Matt Lucky reviews Jimmy Wales’ new book The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things that Last, now out at Penguin Press.
In 2020, Vanity Fair reported the tragic phenomenon of Republicans adamantly affirming that the Covid-19 pandemic was a hoax, even as they lay hospitalized, struggling for their lives against infection. They didn’t trust their doctors, they didn’t trust the mainstream news, and they didn’t trust government public health officials. Their failure to trust America’s medical institutions is emblematic of a contemporary crisis of trust that Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, aims to address in The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things that Last.
Wales notes that “In 2001…half of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right always or most of the time. In 2023, only 16 percent said the same. In 2001, 53 percent of Americans said they had a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the news media. By 2023, that had fallen to 32 percent.” University of California, Berkeley political scientists Jack Citrin and Laura Stoker identify a suspect list, including partisan polarization, failures in economic performance, public scandals, and increasingly partisan media ecosystems, which have collectively eroded trust in government in recent decades.
Trust in Wikipedia, in contrast, has fared comparatively better. According to a 2023 YouGov survey of 1,000 American adults, 64% believe that Wikipedia is almost or always accurate and 20% believe it is becoming more accurate (another 42% believe it is becoming neither better nor worse). Wales hopes that the online encyclopedia’s guiding values can instruct how to repair the 21st century’s collapsing structures of trust.
Why do we trust?
The starting point for Wales’s project is to articulate a theory of the nature of trust, which he contends is largely a matter of perceived reliability. When people decide to trust someone or something, they are asking, according to Wales, “Are you being straight with me? Do you care about me? Can you deliver? These are ancient questions. They can all be summarized in one short, overarching question: “Can I rely on you?”” In this sense, trust is a practical matter about whether someone can deliver as expected or promised.
Even though trust hinges on considerations of practical reliability, we often do not explicitly think through those judgments. Wales presents the example of the gradual establishment of trust in automatic elevators (that is, sans human operators). “As automatic elevators became ubiquitous, more and more people used them and found them to be safe and efficient. People saw lots of other people using the new technology, they saw that it worked fine for them, and that was enough.” That is, individuals, in general, did not investigate and judge the reliability of self-driving elevators on their own, but instead observed that other people around them trusted the new elevators.
Something similar happens when we trust in scientific experts. Most people, for instance, cannot judge the scholarship of an astrophysicist. Instead, the public infers that astrophysicists are trustworthy because other experts trust them. Trust, then, is less often the result of well-grounded reasoning and more often the product of “everyone else is doing it” thinking.
Judgements to trust are also not often made explicitly. Wales offers, “go to a restaurant and people are armed with steak knives. Do you worry that you may be stabbed?…No. You trust others to behave decently, just as they trust you.” We trust the people around us so ubiquitously that we do not even realize we are doing so.
Even scientific experts, who are best equipped to skeptically interrogate reality by drilling down into hard empirical proof of claims, are in fact intensely dependent on unacknowledged social bonds of trust. Harvard historian and sociologist of science Steven Shapin, for instance, argues that if a biologist adopted radical skepticism to question the fact that DNA contains cytosine (it does) and tested that matter directly, they would still be dependent on “trust [in] the identity of the animal tissues supplied [for testing], the speed of the centrifuge, the reliability of the thermometric readings, the qualitative and quantitative make up of various solvents,” and so on and so forth. When we extend doubt and test the world, we immediately encounter the fact that our instruments, methods, textbooks, and research samples are each things we accept on implicit trust. We know vanishingly little of the world except by trusting our communities that supply our foundations for interpretation.
To this point, Wales adds, “the hallmark of an excellent utility—electricity, drinking water, plumbing, and sewage—is that people use it all the time but don’t think about it.” Trust is like electricity; it can go out sometimes, but it’s normally so consistent that we rarely think of it. In this sense, the crisis of trust that we began with is not as systemic as it appears. The crisis is a problem in some institutions, and not a complete breakdown into a Hobbesian Mad Max world.
And how do we rebuild it?
The core lessons of Wales’s narrative are the eponymous seven rules of trust, which he offers as a guide for institutions to fortify themselves against the contemporary crisis of doubt. First among these is the imperative to assume good faith, meaning that when you encounter disagreement, “you assume that the other person is at least sincerely trying to help. While you may suspect in the back of your mind that this person is a rotten, self-promoting, partisan hack, you will not respond that way. You will assume this is someone honestly trying” to help your shared project, even if they appear inadequate to the task.
This lesson is, as Wales sagely observes, the “kindergarten ethics” of being kind and respectful to others by default. It’s the type of insight we understand with pristine clarity when imparting it to children, but that all too often becomes an impossible moral challenge for adults to live up to. By defaulting to respectful and constructive language when disagreeing, Wales contends that we encourage reciprocity from dissenters to join in dialogues that can lead to discovery and agreement, rather than treating differences of opinion as calls to combat. On this point, The Seven Rules of Trust are highly evocative of the advice long extended by the advocates of deliberative democracy for building dialogues across deep divides of disagreement.
A virtuous cycle of assuming good faith and encouraging reciprocity not only builds trust but also supplies the concomitant benefit of fostering cognitive diversity. Wales notes that groups tend to be smarter when they incorporate a diversity of viewpoints into shared reasoning. For instance, he shares that “politically diverse groups of editors “create articles of higher quality than politically homogeneous teams…” [because] “politically polarized teams engage in longer, more constructive, competitive, and substantively focused but linguistically diverse debates.” Challenged by opposing views, people dug deeper, thought harder, and delivered better work.” This insight on cognitive diversity, again, is thoroughly echoed by scholars of democracy.
Another core rule of trust is a commitment to neutrality or independence. That is, on easy questions of fact, e.g., the Earth is round, then simply state the facts. However, “when there is a serious dispute about the facts, Wikipedia sticks with what it knows are facts: It says, “one side says this,” and it says “another side says something different.” But Wikipedia does not say which side is right.” Put differently, Wikipedia does not enroll itself in greater social controversies beyond its core mission of reporting facts backed by reliable citations. Wales contends that one of the contributing factors to the crisis of distrust is that scientists, universities, and corporations have taken partisan stances on controversial topics beyond their core missions, which invites out-partisans to grow suspicious of the institutions.
Efforts at transparency are yet another rule of trust. Wikipedia, for instance, preserves the full history of edits to the site and the discussions among editors informing those decisions on the talk page for each article. In particular, Wales emphasizes the priority of being transparent about your own failings and mistakes. He imparts, “Wikipedia is flawed. It can be biased, make mistakes, and screw up in ways limited only by human imagination. But Wikipedia does not pretend otherwise…. Wikipedia welcomes anyone to flag what they think is wrong so everyone can discuss it.” By being open about errors and limitations, Wikipedia signals a commitment to accuracy that overrides the more immediate interest in saving face publicly.
Taken together, I offer that Wales’s rules for trust resemble the Mertonian norms of science, though packaged differently. I would connect Wales’s account of neutrality with the Mertonian norm of disinterestedness: not favoring one particular outcome from a study but instead following where the evidence leads. Further, Wales’s points on presuming good faith and welcoming continuous discussion backed by quality sources together address the norms of universalism: arguments are welcome regardless of the arbitrary characteristics/demographics of a speaker, and organized skepticism: every claim is open to honest contestation from a plurality of perspectives. The final Mertonian norm is communalism: knowledge is the collective property of humanity. While Wales does not directly hit upon communalism in The Seven Rules of Trust, Wikipedia is free to everyone, and hence I will check that box as well.
To close, one point of concern that troubled me throughout Wales’s work is that it appears to be an account of how to encourage the public to trust the right people for the right reasons. To wit, this is a story of the rules for trust when an institution works correctly. Yet, we know from experience that trust does not always follow the seven rules. Charlatans routinely inspire confidence despite the fact that they deceive, do not care about their victims, and have no capacity to deliver on promises. Conversely, we can consider honest, empathetic, and competent scientists working in climate science or epidemiology, who follow each of Wales’s rules. Alas, they are subjected to unwarranted distrust from many in the public. These common anomalies suggest Wales’s rules are incomplete, and that we also need an account of why people (dis)trust in the wrong ways.
One answer here may reside in the social nature of indirect trust that Wales discusses in the book. Recall, a great deal of trust depends not on direct assessments of reliability, but instead on the social proof of what everyone else like me trusts. Here, I take inspiration from Shapin’s contention that trust is a network of bonds within a community that allows us to know the world beyond our extremely limited direct experiences. Further, if trust is about inclusion in a community, then Shapin instructs, “persistent distrust, therefore, has a moral terminus: expulsion from the community. If you will not know, and accept the adequate grounds for, what the community knows, you will not belong to it” [emphasis added]. When we trust and distrust in the wrong ways, in ways that violate Wales’s rules, I posit a likely explanation is that the strong human tendency toward tribalistic reasoning has wrongly configured the community bonds that are foundational to judgments about trust. Put differently, Wales’s rules appear ineffectual when a community has already divided into opposing camps.
We can grasp the issue here by considering how cult leaders enthrall followers in the fetters of illicit trust, despite failing to be transparent, neutral, or acting in good faith. Part of the allure of cult leaders is simply their charismatic presence, but importantly, cults work by creating discreet, isolated communities of adherents. Within the internal community of the cult, we can observe intense trust alongside cultists breaking each of Wales’s rules. Further, we can likewise witness strong distrust by cultists against outsiders who do follow the rules of trust. It’s the configuration of community bonds here that does the work, and not the epistemic and moral probity of individuals seeking trust. The lesson that social bonds can sometimes subvert the rules of trust can also help to explain the politicized distrust that Wikipedia is grappling with, as conservatives seek alternatives in Grokipedia and Conservapedia. Americans’ social identities and media environments have become highly sorted along partisan lines, and that bifurcation into distinct communities brings distrust regardless of whether it is warranted. In a tribally divided America, Wikipedia, and seemingly any institution for that matter, can be distrusted even if it follows the rules of trust perfectly, because trust is often tribal first and rational second, if at all.
Author Disclosure: Matt Lucky is the senior assistant director of research at the Stigler Center. You can read more about the Stigler Center’s funding here. The author reports no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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