't. Most accepted the calculations of ancient Greek philosophers centuries before Christ that the Earth was spherical. This includes great minds like Augustine and Aquinas. It's an ignorant modern myth that people were flat earthers until contemporary science.

Glad to get that off the chest. Back to the question, though. Is trust or faith the opposite of accepting things by evidence? OK, so can we wind back a bit? You make a really interesting and I think to some counterintuitive point about the relationship between evidence and trust, because people often use trust.

like they use the word faith, to mean believing something contrary to evidence. Or at least without any evidence. But the principal thesis of your book is, and I'm quoting here, normally your trust should follow the evidence so that you trust the trustworthy and not the untrustworthy.

So can you unpack that? I mean, really, that is to ask you to unpack an entire thesis that you've developed over a couple of hundred pages. But can you unpack it for my audience? So I don't at all dispute the observation that people will sometimes use trust in that kind of almost quasi-faith-like manner to express, you know, I'm taking a leap of faith, a leap of trust. But I think the awareness that sometimes trust is a leap of faith should not

disguise from us the fact that the, as it were, the substantial body of situations in which we find ourselves are ones in which when we trust someone, we want it to be the case that they prove trustworthy for us. They actually come through. That's one of the points of trust. It's the key point of trust. And I think actually part of what makes trust really interesting as a concept is that one of the reasons which we trust people is because

It enables us to do things that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do. So we trust each other. We trust each other in market transactions, in personal relationships, in work relationships, all sorts of contexts. We trust people for the outcomes. And the other reason that we trust people is because

Trust is a way of forming relationships that matter to us. So it's distinctive of those relationships. Think of a friendship. It's distinct for friendship that I trust my friend, my friend trusts me. And it's not a friendship if we don't trust each other. So the kind of respect and interpersonal value is the term I use to describe it, is another reason for which we trust people. So

I mean, really what I'm trying to explore is I think this gives rise to tensions, very practical tension. So we have situations where most obviously we feel compelled for reasons of respect or desire to build a relationship with another person to trust them.

but we're just not sure if they're trustworthy. So those are very real practical dilemmas that arise all the time. Actually, there's also the converse. So there's also situations in which we've got excellent evidence that someone is in some sense reliable. They're going to come through on their commitments, but we feel reticent about trusting them because of the

precisely the expression of respect that shows to the other person. We may feel they don't deserve that or we don't want. So think of someone who's betrayed you or maybe in a corporate context, someone's broken the contract.

But they paid the fine and they've got another business proposition and there's a great contract here. And in purely mercantile terms, it might be the right thing to go back into business with them. But they've just let you down in some important sense. But can you put your finger on the relation between evidence and trust and why they're actually not opposites? So the key point that I'm trying to work through is that I think that the normal reason that we trust other people

is because doing so enables these positive outcomes, these valuable outcomes. So we have a general permission for that. So I give an example, the thought experiment that I use most prominently as someone who's preparing to trek to the South Pole, the Antarctic, and contracts with Catherine, who's an old Antarctic hand, for her to drop supplies at the

at the poll. So in deciding whether to trust her, he really does trust her, but he should make that decision on the basis of the evidence that she will be trustworthy. If she doesn't, he will die. So the stakes really, really matter in that situation. So he should take account of evidence in deciding whether to trust. Now, the deep connection with why this is normally the case goes to this question of

attitudes when trust is betrayed. So the willingness to feel resentment, we feel that because it's a response to what someone else deserves for how they treat us. But the social utility of that is that it preserves a culture, a context in which someone gives their word on something, someone makes a commitment, and we thereby have reason to believe that they will follow through on what they've said. So if enough of us

are willing to feel resentful at being betrayed and let down, we create an environment in which the normal thing for someone to do, the normal in the sense that this is what the practice is directed towards, is for people to keep their word. So what I'm giving is a kind of evidentiary-based reason explaining the rational undergirding for why it's normally the case that we trust what someone says. So just in the terms that we were discussing earlier, I'm giving a

An anti-reductionist construal of trust. We have a default assumption of trust, a legitimate default assumption of trust. Trust is normal, but we have excellent undergirding evidential reasons for why that's the case. So I'm guessing you're picking up the whole thing is pretty complicated.

It isn't just that trust is good or bad. There is a trust matrix, you might say. When a community highly values trustworthiness and conversely socially disdains untrustworthiness, people in that community tend to act more trustworthily. And so we trust them. And so we reap the benefits of trust. And that benefit is...

is massive. It means you don't have to personally prove everything to yourself before you act. That would be a paralyzing, completely impractical way to live. Trust is a shortcut to knowing stuff and it usually works.

Trusting a knowledgeable friend where to get the best coffee. Trusting maps to get you to your destination. Trusting an ancient historian turned podcaster that Emperor Tiberius reigned from AD 14 until his death in 37 and so on.

It's no wonder that research is finding that trust has a positive impact on economic growth, democracy, tolerance, charity, community, health and happiness. And we're going to link to an article from the conversation all about this. Is someone's past trustworthiness a rational basis for

for trusting them for some future outcome? Absolutely. Yeah, of course. How so? Well, it's one of the core forms of evidence that we will have. So you might distinguish between contextual evidence for someone's trustworthiness. And when I say trustworthiness in that sense, what I'm meaning is not a general character attribute, I'm meaning the likelihood that they will actually do what they've said they'll do. So we'll have contextual evidence

And then we'll also have individual specific evidence, evidence about the character of a person. And actually, I think as a matter of normal course of events and rationally so, we're extremely sensitive to the character of the person. So when I'm thinking about will someone be trustworthy, I will standardly distinguish between, well, for them to be trustworthy, they need to be competent,

and they need to be motivated. So they need, you know, I promise to give you, I borrow your car, I promise to return it in a week's time. Am I actually able to return the car to you? Do I actually want to return the car to you? Okay. So I promised to build a brick wall for you in your garden, right? Am I actually competent at laying bricks? Do I want to? Okay. So those two examples, in the first example, competence is not really an issue. Most people can drive a

car. But motivation might be more salient. In the bricklaying example, it might be competence is the issue. Motivation may be less significant. So we're always thinking through this competence-motivation question. But once you've got the distinction, you can begin to see that the competence will tend to be relatively domain-specific. Motivation seems less restricted to a specific domain. So it seems like if you're the kind of person...

who is morally committed, maybe virtuous, committed to fulfilling their commitments to doing what you said for other people, that can be relied on across domains. And so conversely, if we have evidence that someone's betrayed others previously or even betrayed yourself, we're very, very sensitive to that. And that will count very strongly for us in future against placing trust.

Tom then raises a crucial point, and I had to stop and think about this next bit. Maybe you'll want to press pause. He asks, what is lost when trust takes a hit? So there's two perspectives. So one perspective is, what do I forego by failing to trust someone who's trustworthy? The second question is, what's the impact on the other person

of me not trusting them. And so one of the tragedies of society is that we can end up with individuals or indeed groups who are distrusted more than is warranted. And that can have very powerful negative effects, obviously. The withdrawal of trust is a very, it's a kind of ostracizing impact. And that's something to think very carefully about. We're going to look at what happens when trust breaks and what can be done about it after this.

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Anglican.

and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions.

Hey, things are about to get pretty heavy because we're going to be talking about institutional abuse within the church. We've put markers in the show notes for this. So if the next 10 minutes isn't what you need right now, pause the show and check the description for a time code that will tell you when we resume the main interview with Tom. Be safe. Take me to the Boston Globe on Morrissey Boulevard. Don't take 93. Take Dorchester Avenue.

Robbie, it's incredible. Law knew about Dagan for years, no question. There's a letter to law from a woman, Margaret Collant, who lived in Jamaica Plain in the early '80s when Dagan was there. Listen to this. "Our family is rooted in the church. Our desire is to protect the holy orders. Even in the midst of our agony over the seven boys in our family who have been violated..." Seven, Robbie? Seven boys. "It was suggested we keep silent.

We did not question the authority of the church two years ago, but since Father Gagan is still in his parish, which he sent it to law, and law did change

Here's another one to law. Same year. That's a scene from the utterly compelling film Spotlight, which tells the true story of how in 2002, a small team of reporters working for the Boston Globe blew the lid off an epidemic of child sexual abuse within the Boston Catholic Diocese. And it's cover up by church authorities. Buff and I watched this with jaws dropped.

The initial reports led to the arrest of five priests, including the serial rapist, Father John Gagan, who'd been reassigned to a new parish every time he committed an offence. It was this detail that the church knew about the crimes and continued to allow the priests to serve that makes it all so horrifying.

The Globe investigations led to the resignation of Cardinal Francis Law, the Archbishop of the Boston Diocese. Here's some more from the film featuring Michael Resendez, portrayed by Mark Ruffalo. He's arguing with his editor, Walter Robinson, played by Michael Keaton, over whether or not the Globe was ready to publish their findings. We'll take it to Ben when I say it's time. It's time, Robbie! It's time!

They knew and they let it happen to kids, okay? It could have been you. It could have been me. It could have been any of us. We got to nail these scumbags. We got to show people that nobody can get away with this, not a priest or a cardinal or a freaking pope.

The Globe's coverage was a key factor in exposing worldwide institutional abuse in the Catholic and Protestant churches. We're going to do a whole episode on this topic in a couple of seasons from now. My point here is institutions, including ones that used to be highly trusted, are experiencing a crisis of trust, a crisis of trustworthiness.

I think there's an inevitability that many of our collective concerns, which are articulated politically, will be articulated in terms of a crisis of trust. And that's precisely because of this connection between trust and betrayal. So if you think about the fabric of our life, our shared life is one of norms and expectations, which set standards that we expect people to come up to. And inevitably,

People, institutions will not come up to those standards and it's a crisis of trust when that happens. So it's inevitable that when things go wrong, it will be expressed in terms of trust. So in that sense, I think it's perennial. And that's been my reflection working on this topic for many years now. Now, that observation does not undermine the point that we may also be facing distinctive challenges to cultures of trust now, which are different to what we may have experienced at times in the past.

And some of the strongest evidence for this comes from a survey instrument called the World Values Survey, which has been administered to populations around the world. It's now very comprehensive. It's been going for a number of decades. And they ask a series of questions in there. One staple, so trust is really, it's an up and coming topic in philosophy, my own discipline.

But the social sciences have been absolutely alert to the significance of trust for many years, and it's a major and very central topic of discussion. Nobody could read all the literature on it. It's just too much of it. And one of the very central questions that social scientists will ask in surveys of people is, generally speaking,

Do you think that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful? And this is really tapping exactly in popular terms, this, if you like, reductionist, anti-reductionist debate that we saw going back to David Hume and Thomas Reid. Is there a default assumption of trust or isn't there? And countries vary enormously on the proportions of people who answer yes or no to that question and to what degree.

So it's not a surprise to hear that Scandinavian countries in general tend to be pretty high trusts. New Zealand, interestingly, has been very high, you know, your own, not quite identical, but your own part of the world. Not at all identical. I'm going to let that one slip with apologies to our Aussie listeners and indeed to our Kiwi listeners.

So that's a very high trust country historically. And many parts of the world, post-Soviet countries, for instance, are very low trust on this. And these generalized trust issues turn out really to matter in lots of areas such as the... I was about to ask you, what is the observable cultural, societal, financial difference

between a society where trust and trustworthiness are high and others where it isn't. So one finding was that it's something in the order of 2% growth rates on GDP may be traceable to generalised trust attitudes. Corruption in public life is both a cause of lower public trust and reflective of degrees of trust.

High levels of generalized trust matter in areas such as the economy in terms of economic growth, matter in terms of public legitimacy for government, and therefore support for government and compliance with government orders. Matters for things like compliance with

The vaccination and lockdown programs as measures in response to COVID. Now, making no presumption about what the appropriate response was, government does need to act in response to crises and high trust levels indicate how effectively a society can mobilize against in the face of crises.

But it also matters in areas like health and well-being. So countries where there's high generalized trust will have higher life expectancy, higher reported health and happiness. So it has this, it's this kind of underlying feature which then responds.

The research on this is fascinating. Australian Think Tank, Committee for Economic Development of Australia, recently reported that higher levels of trust are associated with higher levels of cooperation between people, more effective enforcement of contracts and a lower likelihood that people would harm others by acting only in their own interests.

Then there's Paul J. Zak, a neuroeconomist at the Claremont Graduate University. I didn't even know there was such a thing as neuroeconomics. But it's basically the study of how our brains make decisions about risk and reward in an economic setting. Anyway, writing in the Harvard Business Review, Professor Zak reports...

Employees in high-trust organisations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues and stay with their employers longer than people working at low-trust companies. They also suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives and these factors fuel stronger performance. For any bosses listening, this is amazing. More trust, more success.

Trust is also good for your physical health. There's a 2019 paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health that took 30 years of data and analysed the way trust affects mortality. It protects against early death. We'll put it in the show notes, of course. But here's the conclusion. High levels of individual and contextualised, generalised trust protect against

against mortality, even after considering numerous individual and aggregated socioeconomic conditions. Its robustness at both levels hints at the importance of psychosocial mechanisms as well as a trustworthy environment. So next time someone says to you in a patronising tone, oh, Director Mark, you're such a trusting soul,

you should thank them and wish them a more trust-filled life. After all, on the negative side, this same paper remarks, "Declining trust levels across the USA should be of concern." What there is evidence of from the World Values Survey is that there's steady incremental losses in trust, particularly in the developed world, over a multi-decade period.

And that is not encouraging. So the deep question is, why is that? Where does that come from? Well, my next question was, what are the preconditions of a society where trust flourishes? And I guess the converse is,

What are those things that are missing? Yeah, good. So I'm persuaded by and seeking to articulate the significance of the three Fs, faith, family, flag, as preconditions for a culture of trust. And I think all of these institutions, so flag doesn't have to be construed as the nation. I mean by that, a cohesive political community, which has a sense of its own self, a sense of loyalty and belonging.

And that can occur at many different levels. So it could occur neighborhoods, kind of more widely regionally. Conceptually, you could have supranational forms of loyalty and belonging. But it matters that there are forms of community which have a sense of themselves, a sense of belonging, a sense of loyalty, a sense of shared identity. Institutions of faith and of family. So I think each of these contribute in different ways to cultures of trust. So faith, one of the contributions it makes

If you like, it's the pulpit role within a society. So every society has a moral culture. It's contested what sets the tone, what's the source of moral norms within a society. In historically religious contexts, religious majority societies, it's been the religious institutions that have that dominant role. That's clearly not straightforwardly the case in many societies nowadays.

But what you're having there is an authoritative claim to set the

expectations and standards for individual and collective behavior. And these should have what I call a trumping significance. So deontological claims, claims about your duties should take precedence over what it's convenient to do, what maximizes the social welfare, what maximizes my personal egoistic welfare. These claims of duty, these expectations have to trump these other concerns.

And institutions of faith play another role as well because they, you know, in my case, when you go to church, you know, you don't just hear the sermon from the pulpit. You also do so as a congregation of people who support each other and actually hold each other to account on how you ought to conduct yourself, how you ought to behave. So there's a standard setting that comes from that. So it really matters that I think others in my community value humility, compassion,

honesty, et cetera. Absolutely. So there needs to be a sort of shared moral narrative for trust to really flourish. Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. But what about family? So family plays more directly. I mean, I think of faith and family as formative institutions, so they play a role. So family is the core context in which

obviously children are born and grow up and in which you're disciplined. You learn how to discipline your own desires. You learn how to be a constructive, contributing member. First, it's in the household economy and then ultimately the wider economy. That's not the goal of the family. The goal of the family isn't to prepare workers to be productive, but it's to teach people habits of self-discipline, self-reliance that enables them as individuals when they grow up to then play that contributing role in society generally.

Words like family, flag and faith will raise a few eyebrows, especially for some US listeners. They sound like a conservative political slogan. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. But that's not Tom's vibe. He's just noting what the research is suggesting. The preconditions of trust are a functional family life,

a coherent polity or political community, and a vibrant spirituality. I had to ask him about the last of these because some would say that spirituality or faith is a kind of dysfunction. It's the epitome of misplaced trust. I can't resist asking you about trusting God as an aspect of that faith dimension. Is trust in God akin to

to the trust we might have in interpersonal relationships? Or is it a different category? Because it's a highly controversial topic in our mainstream world. I think there'll be plenty of listeners who think trust in God is basically blind faith. That the quintessential example of why trust is junk

is people that believe in God. Okay, yeah, good. So obviously, there's much discrement, robust, and entirely as to be expected in a liberal society that there should be discrepancy about whether trusting God is a rational attitude or not to have, absolutely. I think as an attitude, I take it to be fundamentally continuous, trust of God, trust of other people. I don't see any deep reason to view these as fundamentally distinct attitudes.

largely arising out of the fact that, I was going to say both are agents, both God and other people are agents, but that's really a reflection of God created us on the Christian theological story, Christian theological account, God created us in his image.

And so our agency reflects God's agency. So in that sense, I think they're the same. I think they're also the same in another important respect in that one way you can distinguish trusting relationships is whether just at a human level, if I trust another person, I might trust them for something specific.

We met at 10 a.m. this morning. I trusted you. You trusted me that we'd both be there at 10 a.m. So there was a particular thing that we were trusting each other for. So schematically, you might say A trusts B over X. So it's a three-place relation. But there are definitely very important relationships. So think of marital relationship, intimate romantic relationship, which was not really... It seems to be misdescribing the relationship to break it down as...

I'm trusting them for this. That doesn't feel quite right. It feels, you know, I trust my wife, you know, and that's more like a two-place trust relationship. So, you know, there might be exceptions, you know. I

I don't know what she doesn't trust me for, but there's some very well-grounded... Well, my wife trusts in me, but she doesn't trust me to do it yourself, building brick walls. Absolutely. She does not. So there's going to be sort of rationally withheld forms of two-place trust. But that doesn't undermine the general two-place trust. And it made me that the two-place trust, that's the primary... When we say that relationship is trusting, that's the more important point that we're trying to make. And I think the same is true of...

the believers trust of God, trust in God. And I think when we use that locution to trust in, there's a kind of emphasis that maybe it's existential. I'm kind of placing my whole self in someone else's hands, in God's hands in particular. All the important things that we want to say about faith, we can capture in talking about trust. And I think that really matters as well. I suppose it matters for me as a Christian that

The word faith, the kind of the idea of faith in wider culture has, for good or ill, I mean, I suppose in my view, mostly ill, it's come to be associated with, it's that famous Mark Twain quote, isn't it? Faith is believing what you know ain't so. And there's a kind of deliberate irrationality about believing against the evidence. And obviously, I think that misunderstands the nature of faith, certainly of true Christian faith, but it's very powerful there. Whereas the notion of trust is not so attached in that way,

And I think that's partly because all of us trust every single day. We're instinctively aware of that. And we're aware both of our dependence, but also that our dependence is not, it's certainly not irrational, but it's also not arrived at through reasonable means, primarily when I'm dealing with another person. I might, if I really wanted to, sit down and consciously articulate what the factors were, but most of it's happening instinctively, intuitively, pre-theoretically, and it's completely right and appropriate to

that that should be so. And it's actually fundamentally a response to another person. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.

There's no doubt trust is at the center of Jesus' own teaching and the apostles' teaching about Jesus. I mean, the Gospel of John ends with the words, These things are written that you may trust that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by trusting you may have life in his name.

The Greek word here is pistouane, often translated to believe, but it's just the normal Greek verb to trust. It doesn't refer just to thinking something is true. It means trusting in the personal sense, in the sense of relying on your friend's word because you hold them to be trustworthy.

You find the same thing on the lips of Jesus. Just last weekend, I gave a sermon in a church in Brisbane. G'day, Anne Street Presbyterian. On Mark chapter 2, it's the account of some friends bringing their paralyzed friend to Jesus to be healed. Here's a snippet.

Jesus again entered Capernaum. The people heard that he had come home. They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. Some men came to him, bringing to him a paralyzed man carried by four of them.

Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on.

By the way, many ancient houses had an external staircase so you could go up and repair the roof, which you had to do a lot in the ancient world. These guys have used that to do a kind of reverse repair. According to the account, Jesus does go on to heal the man. But first we read these words. When Jesus saw their trust, he said to the paralyzed man, son, your sins are forgiven.

This is that Greek word again, 'pistouane', though here it's in the noun 'pistis'. It means 'trust' or 'faith'. When Jesus saw their trust or faith, he said, "Your sins are forgiven." Not when he saw their commitment, he said this, their friendship, their love, their ingenuity, but when he saw their trust.

This idea of trust or faith, I know, has a very bad reputation today. As I said earlier in the episode, some people think of it as the opposite of knowing stuff on the basis of evidence. But that's a caricature

Actually, it's more like a piece of modern propaganda. It's not even what the original English word faith meant. Look up the full Oxford English Dictionary and you'll find that faith derives from the notions of quote, trust, guarantee, assurance, proof, confirmation. Indeed, one of the definitions of faith you'll find in the OED, much older definition than the contemporary skeptical one, goes like this.

Faith is belief based on evidence, testimony or authority. The paralyzed man and his friends weren't just taking a wild stab in the dark contrary to evidence when they made their way to Jesus. They had heard the reports. Maybe they'd even met one of those who had encountered Jesus previously. Perhaps they'd listened to Jesus the previous day and concluded he was trustworthy. And so they made their way to him, trusted him,

and found him to be trustworthy. And so they received the greatest gift of all. When he saw their trust, he said, your sins are forgiven. Christian faith isn't baseless. There is decent evidence. There is good testimony. There is coherent reason. I hope over time, the Undeceptions podcast has made that abundantly clear. But thinking Christianity is solid means

isn't what trust or faith in the Gospels is about. True faith, true trust might involve that, but it goes a step further than just thinking it's likely true. Christian faith involves encountering this Jesus of the Gospels, his words and deeds, especially his death and resurrection, and then trusting him.

Christian faith is personal trust. It's relying on Jesus as the source of forgiveness, true wisdom and life. As John's Gospel put it, by trusting you may have life in his name. You can press play now.

Professor Tom Simpson is the expert on trust. So I wanted to close by asking him about his own trust in the one he and I call Lord. There's a beautiful little pericope, a little episode in John's Gospel. I think it's John 4 where Jesus says, Go, your son has been healed. It's your son of a servant. And the comment is then made, Jesus, rather this person, this man, believed what he said.

He goes away, discovers that what Jesus has said is true, and then he believes him. So he goes from this three-place attitude of trust, believing what he has said, and then he moves to a place of two-place trust, of trusting him, Jesus, the person, the testifier, trusting in him. And I suppose that's the movement I made personally. And yeah, and we're all kind of invited to consider for ourselves.

so

If you want to find out more about anything you've heard on today's episode, Researcher Al has some great show notes for you. All the links to the books and shows and articles and people we mention, as well as some deep dives into the more complicated stuff. And there's a full transcript of the episode as well. Head to underceptions.com and you'll find them. They're way too long to put in the notes in the little podcast app, so do use the website.

And if you're thinking about buying a book that we've mentioned here, you'd be helping the Undeceptions project by buying it via the links in the show notes. We've started getting a very small commission from Amazon sales that come through our site. Every cent counts.

If you have questions about this or any other episode, you can send it my way. Send us an audio or text message via the links in the show notes and I'll try and answer it in this season's Q&A episode. See ya.

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark, the trusting soul Hadley. Alastair Belling is a writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DiMarco is chief finance and operations consultant, editing by Richard Humwe. Our voice actor today was Yannick Laurie. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out.

Out. An Undeceptions podcast. For any bosses listening, this is amazing. More trust, more success. Trust is also... Gee, the room went silent there. No. Researcher Al put his thumb up high, so he wins the points. As for you, Director Mark... Just be quiet. I trust you.