After a late night at work, a man stops by his corner bodega to pick up cereal and milk. Parked cars idle on the street. As the man walks down the street toward the store, he notices the faint mechanical sound of automatic locks on car doors. That sound is not unfamiliar to him. The man is black; the neighborhood once was.

I propose that this kind of fleeting encounter, and many others like it, is of under-appreciated moral consequence. Such interactions raise questions of both theoretical import and practical urgency. What is the cumulative impact of the repetition of this kind of experience on a person’s sense of honor, self-respect and moral agency? Can distrust that is sincerely felt be at the same time morally indecent? What kind of responsibility is borne by those in positions analogous to the people in the cars? If we discover that our own felt distrust lacks warrant, ought we attempt to stifle its expression? What steps toward rectification and restoration might be taken? Cases like this call on us to consider the high moral stakes of subtle signals of interpersonal distrust, and in particular, to pay attention to the consequences of typically non-deliberative and spontaneous behavior that is expressive of attitudes and emotions constitutive of it.

In comparison to trust, distrust is conspicuously under-explored and under-theorized.Footnote 1 Contemporary moral philosophers working on trust have focused their attention on hazards of mislaid trust, which they rightly point out can be confidence shaking, demeaning, and even humiliating.Footnote 2 The vulnerability and exposure that trust brings is no doubt risky. But the moral stakes of misplaced distrust are considerable, threatening to put us out of harmony with others in our community deeply and irrevocably. Distrust is deeply dishonoring, and distrust without warrant risks insulting, demoralizing, and disempowering, planting the seeds of alienation expressed in behavior that does warrant distrust. Distrust that is based in real fear yet fails to target ill will, lack of integrity, or incompetence serves to marginalize and exclude people who have done nothing that would justify their marginalization or exclusion.

I start this investigation with an account of the relationship between trust and distrust, and a characterization of the suite of behaviors characteristic of each attitude (Sect. 1). This will bring into relief the characteristic epistemic and moral hazards of distrust, in particular, distrust’s propensity to bias interpretation, to perpetuate itself, to confirm itself, to dishonor, and to insult (Sects. 2 and 3). Taking seriously these moral and epistemic hazards requires taking affirmative measures to respond to them. In the final section of the paper I elaborate one such strategy: “humble trust” (Sect. 4).

1 Trust and distrust

When encountering someone new we typically want to know if they will be an ally or a threat, a source of security or of hazard, a collaborator or an adversary, honest or shifty. Equally important, we want to know how they will see us along these same dimensions. In short, we want to know whether we can safely trust them and whether they are likely to trust us. Those in positions of power often have greater stake the latter question (“Can I trust the nanny with my children?”) while those who are marginalized often have more stake in the former (“Will they trust me enough to hire me?”).

Over time, trust and distrust are continuously shaped in response to our environment, and in turn they shape attention, cognition, and behavior, bypassing explicit thought or inference. Railton aptly describes the affective component of trust and distrust as “spontaneously experience-sensitive” insofar as “no special mental action such as judgment or acceptance is needed for experience contrary-to or congruent-with expectation to ‘update’ these feelings.” (2014, 147) Deliberation and inference can play a role in shaping trust and distrust, but this role is typically secondary and indirect.

Trust is commonly described using the metaphor of an invisible “social glue” that is conspicuous only when it is absent. It is initially tempting to think of distrust as the absence of the “glue” of trust. But this way of thinking oversimplifies the conceptual relationship between trust and distrust. Not trusting a person is not tantamount to distrusting a person: Trust and distrust are contraries rather than contradictories (Govier 1992, 83). Distrust is typically accompanied by feelings of insecurity, cynicism, contempt, or fear, which distinguishes it from the agnostic mode of “wait and see” (Russell Hardin 2001, 496). Rather than being jointly exhaustive, trust and distrust are mutually exclusive. I cannot simultaneously trust and distrust you with respect to the very same matter (Ullmann-Margalit 2004, 60). Within a given domain of interaction, distrust crowds out trust, and vice versa.

If I do not trust you this could either mean that I positively distrust you, or that I neither trust nor distrust you. Indeed, I may decline to consider something to be a matter of trust or distrust for reasons that are orthogonal to my assessment of your trustworthiness. I may simply recognize that you prefer not to be counted on in a particular domain, and I may respect and defer to your preference (Hawley 2014, 7). Because the reliance of others can be a burden, there are some things we are perfectly happy to do, but not happy to be trusted to do. It is not inconsistent or capricious to want neither trust nor distrust with respect to a particular task or in a particular domain. In contrast to simply not being trusted, being distrusted is to be thought of badly (Domenicucci and Holton 2017, 150). Being widely distrusted is typically a stain on one’s reputation; this is not the case for the mere absence of trust unless this absence is unusual in the context and therefore conspicuous. Not being distrusted is something that is worth wanting even in circumstances in which you prefer not to be trusted.

2 Approach and avoidance

Trust and distrust are each partially constituted by a suite of characteristic action-tendencies. These action-tendencies have profound implications for our relationships with others as well as for our epistemic position. Trust brings with it engagement and is typically accompanied by feelings of security and of confidence. When we trust, we are disposed to rely on others, to interact closely, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable more generally. In particular, trusting can leave us open to being made a fool of, a predicament which, it is important to note, does not require having made a foolish decision to trust. Wise trust that is nonetheless betrayed can beget humiliation and dishonor: we feel diminished, stupid, disvalued. In trusting, we send signals of respect to the trustee as well as to third-party observers. New trust that is honored represents an early step in an inductive case for trustworthiness. If we already trust deeply and we encounter an apparent breach of trust, we seek explanations. If we ultimately decide that our trust has been badly abused, the pain of betrayal makes this information unlikely to be forgotten.

In contrast, when we distrust we avoid or withdraw from interaction.Footnote 3 This, too, has implications for our moral relationships and for our epistemic position. When we distrust, we are disposed to avoid reliance, interaction, and vulnerability whenever this is feasible. As a result, we are unlikely to discover how the person we have withdrawn from would have responded had we chosen to rely on them.

When we are forced to rely or to interact despite our distrustful attitudes, we continuously check-up or make contingency plans. Distrust is typically accompanied by feelings of wariness, uncertainty, and disquiet. It is noteworthy that even when we have strong feelings of distrust and we are also able to confirm that distrust is warranted, it is not unusual that we nonetheless take measures to conceal that this is how we feel and think. There is often significant social pressure to refrain from expressing distrust directly, in much the same way that there is social pressure to refrain from expressing the belief that someone is a liar or that someone smells bad. It is much easier to avoid the person altogether, and we are awkward and uneasy when we must continue to interact after having expressed distrust. This poses problems when we find ourselves in circumstances in which we have no choice but to rely on those we distrust. Even when we try to conceal distrust, our feelings and beliefs are often betrayed by subtle and non-voluntary aspects of our comportment (Slingerland 2014, chap. 7). As Govier puts it, “We are left, all too often, to face distrust as a practical problem.” (1992, 53)

Distrustful behavior can be understood as a tendency to withdraw from reliance or vulnerability in contexts of normative expectation, based on a construal of a person or persons as malevolent, incompetent, or lacking integrity. The affective character of distrust varies widely, depending on its basis. Distrust need not involve the expectation of any particular action, nor does it require the belief that the distrusted party will fail to meet their commitments.Footnote 4 Rather, it consists in a typically affectively-loaded flight or wished-for flight from exposure in contexts where the distrusting party has normative expectations (but not predictive expectations) of goodwill, non-malevolence, competence, and integrity.Footnote 5 Note that on my account the cognitive element of distrust is construal rather than belief. This operationalization of distrust allows us to explain cases of distrust like the one in the opening vignette. Those who lock their car doors may not believe that the man walking by poses a threat; yet they may fearfully distrust him based on an unendorsed, or even reflectively repudiated, construal of him as threatening. As a result, they may find themselves fearfully focused on a risk that they reflectively judge to be below the threshold of statistical significance (Jones 2004, 8).Footnote 6

The multiple disjunctions in this characterization of distrust track the multi-strandedness of the concept. Distrust has many manifestations, each of which has variable affective and normative dimensions. When distrust is based on a construal of a person as incompetent, it may take on the phenomenology of doubtfulness and felt skepticism. When it is based on a construal of a person as lacking integrity, its affective profile will be of contempt or of moral disgust. When it is based on a construal of a person as threatening, it typically manifests as fear. The kind of flight from exposure to the perceived hazard of reliance that is characteristic of distrust casts aspersions on a person’s competence or good will or integrity. This normative aspect of distrust explains how we can insult a person by distrusting them, how the character of the insult may vary with the perceived basis of distrust, and why moral reckoning and rectification is in order when distrust is unmerited.

3 The epistemic hazards of distrust

Considering the widely cited corrosive effects of cynicism, might it be wise for us to aim to be more trusting in general? In a widely-viewed TED talk, Onora O’Neill explains why she is not tempted by this thought: “Well frankly, I think that’s a stupid aim. It’s not what I would aim at. I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy. In fact, I aim positively not to trust the untrustworthy.” (O’Neill 2013) While there is something obviously right about what O’Neill says here, I think her formulation may mislead. O’Neill is surely correct that we would do better by trusting the trustworthy more (more opportunities for meaningful and productive interaction coupled with less anxiety and fear). She is also surely correct that we would do better by trusting the untrustworthy less (diminished exposure to exploitation, betrayal, and trauma). I take it to be uncontroversial that these sort of adjustments to one’s patterns of trust represent meaningful improvements.

But it is by no means clear that the best way of realizing these desirable states of affairs is to positively aim at them. O’Neill advocates for an “intelligent” account of trust that emphasizes judgment and choice over attitude and affect (O’Neill 2002, 58). She is surely right that the goal of better discrimination in trust and distrust is a worthy one: we want our attitudes to target trustworthiness and untrustworthiness as accurately as possible. But it is critical that we do not overestimate how fine-grained and responsive to evidence we can reasonably hope our trust and distrust can be given human psychology. I think that consideration of our susceptibility to bias should lead us to be skeptical of our own attitudes.Footnote 7 To plan for the inevitable contingency that our trust and distrust will sometimes fail to target trustworthiness and untrustworthiness respectively, we must reflect on the kind of errors that we will inevitably make, and on the respective moral, prudential, and epistemic costs of each kinds of errors.

Some language from signaling theory will help to elaborate this idea. Adopting the positive aim not to trust the untrustworthy may serve to increase our “hit rate” and decrease our “miss rate” for detecting untrustworthiness, but there is a risk that this improvement will come at the cost of increasing our “false alarm rate” (the rate at which we mistakenly class trustworthy people as untrustworthy) and decreasing our “correct rejection rate” (the rate and which we correctly identify the absence of untrustworthiness).

Since it is often difficult to know antecedent to interaction or testimony who is trustworthy and who is untrustworthy, it is not a simple matter to deepen our trust in the former and to avoid trust in the latter. But the difficulty goes beyond just our ignorance. Judgments related to trust and distrust show particularly high susceptibility to bias. Social psychologists have long studied the tendency of people to see themselves as better than others (“perceived superiority”). It is noteworthy that this tendency is especially pronounced in domains that are relevant to trust. Relative to themselves, we see other people as especially low in honesty, considerateness, and prosociality (Allison et al. 1989; Lange and Sedikides 1998).

Initial impressions of trustworthiness and untrustworthiness are often driven by arational, atavistic factors. Experiments using functional neuro-imagining indicate that regions in the amygdala track how untrustworthy a face appears as well as the overall strength of a face’s trustworthiness signal even in advance of faces being subjectively seen (Freeman et al. 2014). After a face is seen, judgments of trustworthiness are made extremely rapidly and spontaneously based on remarkably thin and fleeting first-impressions (Willis and Todorov 2006). Experiments on “facial trustworthiness” (attributions of trustworthiness based on the appearance of a person’s face) show that impressions of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness are formed after a mere 100 ms of exposure. The effect of additional time to study a face is simply to increase confidence in judgments rather than to revise them (Todorov et al. 2009). These judgments guide real-world behavior (Tingley 2014; van Wout and Sanfey 2008) and in some cases even override behavioral evidence (Chang et al. 2010). The effect of the physical appearance of a person’s face on assessments of trustworthiness is not limited to situations where people lack any information about their partners “but survives in richer environments where relevant details about partner past behavior are available.” (Rezlescu et al. 2012, 1)

Faces with low inner eyebrows, shallow cheekbones, thin chins, and deep nose sellion (the depression below the top of the nose) are perceived as untrustworthy (Todorov et al. 2008). Individuals who are attractive or who appear happy are more likely to be viewed as trustworthy (Scharlemann et al. 2001). Individuals who are perceived as “baby-faced” (large eyes, arched brow, small chin, round face, small nose) are judged to be less dominant and more trustworthy despite the fact that there is no correlation between a baby faced appearance and the aforementioned qualities. One prominent evolutionary explanation of this pattern is that we base our impression of adults on the similarity of their faces to the facial prototypes of different ages. We are sensitive to these physiological differences because the detection of age difference is important to our social functioning. Babies are physically weak, need protection, and cannot hurt us, and so we interpret people with faces that resemble a baby as non-threatening (Zebrowitz and Montepare 2008).

The perception of one’s face as “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy” has real implications for a person’s life prospects. For example, in small claims court baby-faced defendants—as opposed to mature-faced defendants—were found less likely to lose when the case was about intentional harm, but more likely to lose when the case was about accidental harm (Zebrowitz and McDonald 1991). More troublingly, whether a person is sentenced to death for a capital crime is also predicted by facial trustworthiness. Participants in a study by Wilson and Rule were shown photos of 371 death-row inmates who had been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced either to life without parole or death (2015). Participants rated the trustworthiness of each face without knowing that the person pictured had been convicted of any crime. The inmates who had been sentenced to death had faces that the raters perceived to be less trustworthy than the faces of those who had been sentenced to life imprisonment. The less trustworthy a face was rated, the more likely it was that the inmate had been sentenced to death. A follow-up study included the faces of individuals who had been convicted and later exonerated. Even among those who were exonerated, lower trustworthiness ratings correlated with higher likelihood of a death sentence. The authors of the study reach the conclusion that “facial appearance affects real-world criminal sentencing independently of actual guilt.” (1329)

Judgements of the trustworthiness of a face are strongly influenced by what we perceive as typical and by what we know about the people around us. We tend to trust people with faces similar to individuals we already trust, and to distrust people with faces similar to individuals we already distrust (Farmer et al. 2014). We also tend to trust people who appear similar to “our tribe” and distrust people are appear dissimilar. In a recent study in which Israeli and Japanese women were asked to rate computer-generated faces for trustworthiness, their impressions were predictably influenced by the faces they were most frequently exposed to. As the face became more similar to what the algorithm determined is the typical Israeli face, Isreali subjects trusted it more and Japanese subjects trusted it less. As the face became more similar to what the algorithm determined is the typical Japanese face, the opposite occurred (Sofer et al. 2017). We feel intuitive trust toward those who appear to us to be typical; we feel intuitive distrust toward those who appear to us to be marginal.

The “science” of physiognomy is long discredited, but there is an important sense in which we are all practicing physiognomists. Faces immediately hold our attention, and this attention is accompanied by likes and dislikes, attributions of emotional and mental states, and importantly for my purposes, by global attributions of character such as trustworthiness and untrustworthiness. These attributions have significant and measurable consequences for human decisions and behavior (Todorov 2017).

Adopting the positive aim of avoiding trust of the untrustworthy often means encountering others with skepticism. The problem with this starting place is that skeptical interpretation has its own inertia. Karen Jones describes the way that distrust functions as a biasing device, tampering evidence so as to make us insensible to signals that others are trustworthy (2013, 194). As a paradigm Jones considers the high frequency with which young black men in the United States are stopped by the police: “By doing nothing at all they are taken to be signaling untrustworthiness.” (195) This echoes Govier’s (1992) observation that “[w]hen we distrust a person, even evidence of positive behavior and intentions is likely to be received with suspicion, to be interpreted as misleading, and, when properly understood, as negative after all.” (52) In a similar vein, McGeer describes the sense in which “trusting and distrusting inhabit incommensurable worlds” insofar as “our attitudes of trust and distrust shape our understanding of various events, leading us to experience the world in ways that tend to reinforce the attitudes we already hold.” (2002, 28)

Distrust can go so far as to corrode our sense of reality, risking “an unrealistic, conspiratorial, indeed virtually paranoiac view of the world” (Govier 1992, 55). Paranoiac distrust is indiscriminate in finding its target. As we systematically interpret the speech and behavior of others in ways that confirm our generalized distrust, suspiciousness builds on itself and our negative evaluations become impenetrable to empirical refutation.

Jones identifies two further distorting aspects of distrust understood as an affective attitude: recalcitrance and spillover. Distrust may manifest recalcitrance insofar as it parts company from belief: “Even when we believe and affirm that someone is trustworthy, this belief may not be reflected in the cognitive and affective habits with which we approach the prospect of being dependent on them. We can believe they are trustworthy and yet be anxiously unwilling to rely.” (2013, 195) Distrust exhibits spillover in cases where “it loses focus on its original target and spreads to neighboring targets.” (195) Distrust easily falsely generalizes from one particular psychologically salient case to an entire group. It is distressingly familiar how this aspect of distrust can be leveraged by those seeking to stoke distrust of marginalized groups such as refugees and asylum seekers by fixating on dramatic but unrepresentative cases.

Consider once again O’Neill’s declaration: “I aim positively not to trust the untrustworthy.” O’Neill certainly never claims that avoiding distrust of the trustworthy is not a worthy or important aim. But the omission is nonetheless striking. O’Neill’s formulation encourages us to think about the detection of untrustworthiness on the analogy of the functioning of smoke alarm. What’s essential is that the alarm sounds whenever there is smoke: the “hit rate” must be high and the “miss rate” low. But if the alarm goes off when there is no smoke (“false alarm”) this is merely inconvenient. This approach to trust may well track a pattern of risk aversion in our actual judgments. The hit/miss rates of people who are in relative positions of power are often more important prudentially than false alarm/correct rejection rates: betrayals are typically (although not always) more costly than forgone opportunities for cooperation, especially if one is already established in a powerful community of cooperators.

But morally speaking those who are in relative positions of power also need to be concerned with minimizing “false alarms” and maximizing “correct rejections”.Footnote 8 The ability to disinguish the mere appearance of untrustworthiness from its real manifestation is crucial in realizing this aim. It is common for distrust to be characterized as a risk-averse strategy in comparison to trust. For example, Russell Hardin maintains that distrust “produces an aggregate of lost opportunities, each one regular and predictable. Trust leads to an aggregate of some real losses and some real gains. […] Although, potentially, trust is far more productive than distrust, it leads to greater variance in piecemeal outcomes because it offers both greater potential gains and greater potential losses.” (2002, 91) There is something intuitive about this ubiquitous way of framing the rationality of trust and distrust, but the liability of this framing is that it can obscure the fact that in settings in which trusting behavior is the norm and distrusting behavior is therefore conspicuous, the risk of marginalization and dishonor represents significant, even dramatic, losses for the party who is wrongly distrusted and for the relationship as well. Being distrusted in a setting in which others are given the benefit of the doubt can open deep wounds that are slow to heal.

To get a more textured sense of the relevant injury, it will help to examine some precisely rendered retellings of the experience of unmerited distrust. The opening vignette of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk describes well the the alienation and dishonor occasioned by the social withdrawal of one’s peers:

It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow crept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England. […] In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. (DuBois 2007, 7–8)

The poignancy of this story of misrecognition is in part a function of the closeness of the face-to-face encounter. Jeremy Wanderer notes a “singular intimacy” between the newcomer and Dubois that creates “a certain heightened affective sensitivity to each other’s situation.” (2012, 155) But despite her closeness, the “tall newcomer” cannot see or refuses to acknowledge the possibility that she and Dubois are alike in “heart and life and longing”. In his rendering of this memorable encounter Dubois conveys both the surprise and the pain of seeing oneself through the lens of another person’s distorting and distrustful eyes. He relates that the experience of unmerited distrust bred in him a sense of contempt for the white world, a feeling that he had to overcome if he were to have a chance to realize its “dazzling opportunities” (2007, 8). Dubois remarks with melancholy that many of his contemporaries were not able to achieve the same feat: “With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth sunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into a silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in my own house?” (2007, 8)

In Dreams of My Father, Barack Obama recounts an analogous formative experience of unmerited yet nonetheless stinging judgment. He relates that his identity as a young black man was shaped by a “ledger of slights” that includes early memories such as “the older woman in my grandparents’ apartment building who became agitated when I got on the elevator behind her and ran to tell the manager that I was following her; her refusal to apologize when she was told that I lived in the building.” (2007, 80) Obama describes a bewildering “obtuseness in otherwise sane people […]. It was as if whites didn’t know they were being cruel in the first place.” (2007, 80)

The disorientation that comes with misrecognition, in particular with the experience of being perceived (baselessly) as threatening, is the focus of Laurence Thomas’s rancorous op-ed “In My Next Life, I’ll be White” (1990). Thomas relates, “At times, I have looked over my shoulder expecting to see the danger to which a White was reacting, only to have it dawn on me that I was the menace.” (2007, 84) Thomas echoes Dubois in describing not just the mismatch between self-perception and the perception of others, but the dismayed surprise at being perceived in a way that is antithetical both to the persona that one tries to present to the world as well as to the person who one feels one is. Thomas reports that black men like himself rarely enjoy the “public trust” of whites, “no matter how much their deportment or attire conform to the traditional standards of well-off White males.” (84) To enjoy the public trust means “to have strangers regard one as a morally decent person in a variety of contexts.” (84) This enjoyment is something that is easily taken for granted by those in the mainstream, yet routinely denied to young black men who are the object of a fear that “goes well beyond the pale of rationality” (84).

Thomas picks out a feature of unmerited distrust that is particularly troubling from a moral perspective: distrust has a tendency to be self-confirming. Unmerited distrust creates an environment that is deeply inhospitable to the cultivation of trustworthiness:

Thus the sear of distrust festers and becomes the fountainhead of low self-esteem and self-hate. Indeed, to paraphrase the venerable Apostle Paul, those who would do right find that they cannot. This should come as no surprise, however. For it is rare for anyone to live morally without the right sort of moral and social affirmation. And to ask this of Blacks is to ask what is very nearly psychologically impossible. (84)

The broad and pervasive distrust from one’s fellow citizens threatens to erode the motivation to act with decency and respect.Footnote 9 Much of the contemporary empirically-informed work in virtue ethics has come around to the general view that in order for virtue to take root and thrive, it must find social support.Footnote 10 Maria Merritt points out that even Aristotle himself thought that virtuous character needs support from social relationships.Footnote 11 Virtues such as justice, liberality, magnificence, pride, due ambition, friendliness, and good temper all require for their practice “a social world inhabited by a community of peers.” (Merritt 2009, 32) Aristotle’s own conception of virtue is highly sensitive to concerns of honor and to the psychological reality that the disesteem of others is aversive and demoralizing.Footnote 12

The sting of unmerited distrust can be particularly painful in cases in which a highly skilled person who endeavors to act in a civil and helpful way is suspected of incompetence or deceitfulness. Such was the experience of Tamika Cross, a Houston-area physician who volunteered to treat a sick passenger on a Delta flight from Detroit to Minneapolis. As reported in the Washington Post, Cross recalls that the flight attendant on duty responded to her offer of assistance with, “Oh no, sweetie put ur hand down; we are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some type of medical personnel. We don’t have time to talk to you.” (Hawkins 2016) Beyond the gratingly condescending tone (“sweetie”) and the assumption that Cross couldn’t be a “real” doctor (the help of a white male doctor on the flight was later accepted), the depth of the dishonor issues from the further presumption that either Cross was not speaking honestly when she described her credentials, or else that she was not competent to discern her own expertise. The disorienting clash between self-perception (that of a skilled person acting honorably and selflessly) and other-perception (that of an incompetent or deceitful person) could not be more stark.

What other people think of us tends to matter to us a great deal whether or not we think it ought to, and whether or not we think their judgments are well-founded. In particular, we highly value being thought of as trustworthy. In “The Cunning of Trust” (1995) Philip Pettit notices that when people decide to rely on us, they signal not only to us but to others that they regard us as trustworthy. Our desire for that signal to be widely broadcast reinforces the motivation to be responsive to their trust. As Pettit puts it, “The act of trust will communicate in the most credible currency available to human beings—in the gold currency of action, not the paper money of words—that the trustor believes the trustee to be truly trustworthy, or is prepared to act on the presumption that he is.” (214) When we manifest trusting reliance, we offer the person we rely on an incentive to do the very thing we rely on them to do. This is because they want to cultivate and maintain the status that comes with being widely perceived to be trusted. Pettit concludes that this is why the trust of strangers, though never a sure bet, it is a good bet more often than one might imagine (218).

Pettit’s argument can be extended. Just as the act of reliance supports a psychological mechanism of trust-responsiveness, so also conspicuous withdrawal from reliance or vulnerability can serve to undermine trust responsiveness. In manifesting distrust of someone, one typically withdraws from interaction with them and thereby takes away the opportunity, and therefore the incentive, for the person to prove themselves worthy of trust. The person who is broadly distrusted has limited opportunity to broadcast a signal of responsiveness to trust to others, and so has diminished incentive to respond to trust. Just as reliance breeds trust-responsiveness, so also withdrawal breeds distrust-responsiveness.

Victoria McGeer identifies a second mechanism of trust and trust-responsiveness through which our “hopeful investment of trust in others can often elicit—or, better, empower—trust-responsive behavior of the sort we seek: namely, acts and attitudes on the part of trustees that live up to our hopeful vision of what they can do and be, particularly with regard to showing competence and care in the domain in which we trust them.” (2008, 250) This mechanism relies on an interpersonal dynamic whereby “others draw motivational energy for enacting and elaborating their own powers of agency from our hopeful vision of them.” (250) Our hopeful trust has a galvanizing and empowering effect on how trustees see themselves, allowing them to reconnect with a sense of their own agential abilities through having such abilities recognized and counted on.

Baseless distrust of a person can have an effect equal and opposite of the vicarious confidence that McGeer describes. As one’s agential abilities go unrecognized one is led to doubt their efficacy. Skeptical or contemptuous distrust can be demoralizing in the same measure that hopeful trust is galvanizing. It is true that one response to baseless distrust is to try to prove the doubters wrong. But the stamina required to swim against the current is not without limit, and the effort will seem useless in the face of persistent and pervasive distrust that appears impenetrable to refutation by evidence.

Mark Alfano identifies a third psychological mechanism—the “self-concept mechanism”—in which one person’s trustworthiness is dependent on another person’s trustingness: “When I signal that I think of you as trustworthy by explicitly putting my trust in you, I prompt you to revise your self-concept, to accept that you merit this trust. To the extent that you feel that you do, you will find your newly revised self-concept rewarding.” (2015, 198) The trusted person “is motivated to prove himself worthy of the trust and esteem that have been directed his way” because “he wants to prove to himself that he is worthy, in order to hold onto this positive self-concept.” (2015, 202)

Both the initial prompt to form a positive and thereby rewarding self-concept as well as the subsequent motivation to sustain such a self-concept is denied to the person who is broadly and pervasively distrusted. When I signal to you and others that I think of you as untrustworthy by withdrawing from vulnerability to you, I prompt you to revise your self-concept in a negative direction, to see yourself in the way that I see you, as someone who is lacking in competence, integrity, or good will. You may endeavor to sustain a positive self-concept in the face of negative judgments and appraisals if you hold them to be baseless, but you would do so in the face of a strong pressure.Footnote 13

It is easy to underestimate the degree to which a person who is the object of distrust is aware that they are so regarded. Slepian and Ames explore the effects of such awareness empirically (2016). Experimental subjects manifest an intuitive sense of whether or not others perceive them as trustworthy, and that subjects tend to behave in a way that is consistent with how they imagine themselves to be perceived. They find that face-based judgments of strangers predict trustworthy behavior in a game involving trust and deception. But this link is mediated by subjects’ expectations of how other people perceive them and in particular their expectation of whether they would be trusted by others.Footnote 14 As they put it, subjects “seemed to have an awareness of how people would judge them, and they internalized these expectations and behaved in accordance with them.” (2016, 287) This work extends previous work in social psychology on “self-fulfilling prophesies” (Rosenthal 1994) that focus on individual contexts (e.g.—whether a student will conform to a teacher’s high expectations). The meta-perceptions that Slepian and Ames find are not derived from a particular interaction but rather likely “from a range of contexts across a lifetime of treatment.” (2016, 287)

Just as trustworthiness is cultivated and reinforced by trust, so also untrustworthiness is cultivated and reinforced by distrust. A lamentable consequence of this recursive pattern of trust- and distrust-responsiveness is that knowledge that a person is widely distrusted, whether or not such distrust is merited, provides (defeasible) evidence that they are untrustworthy. Conversely, a distrusted person who has a grasp of the interpretive biasing that is a signature of distrustful attitudes has reason to believe that entirely innocent actions are like to be interpreted as indicating untrustworthiness. This person will not trust others to trust him. The mere anticipation of such mis-recognition diminishes the motivation to be responsive to trust. All of this is the perfect recipe for a self-reinforcing and pernicious equilibrium. Doubtless there is a logic to distrusting those who are broadly distrusted, just as there is a logic to giving up on winning the trust of one’s distrustful fellows.

I think it is obvious that we have moral reasons to endeavor to escape and to disrupt the aforementioned pernicious equilibrium. Failure to effect such a disruption darkens our prospects for living in harmony, equality, solidarity, and moral community.Footnote 15 The changes required are both structural and individual. Since my focus has thus far been the individual experience of distrust, in the final section of the paper I will outline some ideas for a response at the individual level. This emphasis is in no way meant to downplay the importance of structural changes.

4 Humble trust

In his 1947 Delhi Diary Gandhi advocated for a comprehensive disavowal of distrust: “we should trust even those whom we suspect as our enemies. Brave people disdain distrust.” (Gandhi 2005, 203) Gandhi’s position here is extreme, but there is nonetheless something compelling in the idea that there is a connection between trust and courage, and that failing to trust can be symptomatic of a kind of morally criticizable cowardice. However, a natural worry about Gandhi’s categorical stance is that a broad policy of repudiating distrust may have the effect of exposing vulnerable parties to hazard. What moral right do we have to be “brave people” on the behalf of others, especially those whose positions are more precarious than our own? How confident can we be that our own trust will inspire trustworthiness in those who otherwise experience broad distrust?

H. J. N. Horsburgh develops Gandhi’s views to formulate more narrowly a notion of “therapeutic trust” whereby one person relies on another with the aim of bolstering the latter’s trustworthiness. The moral reason to engage in therapeutic trust issues from what Horsburgh maintains is an intimate connection between moral development and the experience of being trusted: “it is no exaggeration to say that trust is to morality what adequate living space is to self-expression: without it there is no possibility of reaching maturity.” (1960, 352)

But even if Horsburgh is right about the importance of the experience of being trusted, one might nonetheless worry about the feasibility and the moral propriety of producing such an experience with the administration of therapeutic trust.Footnote 16 The problem is that insofar as you trust “therapeutically” you seem to lack belief in your target’s trustworthiness, the very belief your trustee must take you to have in order to be inspired by your trust. As Pamela Hieronymi puts it, “the degree to which you trust a particular person to do a particular thing will vary inversely with the degree to which you must rely, for the motivation or justification of your trusting response, on reasons that concern the importance, value, or necessity of having such a response.” (2008, 213) Therapeutic trust seems to rely on obscuring your true attitudes: the therapy will not work unless the patient believes that you really trust them, which you don’t. Aside from practical doubts about possibility of effectively concealing doubts about trustworthiness, we might also worry about the moral propriety of such subterfuge. There is an uncomfortable irony in the fact that, insofar as it relies on misdirection, therapeutic trust provides warrant for distrust.

There is also something worrying paternalistic and high-handed about the notion of therapeutic trust. The “therapist” in the relationship seems to assume too much, in particular, that they have an accurate grasp of the degree of trust that is objectively warranted and of the “dosage” of trust beyond what is strictly warranted that will inspire trust-responsiveness. This might be the right stance to take when there are vast differences of maturity between truster and trustee, as in the case of parent and child. But knowing of the epistemic pathologies of trust and distrust should make us skeptical of the accuracy of such judgments, especially when it comes to other adults. The model I will propose is one that requires a much greater degree of epistemic humility than the strategy of therapeutic trust.

The social practice that I want to sketch—“humble trust”—manifests a spirit of skepticism, curiosity, and moral commitment: skepticism about the warrant of one’s own felt attitudes of trust and distrust; curiosity about who might be unexpectedly responsive to trust and in which contexts; and commitment to abjure and to avoid distrust of the trustworthy. Those who engage in the practice are disposed to initiate and to pursue inquiry directed at discovering trustworthiness that may be concealed to them by their own prejudices and by larger patterns of social exclusion.Footnote 17 The central aims of humble trust include:

  1. 1.

    Responsiveness to the insult and injury of unmerited distrust.

  2. 2.

    Better discrimination of untrustworthiness itself from the illusory appearance of untrustworthiness.

  3. 3.

    Disruption of pernicious distrust equilibria.

  4. 4.

    Cultivation of full trust of the trustworthy.

Crucially, if one extends trust across the board without discernment, one fails to realize the ideal of humble trust. Trust loses its power to signal respect when it is indiscriminate. Moreover, humble trust should not be conceived of as a studied cognitive laziness; it does not require that a person refuse to follow up on suspicion or doubt Moreover, the practitioner of humble trust must remain open to modifying their stance in the future when their epistemic position may improve or their vulnerability may be less.

A practitioner or humble trust will sometimes decide that the risks are too high or that the evidence is unfavorable. But even in the circumstance in which she decides that all things considered it is wise to withdraw from interaction or to shield oneself from vulnerability, the true weight of this is appreciated. In particular, the effects of the signals of distrust are understood, and when possible, mitigated. For example, a private stance of “wait and see” will often send a signal that is naturally interpreted as distrust.

The practice of humble trust is distinguishable from both mere reliance and from full trust. In contrast to mere reliance on someone’s dependable habits, fears, or prejudices, the person engaged in humble trust relies on a person qua moral agent. This can include reliance on her competence, her non-malevolence, her moral integrity, or some combination therein. Consequently, Strawsonian reactive attitudes such as gratitude or moral anger are not out of place when trust is honored or abused. This distinguishes humble trust from Pettit’s “cunning trust”, which relies exclusively on a person’s sense of self-regard and desire for reputation (Pettit 1995).

In investing trust in others, the practitioner of humble trust needs to have a clear idea of what is put at risk, and must be responsive to the vulnerability of others. Unlike full trust, the practice of humble trust may be contemporaneous with persistent feelings of doubt and skepticism: humble trust is in a continuous dialogue with distrust. In contrast to full trust, humble trust need not abjure calculation of risks and benefits, nor does it rule out taking measures to ensure that that the arrangement of situational pressures is conducive to trust-responsiveness. A humble trustor does not set her trustee up to fail. The practical stance of humble trust requires that one be responsive to the chances of success as well as the risks of failure.

One of the marks of humble trust is a characteristic response to being let down. On the one hand, the response cannot be merely the disappointment one feels when, for example, one’s new car breaks down. This is how one is disposed to react when one merely relies rather than trusts, and it betrays an absence of genuine investment. On the other hand, the practitioner of humble trust must fight shy of the kind of catastrophic betrayal that damages a person’s ability to trust others in the future. Particularly crippling is the sense of being made a fool of, a sense that is distinguishable from thinking that one’s trust was mistaken. The former response involves feelings of humiliation, shame, and diminishment that make future trust highly aversive. Humble trust, to be effective, must be a long game.

Some of the epistemic benefits of extending trust manifest themselves in the social psychology lab. Fetchenhauer and Dunning make a compelling case that experimental subjects, antecedent to interaction, significantly underestimate the trustworthiness of strangers (2008). In the “trust game’ paradigm, subjects are endowed a set amount of money and given two choices: they can keep all the money, in which case the game is over; or else they can send the money to Person B, a stranger. If they choose to send the money, Person B will receive some multiple of that money and be given the choice to keep it all or return some portion to Person A. Social scientists use the trust game as a behavioral measure of trust.Footnote 18 When Person A hands over money the payoff for their “investment” is entirely dependent on whether Person B rewards their trust or exploits their vulnerability.

Fetchenhauer and Dunning assess belief in trustworthiness by asking study participants what percentage of Persons B they think will split the money evenly. People estimate that Persons B are slightly more likely to exploit than to honor trust. Across several trials, the average estimate is a little less than 50% (Dunning et al. 2014; Fetchenhauer and Dunning 2008). The actual proportions are strikingly different: “In all of the approximately 70 to 80 occasions in which we have conducted trust games with different participants, a vast majority of Persons B turn out to be trustworthy, with the exact percentage on average hovering between 75 and 90%—much higher than the roughly 40% to 50% estimate provided on average by Persons A.” (Fetchenhauer et al. 2017, 142)

Fetchenhauer and Dunning hypothesize that an asymmetry in “experience sampling” is the best explanation for our underestimation of the trustworthiness of strangers (2010, 192). When you trust, you typically receive corrective feedback when you make an error in judgment. This feedback is highly psychologically salient if it involves betrayal. In contrast, when you distrust a person you withdraw from interaction and so you learn far less. The experience sampling hypothesis was tested by creating a manipulation in which subjects receive feedback even when they withdraw from interaction. Fetchenhauer and Dunning achieved this by asking a cohort of Persons B in advance whether or not they chose to reciprocate if sent money. They videotaped these answers, which they could make available to Persons A. They found that when Persons A received “unconditional feedback” after deciding whether or not to send money, their average estimation of the likelihood of reciprocation grew close to the actual frequency with which people reciprocate, about 80% (2010, 191).

Central to the practice of humble trust are information gathering strategies expressive of epistemic humility. This will include experiments in extending trust to new trustees, an enterprise that cannot be without risk. Such experiments might include relying a person to perform a particular action, or merely refraining from shielding oneself from vulnerability to potential malevolence, incompetence, moral indifference, or lack of integrity. Alfano and Huijts describe how a person may undertake “small ‘test’ dependencies, “extending her trust just a little bit even when she lacks compelling reasons to do so.” (Alfano and Huijts 2019) They maintain that “Doing so might seem reckless, but if it is viewed from the point of view of information-gathering (I trust you in order to find out what kind of person you are rather than to reap the direct benefits of trust) this strategy is sensible for people who have enough resources and resilience that they can afford to take small risks.”

Alfano and Huijts’s remark about “sufficient resources” is important. Those in positions of relative precarity may find that the risks of trusting outside of a small inner circle are simply too high. Moreover, the risk of insult and harm from unmerited distrust are less salient, in part because the distrust of the marginalized has relatively less power to insult and to harm. On the other hand, being able to trust a wide range of people, especially people in positions of power such as doctors or public health officials, is essential to improving a person’s relative social and economic position. And so I think that humble trust is a social practice relevant also to those who are marginalized. But in this case it is undoubtedly much more difficult to carry off.Footnote 19

5 Conclusion: trusting that you will be trusted

Theories of trust often dichotomize trustor and trustee; typical targets of analysis are “X trusts Y to ø” and “Y is trustworthy”. This focus makes it easy to overlook the ways in which each party in a functioning trust relationship plays the role of both trustor and trustee. Insofar as trustworthiness consists in a responsiveness to vulnerability, the trustee must have confidence that the trustor has an attitude of openness to such vulnerability. This is why the retreat from vulnerability that is the signature of distrust makes trustworthiness difficult or even impossible to manifest.

Sometimes the thing we must trust others to do is to trust us. We must trust that our actions and words will be interpreted favorably in the face of uncertainty, that we will be believed and believed in. We must be able to trust that our innocent or good actions and that our honest or informative words will be recognized as such, that the signals we send will be received and properly interpreted. This trust does not come automatically, and the perception of hasty or unwarranted distrust undermines the conditions that make such trust possible, thereby undermining trustworthiness itself. This is the predicament that calls for humble trust.