Dani Ng-See-Quan: Hello and welcome to Trust Faster - a Clearspeed podcast about the ways that risk and trust intersect in our day-to-day lives. I’m your host, Dani Ng-See Quan.

This time on the show we’re going to talk about the trust side of the equation. Now on the surface at least… trust seems like a subjective thing - it’s a gut feeling, a reaction to circumstance, or something informed by our experiences… both good and bad.

But that subjectivity doesn’t keep people from studying trust - and one of the biggest names in the world when it comes to quantifying trust and putting it into a global context is Edelman.

Edelman started way back in 1952, and is still to this day a private, family-owned business. Their mission is to partner with businesses and organizations to evolve, promote, and protect their brands and reputations.

And a big part of that means getting people to trust those businesses and organizations. So, for almost 25 years, Edelman has been releasing what they call the Trust Barometer - a survey of more than 32,000 people in 28 countries that looks at the influence of trust across society. Specifically - how do people relate to the institutions, businesses, organizations, and governments that they interact with every day?

In this episode of Trust Faster we’re going to be joined by Tonia Ries. For the past 10 years she’s been the Executive Director of the Trust Barometer. Under Tonia’s leadership, the Trust Barometer has expanded beyond a yearly survey.

It now includes a year-round series of reports and publications focusing on issues like employee activism, climate change, and the evolving information ecosystem.

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who spends as much time thinking about trust on the same scale or with access to the same data as Tonia, so she’s the perfect guest for this episode. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

We started things off with Tonia by asking a pretty simple, but important, question… why trust?

Tonia Ries:

Trust is such an important metric because it is the only one that businesses and other institutions can measure that is forward looking. Typically everything that an organization can measure, financial metrics, right? That's backward looking.

Reputational issues. Those are responses to behaviors that have happened in the past. What's really unique, special, and important about trust is that it is a forward-looking expectation of how you will behave in the future. When I trust someone, I'm more willing to make myself vulnerable. It becomes easier to say yes, to collaborate, to partner.

Distrust can have incredibly negative consequences for an institution. It becomes a lot easier for actions that you take or words that you say to become politicized. If you do invest in action to demonstrate goodwill, people might see it as performative. We've all heard of the term greenwashing. We talk about trust washing.

Because that can happen across any different kinds of issues where you're trying to demonstrate good will. You won't be seen as authentic or sincere. People will mistrust your motives. Employees will be less loyal and you'll have more turnover. You'll see the impacts in your workforce.

So trust is such an important precious commodity because it creates bonds and ties and shared interests across all of your stakeholder groups. We know it's important in financial markets, but we also know that it's important to employees, it's important to consumers, and it's important to your local community. It essentially is your license to operate. And when you lose trust, you lose that license to operate.

DNSQ: So, we know trust matters, but it’s a big jump between recognizing that and becoming a global leader in studying trust.

Tonia said that there was actually one event - just before the turn of the last century - that really showed the disparity in trust between individuals and institutions like businesses and government. Seeing that disparity play out in real time is what set the Trust Barometer into motion.

TR:The precipitating event actually happened in 1999, which is the Battle of Seattle, and which was a large-scale protest that took place around the World Trade Organization meeting. And to everyone's surprise, was met with fierce backlash, literally people in the streets, broken windows. And there were protesters that had come together and converged that were protesting essentially globalization, and the financial industry as a whole.

Richard Edelman, our current CEO and the founder of the Trust Barometer was watching these events unfold in the news and really the question that came to him was why are these protesters trusting what the nonprofits, the activists, the organizers are telling them over what they might be hearing from business leaders and the business community and CEOs in general?

And so having the protesters sort of hijack the conversation in that sense was also something that really took people aback and sort of was stunning to them. Like, where did these people come from and who are they and why? Why do they hate us so much? Why are they so unhappy? I don't understand. And also importantly, how did it come about that? that Because I think there were several different organizations involved in the protests that all of these people were able to converge. And remember, this was before social media and before people really had the digital tools to organize openly in the sense that we do today.

And so this kind of sense of where how did this all get organized so quickly? And why do these organizations and these nonprofits have this level of influence? And that was the initial impetus for the Trust Barometer.

DNSQ: The team at Edelman designed a set of questions that would get to the heart of the conflict that they’d seen playing out in front of them on the streets of Seattle.

To do this, they came up with a series of questions that struck a balance between specificity and leaving room for interpretation. And it turns out that those questions have held up really well over time.

TR: The questions that were devised by the research team in the very early years were incredibly simple, elegant, and have really stood the test of time. And specifically, what we ask, we do not define for people what we mean by NGOs,

We do spill it out in non-governmental organizations. We don't define what we mean by the media. But what we do know is people's understanding of those terms has evolved over that period of time. And we also don't define for people what it means to trust, right? Trust is a very personal concept. And it's the kind of thing that everyone knows what it feels like.

Everyone knows what it means, but no one can really define it. And so the initial question that was written was, how much do you trust each of these institutions to do what is right? And what's so brilliant and elegant about that question is that it includes the important demand the most important dimensions of trust, which are capability or ability, right?

The ability to do something and a sense of an ethical or moral component.

DNSQ: For the folks at Edelman, trust is and was one of those… I know it when I see it type of things.

When they started the Trust Barometer, they didn’t define trust. What they did instead was situate it in a universe. They gave it dimensions… parameters.

It’s about competence, and ethics, and how those things relate to one another. You believe that someone has the ability to do something. And you believe that someone’s moral compass is aligned with your own.

And somewhere, in the middle of that, you have trust - more specifically, you have a way to survey people ABOUT trust. So… what did they find?

TR: Well, for the first survey and many years thereafter, the findings, not too surprisingly, are that NGOs, non-governmental organizations, non-profits are more trusted than business, government, or the media. And those were the four institutions that were part of the first trust barometer and have been measured ever since as being the idea being that those are the four pillars, if you will, of society or of civil society.

And so the finding really was that the nonprofit non profit motivated institutions were the ones that had the highest levels of trust.

One of the beauties of the trust barometer is that because we've now measured these things for 25 years, we have long-term tracking data. And so the most interesting part of the data is how things have changed over time.

I think that if I had to summarize what the biggest shift in trust has been, it has really been about the inversion of influence, right? And that expert and authoritative voices are no longer the final word on a topic.

People trust pure voices as much as they trust expert voices. They trust their community and their family as much as they trust an institution. And they want their own voice to now be part of the conversation.

One of my favorite stat statistics is in 2012, we saw a, which was the year that Apple introduced the iPhone app store. And everyone downloaded Facebook and Twitter for some of us and started walking around with our social media friends in our pocket. And that was the year that the credibility of peer voices, a person like myself, shot up by about 25 points to where it suddenly was on par with expert voices.

Almost half, 40% of Gen Z will say, doing my own research, I can know as much as a doctor. I can go out there and do my own research and know as much as a doctor. and so it's not that expert voices and scientific voices are less trusted, it's just that there are more voices that people are listening to.

DNSQ: That “inversion of influence” as Tonia calls it has led to what many experts see as a trust crisis. To go back to that idea of trust being a combination of competence and ethics - people just don’t seem to believe that businesses, governments, NGOs, and other institutions have the competence or ethics to serve them anymore.

And that’s a big problem. We talked about the trust gap in our last episode, and Tonia says that not only is the trust gap real, but it’s global. And it’s also growing.

TR: In too many countries in the world, especially in the developed world, there's been a long-term ongoing erosion of belief that the system is working fairly. There's been a sense that the elites and those that are well off and that are leading our institutions do not have my best interests at heart and maybe don't even have our country's best interests at heart. They're not part of my community, certainly, and they're not necessarily demonstrating that they are doing their fair share; whether that's paying taxes or contributing back to the communities.

So high-income people have always been more trusting than those in the lower quartile of income. That's not really a shock. If I'm well off, then the system is working well for me, right? Institutions are taking care of me. If I'm not well off, I am a lot more vulnerable. But that trust divide of about seven or eight points in the earlier years of the data, right around 2015, 2016, started to open up and widen two double digits.

It started initially in Western developed countries. Europe, the US is where we first saw some of those big gaps, but it has since, it's almost like it's mis metastasized. And that income-based trust inequality is now present in the majority, nearly all of the 28 countries that we measure. am It is present around the world. We can show this in our data over the years, has directly led to the rise of populism, a sense that the system is not working for me. And to some, that means I would rather burn it down. I want very strong leaders in power because we need change.

And because the institutions are not working for me and they're not listening for me, right? And I need someone to be my voice. And it has it has been absolutely fascinating to watch that play out over time. How much trust is a component part of society being able to function, people being able to collaborate.

And when you don't trust, when you feel that you're divided to a point where those divisions cannot be overcome, a shocking number of people say that they are not willing to work with those on the other side of a contentious issue, live in the same neighborhood, or even help someone if they're in need when they're on the other side of a contentious issue.

DNSQ: Tonia says that one of the institutions that’s really taken a hit over the past decade has been the media. Traditionally, we’ve relied on newspapers and journalists to hold governments and businesses accountable - they’ve been there to safeguard the public good.

But according to Edelman’s research, that’s not really how people see the media anymore.

TR: Journalists are among the least credible. As a source of information, they're among the least trusted and they along with business and government leaders, there's a very high belief that all three of those government leaders, business leaders and journalists are deliberately exaggerating information or giving us misleading information in order to manipulate the truth.

So the numbers were getting so low that we wanted to ask a question that was really explicitly about, okay, you say you don't trust them, but do you think they're actually lying to you? And the answer came back, yes.

So there is there's a lot of work to do in that space because I know many journalists and I know how hard they work and how trustworthy they are. But the trust in journalists is being undermined from so many different directions, right? One, of course, is the fact that the whole flow of information has shifted.

People absolutely distrust social media. They spend all their time on social media and yet they don't trust it. And for many people,Tthat has become their primary source of news. And so that in turn taints all news. It doesn't help that we've had politicians and others deliberately undermining journalists and the media and seeing a lot of things that are not necessarily true.

It was one thing when we had local news and local reporters that actually showed up at the community meetings, and we knew them and we could see them and we could see the kind of work they were doing. And so that's no longer happening. We've lost our local newspapers. And so those local ties that are so important to trust have frayed.

So one of the things we saw happen in the data after. Gosh, when was this? I mean, I think it was in our 2016 report, just a massive increase in people saying that they're actively looking for news. They are actively spending their time looking at multiple sources of information, amplifying, talking about news online, right? They want to be part of the process.

Well, and that absolutely begs the question, what are they searching for? And aren't they finding stories from traditional media outlets when they're searching? But I think that what it really speaks to is I've watched that data and looked at other questions over time. What that really speaks to is that what people are saying is, I will trust you more if you give me a sense of agency and a sense of control, right?

And so how does a journalist participate in that new digital public square and elevate the right voices in the right way? I mean, those are all very hard questions to answer.

DNSQ: Edelman’s research has also shown that as tech companies have moved away from building tools that facilitate things like business transactions, or providing real nuts-and-bolts behind-the-scenes systems, they’ve also become much less trusted.

The rise of technology companies has really been seen as the rise of global social media platforms, and that’s resulted in a big shift in how trusted the companies behind those platforms actually are. New technologies, like the ones being promoted by public-facing AI companies, are only adding to the scrutiny.

TR: There's also so much uncertainty right now and a very much split among the general population about whether we are enthusiastic about the rise of new technologies such as AI and the growing use of AI and so and in society. There are just as many people who say they think that's a bad thing and I reject it and I try to avoid it as there are people who are enthusiastic about it.

And the reason for that has to do, yes, with jobs, but it also has to do with people being deeply concerned about information. We've seen over the last two, three years a real rise in fear of not just misinformation, but specifically cyber attacks, deliberate attempts by foreign governments to undermine our information systems.

So it's a really challenging time for the technology industry. And at the same time, I would make the argument that no industry sector has done more to build trust at scale than technology has.

20 years ago, I would have never thought of getting into a car with a stranger or even spending as much time with strangers online as I do.

So I feel that the technology industry from a trust perspective is at a real inflection point and has an opportunity if it can find ways to humanize what it does and to bring people along to manage the impact of the technology to be more sensitive and thoughtful and deliberate about the impacts. Rather than, we're going to move fast and break things mentality that has gotten us to this point.

I think there's a real opportunity for technology to play a very strong role in building trust. But there's also a real risk if we don't take those challenges seriously and address them, that the opposite could happen.

DNSQ: So, we’re losing faith in media and tech companies… we’re seeing a shifting public square, and a growing distrust of government… we get so much of our information from social media platforms, but we don’t actually trust those platforms.

All of this together really does sound like a trust crisis - to me at least. And Tonia says that there are some consistent external factors that are wearing down our ability to trust these institutions. The first problem is one of preparedness - a lot of organizations simply aren’t thinking about trust in the right way.

TR: Most organizations do not have a strategic, intentional, integrated plan in place on how they're going to earn and manage the trust that they have. And that's a missed opportunity because today with all of the external pressures on trust, it is more important than ever that trust is a resource that you cherish and that you deliberately invest in.

In terms of the external pressures, there are so many of those, and they're very clearly documented, both in academic literature, in our own data as well. Societal fears, chief among them economic anxiety, right economic optimism, just in the last year, has collapsed in countries around the world.

And people who think their families will be better off in five years down time is down in almost all the countries that we measured over the last year. And that has put tremendous pressure on trust because if I don't think I have a better future, I won't trust that the institutions are helping me, protecting me. We've also had a great imbalance between the institutions right now.

Government and business are highly distrusted. Government is seen as 50 points less competent than business. And so in many ways, that might be seen as a good thing for business, but it's not necessarily a good thing for society because government has an important role to play. People are more trusting of business when it acts on issues in partnership with government. So business is missing its partner. That puts pressure on business to step into that void in ways that then allows business to be politicized. So this imbalance between the institution is not a healthy or sustainable thing and it's putting pressure on trust.

And then the other big trend, of course, that I would point to is the battle for truth. And the erosion of a shared sense set of facts, a shared reality that is making it so hard to communicate in ways that are believable and that build trust.

DNSQ: Tonia pointed to one example from recent history that clearly showed how easy it is for people to lose faith in the institutions they’re supposed to trust.

TR: One of the most stunning examples of how real world events and news happenings are reflected and shape trust and reflected in the data is what happened what we saw in Japan after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. We had trust in the government, trust in the media, trust in business, and also trust in NGOs. All four institutions fell off a cliff. Japan has been one of the least trusting countries ever since. They've never recovered. And the energy sector lost trust by double digits around the world. In every country that we measured, that sector since has come back to close to where it was previously. But the impact of an event like that when

Institutions fail at some of their most basic obligations to society, right? Fail to keep us safe. Do not tell us the truth, right? Do not protect our best interests or our future. Once you break trust, it is very, very hard to recover it.

DNSQ: Since Fukushima in 2011, Tonia says that this loss of faith in NGOs has only grown. She points to the recent pandemic as a real turning point.

TR: One of the most interesting changes and shifts in the data has been, I said earlier that NGOs were the most trusted institutions for the early years of the barometer. That was true until 2019 when business caught up and then passed NGOs and to become the most trusted institution, which is quite a shocking and stunning development if you think about it, and then over a three-year period, the ethical score for business increased by about 20 points. So business has always been seen as the most competent institution, the ability to get things done, but today it is not only the most competent, but also almost nearly as ethical as NGOs. And NGOs are highly ethical, but not seen as competent. And so you have to ask yourself from about 2020 to 23, what was happening in the world that business suddenly became seen as not only competent, but also more ethical. Well, we can speculate.

One of the big things, of course, was the pandemic. And when you look at the way that companies, brands responded to the pandemic, you can say that from a trust-building perspective, the way that they demonstrated care, concern, and empathy for their employees.

The way that companies very quickly pivoted to deliver new solutions to consumers who were stuck at home, right? And needed services delivered or brought to them.

So it was a bit of a missed opportunity, I think, for government to demonstrate some competence in some areas. I think even if governments had maybe picked one piece to focus on, if government had been able to ensure that we had access to trustworthy information as just one example.

It could have been an easy win for government to retain some of that trust, right? But for any number of reasons that didn't happen. And instead today, when we ask people the question, which of the following sources are the most believable when it comes to information about any number of topics or information in general, the number one choice, the number one answer is information for my employer.

DNSQ: So… we have lots of examples of trust being lost, and organizations mishandling situations. In our own lives, I’m sure that we can all think of interactions we’ve had with businesses that have made us lose faith in their ability to do a job, and do it ethically.

You miss a line in the fine print and all of the sudden someone on a customer service line is telling you that the fully refundable whatever you paid for is no longer fully refundable. We’ve all been there, it’s no fun, and it makes you never want to deal with that company again.

Like Tonia says, maintaining trust with your customers, your employees, your citizens… it’s a hard thing to do. And most organizations don’t really have a plan in place to deal with this stuff.

So, it begs the question… What do you do once trust is broken? How do you rebuild it?

TR: Repairing lost trust is incredibly difficult. So the most and the most effective strategy is to avoid that happening to begin with, right? And the best way you can do that is to invest in trust on an ongoing basis and have a plan in place so that when a crisis does present itself that challenges perceptions, first of all, very clearly what your values are.

Because you're going to have to act quickly and you're not going to have a lot of time to assess where you want, what you want to base a decision or a stance or perspective on an issue on. So do your homework before you're in a crisis situation where your trust is challenged. Know what your values are. Know who your most important stakeholders are that you're going to prioritize.

If there are conflicting pressures, and understand what their values are and how those values intersect with yours. And only once you have that homework done, are you going to be prepared to react to a trust breach in a way that is truly going to be seen as authentic and sincere. And what's important to understand is what is the nature of that breach, right? Is the breach one where there's been a mistake, you've been incompetent,

You did something where you mixed up an order, you had a quality defect, something that you can address through more traditional customer service types of actions and win them back that way.

Or is it more challenging a breach of ethics or morals where there's been a values misalignment? And is the issue then that you need to clarify your values or in other other ways address that ethical breach in a way that needs to be more thoughtful, more intentional, and more delicate?

DNSQ: Edelman has been publishing the Trust Barometer for almost a quarter century with Tonia leading the team for almost a decade. That’s given them a really big picture view of how our collective relationship with institutions, businesses, and brands has shifted over time.

In January 2025, Edelman will release the 25th anniversary Trust Barometer annual report. Tonia says that for her team this big occasion is as much about looking forward as it is about looking at the current moment.

So, we’re going to end this episode by having Tonia zoom out a bit and look at things from a higher altitude. Simply put… where is trust headed?

TR: We've been thinking a lot about the divisiveness that's shown up in the data, right? The divides between income, geographic divides, the inversion of influence and the lack of trust in information. But in many ways, those are all symptoms of and exacerbated by something that we've seen show up in the data in a number of different contexts, which is a lack of optimism.

And we first measured this in our climate trust study a couple of years ago where we found that when people lack any optimism that we can address a crisis such as the climate emergency, they're far more likely to be willing to take any action or even support public action or public policy to address the crisis. So you need a certain amount of optimism that a better future is possible. Trust is a forward-looking metric, right? Trust is something that predicts how I will behave in the future because if I trust you, I'm willing to take a risk, make myself vulnerable to you, send you money and know that you're going to return an item without asking questions if I don't like it or if there's a problem with it, that you'll fix it, right?

That's what trust allows us to do. It allows us to work together to collaborate. So if you have if you lack the expectation that the world will be a better place if you work harder, if you trust, or that I personally, that my economic future will be better in five years for myself and my family, it's going to be a lot harder to feel that the institutions are doing what they need to do to do their part.

We found in this year's workplace study that we just released in September of this year, 24, that there is a 40-point gap between the economic optimism of those who are in management or executive positions in a company versus those who are either entry-level or non-management associates, employees.

It is literally executives are twice as likely to say, oh yeah, I'll be better off in five years. But only 39% of those who are associate workers in the work across the workforce have economic optimism about their future.

And similar to the gap that we see in trust data for those levels as well, or if we look at the trust data by income, What has happened over the last five, 10 years is that higher income people, executives have become more trusting. They've become more optimistic. Low income people or associates, right? They're not perfectly matching groups, but both data points hold true, have not moved.

They've stayed at the same level of distrust and they've stayed at the similar level of economic optimism. And so the gap has widened as those in higher income groups are seeing innovation, growth, economic growth, all of the data indicators that we might look at if we're reading economic news and scratching our heads, because we see good news. But that good news is not translating into a vision for the future that everyone can believe in. And then on top of that, we just have not done a good job of explaining change and innovation, right? Look at the farmers in Holland last year. Being asked to make massive changes to how they produce food and manage their business by faceless experts who've never been to a farm. Or look at the fishing community here in Montauk where suddenly these experts and funded by hedge fund guys and Washington DC who doesn't know anything about the ocean are coming in and have authorized wind farms in the name of green energy, but they're setting them up right in the middle of the most fertile fishing grounds that we all eat our seafood from.

So the conversations, that last mile conversation between the experts, the institutions and the local community is not happening. And that's the other big thing that we really need to say before we close the conversation is trust is local. People trust things that they can see, feel, the people they talk to every day. So somehow we're failing either to Show them the path, show them what their place in future facing jobs is going to be, right? We're failing to reassure people that, oh yeah, we have AI and automation. And unlike previous waves of innovation that have benefited some, but have left others behind, this time we're going to actually manage the impact of that innovation, or we're going to give you a voice in how it's going to affect your job or your family. Or we're going to give you a sense of agency when it comes to the shape of the future. Until we find a way to ensure that people have a sense of confidence that they will have that voice and that agency, they are not going to trust the institutions to look out for them.

Some of the most trusted people today are everyday people, teachers, pharmacists. So maybe it's less of a time for us experts to speak and more of a time for experts, including journalists, to elevate those kinds of voices and empower them with the information because they are the ones that people are listening to and are more credible. So how can we empower those influential voices in the across communities in ways that they can then amplify information that is trustworthy? How can we give them tools to address misinformation or best practices when they see it? And how can we give them confidence that they can share with their communities?

That there is a reason to feel optimistic. There's a reason to feel hope for the future. There's a reason to trust that institutions will bring a better future.

DNSQ: Thanks so much to Tonia Reis, Executive Director of the Edelman Trust Barometer at the Edelman Trust Institute for joining me on this episode of TRUST FASTER. I’ve been your host, Dani Ng-See Quan.

I’ll be back next time in conversation with General David Petraeus, to look at his 50-year career as a leader in situations where sometimes trust isn’t just critical… it’s life or death.