Trust, Doubt and the Power of Experts
Is trust in experts really declining, or is it just changing? In this episode, Gil Eyal, a sociology professor at Columbia University, challenges the popular idea that people are losing trust in science and expertise. Instead, he argues that trust exists in tension with blind faith on one side and skepticism on the other. Trust isn’t just about believing in experts—it’s about knowing when to trust and when to question.
A key theme of the discussion is the role of time in building and eroding trust. Eyal explains that trust is not a one-time decision but a process that unfolds over time. He introduces the concept of timing in trust, showing how it matters when trust is given, how long it takes to build, and how quickly it can collapse when betrayed. Trust in institutions, for example, is accumulated through repeated positive interactions but can be destroyed instantly by a single failure or scandal. This is why governments, companies, and even personal relationships must continuously maintain trust—because it is never fully secured.
Using the example of choosing a flight, Eyal illustrates the difference between routinized trust, where we simply assume things will work, and informed anticipation, where we actively evaluate risks based on past experience. This distinction, he argues, is crucial in understanding how modern society navigates trust in science, medicine, and politics.
He also explores how expertise has become deeply entangled with politics, making public confidence in institutions more fragile than ever. He explains why mistrust isn’t necessarily a problem—in fact, it’s often a rational response to systems that have historically failed certain groups. He highlights research on long Covid patients, showing how their trust in doctors is shaped by personal experiences, rather than blind faith in medical authority.
A particularly provocative argument Eyal makes is that trust itself has become commercialized. Consulting firms, governments, and corporations actively sell trust as a product, offering frameworks and training to “restore trust” in workplaces and institutions. But does all this talk about trust actually deepen the crisis instead of solving it?
On Experts and Expertise
when we say expertise, we think something that experts have. But I think that’s kind of a limited way to think about it because you don’t see expertise, what you see is the results of it, namely, you see that certain tasks are performed better, faster than when it’s not there. So expertise is sort of a capability that underlies the speedy, superior, successful performance of tasks. And what I’m suggesting is that when we think about this capability, we have to include not just the flesh and blood credentials, recognized experts, but everything else that is involved in that. So a doctor is not a good expert without a stethoscope. A doctor is also not a good expert without a nurse. A doctor is also not a good expert without a patient who provides the doctor with a credible account of their symptoms. So what I mean by sociology of expertise is the study of this network that includes the credentialed experts, but all the devices involved as well, and the contribution of laypeople and the contribution of all other auxiliary experts. As you know, as one thing that underlies the performance of tasks.
The Trust Collaboratory
The idea behind this was as follows that we hear a lot about mistrust today and this is how I got into this ten years ago, this talk about mistrust in science and experts. And everybody wants to know why it is happening, but I think this is the wrong question. Namely, that mistrust is not difficult to understand, it’s actually quite understandable. The puzzle is trust. Trust is what is difficult to understand here. And trust is what is hard. So what we do at the Trust Collaboratory is we have a couple of research projects that are geared towards understanding the nature of trust, how it is generated, for example, the a study of long Covid patients, how is it that they trust their doctors or other patients or information online?
About the unrest at the University caused by the war in Gaza
When things were happening at full swing in the spring, I just felt like I wanted to take a table, put it in the main square, sit there and talk to people. It’s not the university that is doing it, it’s us, it’s the Trust Collaboratory. If it was understood to be something that is organized by the administration, quote unquote, it would not be trusted. Does it create trust? Well, I think it’s still an open question. I mean, the underlying idea is simple, namely that indeed the conflict in Colombia was exacerbated by a lack of trust, a lack of trust among students in one another, between the students and the administration, between the administration and the students, among professors, etc. And that to generate trust, you need dialogue. But in order to have dialogue, you have to listen. So you need a commitment to actually listening in order to achieve dialogue, in order to achieve trust. There’s usually a professor who moderates the discussion, and we start by saying, okay, first of all, put your phones away, turn them off. So nobody is afraid that they are being recorded or photographed, or that somebody will take notes and report later or something like that. Then we say, start by introducing yourself, tell us why you’re here, what is indeed your take about the issues. But don’t give us ideology, tell us your own experience. What was your experience of what happened in the spring? Did you have friends that you don’t talk to anymore? Why? Why did that happen? How do you feel about it? So we wanted people to be rooted in personal experiences, because that’s the best way to get other people to listen
Boarding a plane and trust
So when boarding the airplane, did you ask yourself how confident you were that this was not a risky endeavor? Unless something happened to alarm you, you probably didn’t give it enormous amount of thought. And we could say, therefore, that you trusted in a habitual way, as a matter of routine, in a tacit way. And at a certain point, when you look at it from the outside, you can ask yourself, was this trust or was this just blind faith? In fact, no justification for it whatsoever. Or maybe, Severin, you are a very different person than me and before you fly, you actually do a lot of research, you compare airlines, aircrafts, airports, and times of day to figure out which have the lowest probability of risk. And then you choose your flight to minimize the risk. You can never eliminate it. You always have to trust that you minimize the risk as much as possible, but you do this therefore in what I call informed anticipation. You assessed as well as you could the ability, integrity and benevolence of the party in which you put your trust. But then again, just as before, we could wonder whether this was really trust or actually mistrust. Namely, you could not trust until you actually saw with your own eyes and you employed so many checks, we would actually normal everyday life call this you’re kind of a mistrustful person, very, very skeptical, perhaps paranoid
Trust among Long Cvid patients
we did this research on long Covid patients. I first did a survey and then we interviewed about 100 people who identify as having long Covid. And we asked them something like, do you trust your doctor? When you ask them that in a survey, almost everybody says yes. The only thing that they trusted more was “my own research”, as they put it. But then, you know, once you start talking to them, once you interview them, you hear enormous amounts of reports about terrible experiences with doctors. Saying that they trusted their doctor in a survey was a form of self-presentation. I’m the kind of person who trusts science and trusts experts, trust doctors, I’m not the kind of person who will tell you immediately I don’t trust them. But if you ask me enough times, then I will have a story to tell you. And that was not just self-presentation for us, it was self-presentation to the doctors that they saw a sort of a opening move, if you will, in how the doctor handled this initial show of trust impact what followed. Long Covid patients took the time that the doctor spent with them as a sign of whether their trust would be blind faith or something more reasonable. If they came to the doctor and the doctor spent five minutes and didn’t seem to be listening all that much to put trust in the doctor would be blind faith. And in fact, once you probe them, you realize long Covid patients were entertained sort of healthy skepticism of doctors expertise. They often felt that they knew more about their conditions than the doctors. So they looked for signs that allowed them to place trust in doctors because they didn’t want to place trust in doctors it’s not that they didn’t. For example, if the doctor listened to them for a long time, that would be a reason. If the doctor told them, oh, you know what? I saw 100 patients like you and they all said the same thing. That was another reason why you could trust the doctor. If they will refer to the doctor by another patient that they trusted, that was another reason. If the doctor was willing to say, I don’t know, this is really new to me, but you know what? I’m going to read about it and come back next week. I will tell you what I found out. And that was another reason to trust the doctor. And that was especially struck by one woman who had this long diagnostic odyssey going from doctor to doctor to doctor without a lot of success. And at the end, she goes to see one more doctor, a woman and she comes in clutching this big folder with all her tests and her research, etc. And the doctor listens to her for 20 minutes and then says, I want you to put down your folder. And I want you to let me handle this for you. I believe you, I can see that you are suffering. You can’t do this all by yourself, let us do it together. We together we will get through it. And this gesture wins her trust.