Call it the Distrust Society: What companies can learn from a shifting trust landscape

Photo credit: Lauren Lancaster, The New York Times

A September 22nd headline in The New York Times put it succinctly: “Call it the distrust election.” The article described a pattern that can be observed across the political spectrum. Voters express deep distrust of political parties, parliaments, courts, and even the electoral process itself.

The article presented this as a political story. But there is a deeper underlying pattern. Similar doubts are directed at banks, insurance companies, the media, and other large organizations. The crucial development may not be that trust is disappearing altogether. Rather, whom people place their trust in is changing: away from institutions and toward individuals.

For companies, this raises a fundamental question: What does it mean when customers no longer automatically trust an institution, but do trust individual people who represent it?

Trust Is Not Disappearing, It Is Shifting

In her book Who Can You Trust?, Rachel Botsman argues that trust does not simply increase or decrease over the course of history. It changes form and finds new points of reference (Botsman, 2017). Botsman describes three eras of trust:

The first era was characterized by local trust. People trusted the baker on their street, the butcher next door, or the small bank in town. They knew the person they were dealing with and could observe through repeated interactions whether promises were kept.

With industrialization, markets expanded beyond the village and personal acquaintance. People bought from companies whose owners and employees they did not know and entered contracts across ever-greater distances. As a result, the radius of trust also expanded: from the baker on one’s own street and the local bank to large companies and institutions. Personal trust did not disappear. It was supplemented by institutional trust, which enabled economic relationships far beyond people’s immediate social environment.

Today, this form of trust is becoming more fragile. Financial crises, a pandemic, wars, data breaches, and publicly visible misconduct within institutions have shown that size and familiarity alone do not guarantee trustworthiness. At the same time, many institutions have become more anonymous. Decisions are made within systems that are difficult to understand, responsibilities are unclear, and personal points of contact are absent. As this distance grows, it becomes more difficult to build trust—and to restore it after a breach.

This does not mean, however, that people are turning away from institutions altogether. They often look for more concrete points of reference within those institutions. They may distrust a bank but rely on their long-standing advisor. They may approach an insurance company with skepticism but trust a representative who understands their situation.

In this case, trust does not disappear. It is anchored in a new way: less in the abstract promise of an institution and more in observable interactions with the people who represent it.

What Trust Consists Of

For organizations, this raises the question of how they can build trust when their business needs to scale but trust is becoming more personal again.

The model developed by Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman offers a starting point. According to this model, the perceived trustworthiness of a person or organization is based on three components: ability, integrity, and benevolence (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995).

Ability refers to the competence required to actually fulfill a promise. Integrity means acting consistently according to comprehensible principles. Benevolence, finally, describes the belief that the other party is not merely pursuing its own advantage but also has a genuine interest in achieving a good outcome for the other person.

None of these dimensions can fully replace the others. A technically brilliant advisor who is perceived as dishonest will not enjoy stable trust. Conversely, good intentions are not sufficient if the advisor is unable to deliver the promised outcome.

Which dimension is particularly relevant depends on the situation. Bansal and Warkentin (2021) demonstrate this using the example of an insider data breach. In their study, integrity-based trust was damaged more severely than trust in the company’s ability. The behavior of individual employees was therefore also interpreted as an indication of the moral character of the whole organization.

For companies, the implication is clear: It is not enough to aim to create “more trust” in general. They need to understand what kind of trust is required at which point in the relationship.

Designing Trust Along the Customer Journey

Trust does not emerge in a single moment. It develops through a sequence of experiences in which customers observe whether a company keeps its promises (Lount et al., 2008; Juvina et al., 2019).

Positive experiences usually build trust gradually. Negative experiences, by contrast, can reduce it abruptly. Juvina et al. (2019) describe this dynamic as trust asymmetry: Evidence of trustworthiness increases trust gradually, whereas indications of unreliable or unfair behavior can have a disproportionately strong effect.

The timing of a trust breach also plays a role. Lount et al. (2008) show that a breach at the beginning of a relationship can be particularly difficult to overcome. Initial interactions create expectations through which subsequent experiences are interpreted.

The practical starting point is therefore a systematic examination of the customer journey. At every relevant touchpoint, an organization should ask three questions:

• How is ability made visible here?
• How do customers recognize our integrity?
• How do we show that we also take their interests into account?

A fast and professionally convincing solution to a problem demonstrates ability. A comprehensible description of services and an open approach to limitations signal integrity. Proactively pointing out a less expensive or more suitable solution can communicate benevolence.

What matters is that these signals are concrete and observable. The statement “Our customers are at the center of everything we do” remains ineffective if the actual experience points in a different direction. Trust does not emerge through the frequency with which a promise is repeated, but through the experience that the organization acts accordingly.

Employees Make Trust Visible

Digital systems can foster trust through quality, reliability, and transparency (Li, Ong, & Yuen, 2026). Empathy, care, and an interest in long-term relationships, however, become particularly visible in the behavior of specific individuals.

Employees therefore become one of an organization’s most important trust touchpoints. Customers do not always clearly separate their behavior from the company. Poor advice is not merely poor advice from one individual. It can be interpreted as an indication of the priorities the organization sets and the behavior it tolerates.

The same applies in the opposite direction. Cui et al. (2025) show that empathetic assistance can restore damaged trust. Actions that solved a specific problem without demanding an immediate return were particularly effective. Empathy, a long-term orientation, and following up later without sales pressure signaled that the relationship was not being reduced to the next sale.

Employees can only behave in a trustworthy manner, however, if the organization provides the appropriate conditions. If an advisor is primarily required to sell a particular product, a conflict can arise between the sales target and the customer’s interests. If the advisor has to complete ten appointments a day, they may not have enough time to understand an individual customer’s situation.

The crucial question is therefore not only: “How competent are our employees?” It is also: “How much trustworthy behavior do our goals, processes, and incentive structures enable?”

Conclusion

Trust has not disappeared from public or economic life. But its foundations are changing. Institutional size, familiarity, and tradition are increasingly insufficient. People are looking for concrete evidence that an organization acts with ability, integrity, and benevolence.

This evidence emerges along the customer journey: through comprehensible information, reliable processes, and the behavior of the people who represent an organization. Companies should therefore not primarily regard trust as a communication task. Trust is a design task. It is embedded in touchpoints, objectives, and incentive systems.

Organizations that understand this do not simply try to appear trustworthy. They create the conditions that enable their employees to act in trustworthy ways. At a time when abstract institutions are losing their power to create connections, this may become the decisive difference.

References

Bansal, G., & Warkentin, M. (2021). Do You Still Trust?: The Role of Age, Gender, and Privacy Concern on Trust after Insider Data Breaches. The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems, 52(4), 9–44.

Botsman, R. (2017). Who Can You Trust? PublicAffairs.

Cui, A. P., Nelson, C. A., Wang, X., & Du, S. (2025). The Effects of Renqing Repair on Trust Recovery: A Cross-Cultural Study. Journal of International Marketing, 33(3–4), 1–20.

Juvina, I., et al. (2019). Toward a Unified Theory of Learned Trust in Interpersonal and Human-Machine Interactions. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 9(4).

Li, Z., Ong, Y. T., & Yuen, K. F. (2026). Building Trust and Reducing Perceived Complexity in AI Adoption. International Trade, Politics and Development.

Lount, R. B., Jr., Zhong, C.-B., Sivanathan, N., & Murnighan, J. K. (2008). Getting Off on the Wrong Foot. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(12), 1601–1612.

Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709–734.