Are You Creating Trust? | Psychology Today

Trust. You might argue that nothing much happens in organizational life without it. Leaders need to trust their workers. Workers need to trust their leaders. Customers and companies need to trust each other, as well as suppliers and companies, and so on. When there’s a circle of trust, good things can happen. When trust is lacking, everything is hard – or stuck.

So, what can neuroscience teach us about trust? Most generally, we know that trust is something we decide unconsciously in areas where we make all our important decisions. That means that it happens fast – we decide, for example, that a face is the face of someone we can trust in less than half a second.

But what else happens in our brains that might surprise us as far as trust is concerned? Here are five recent insights from neuroscience about what builds trust.

1. Expressive faces are more trustworthy (Kavanagh et al., 2024). If we can see the emotions playing across your face, we’re more likely to trust you. That’s probably because we feel like we know you, and we know what you might do under a variety of circumstances.
2. Sharing secrets builds trust. (Kardas et al., 2023). We worry that people will judge us for our secrets, but the research shows that they like us better and trust us more. And we shed the burden of keeping secrets, which is a heavy one for most of us. So share away!
3. Use the “Mona Lisa smile.” (Hehman et al., 2015). This study has been around for a while, but it’s so simple that it’s a secret worth spreading: a slight smile (not a big grin) builds trust.
4. Use the same language as me. (Matzinger et al., 2024). English is a polyglot language with many ways of expressing similar ideas. You say potato, I say po—tahhh-to. If we speak the same language sub-group, we’re more likely to trust each other, since we come from the same tribe.
5. If all else fails, try humility. (Koetke et al., 2024). This study was particularly about scientists who display humility about their research, but it seems likely to apply to anyone who displays humility as well as expertise. We are more likely to trust you if you recognize your limits.

Now we have a picture of someone we’d be likely to trust immediately: someone whose face is an open book, who is sharing personal stuff with us with a slight smile on their face, sending out a couple of tribal indicators in the language they use, and someone who admits that they don’t know everything.

Does that sound like anyone you know? Or is it a collection of traits you could pull off without too much of a stretch? Don’t try this if you score low on all of these measures; it’s likely that it would be too obvious and look like you were trying too hard – and that is not one of the trust indicators!