Consider the paranoid parent who hires a babysitter and then monitors her via a nanny-cam while out for dinner. Despite what she may say, it is intuitive that she fails to trust the babysitter. Why is this the case? One response has been to propose a constraint against inquiring while trusting. This paper argues that this constraint fails to explain other intuitive instances of a failure of trust owing to epistemic features of the trustor. In light of this, the arguments here suggest the need to adopt an additional constraint. One tempting hypothesis is a constraint against knowing while trusting. This proposal has explanatory advantages but also comes with its problems. This paper will first consider the hypothesis that when one trusts, one cannot know. In responding to objections, it will ultimately argue for a trust-based certainty constraint. The paper thus establishes the need for an additional epistemic condition on trusting and concludes that the trust-based certainty constraint is the most appropriate.

Adults tell teenagers to think about the future, delay gratification, and make better choices, as if waiting were purely a private matter of willpower. The research suggests something more complicated. Children and adults alike wait longer when the people promising a reward have proven reliable, and less when those people have not. This essay, written directly for teenage readers, examines what schools teach about time through deadlines, grades, portals, notifications, feedback, and the small promises adults make and either keep or break. Rereading Orwell’s Animal Farm, it argues that the humanities matter not because they teach students to wait or obey, but because they teach students to judge what deserves their patience, effort, and trust.

How does experiencing direct investment loss affect individuals’ trust in the financial system? Exploiting recent UK corporate financial failures that generated press headlines, government debates, and institutional criticisms, we design and analyse a survey involving investors in these failures. We find that direct exposure to investment losses significantly reduces trust in financial markets, regulators, big audit firms, and the likelihood of future risky asset market participation. Moreover, trust loss is not fully reversible even with possible compensation. Individual characteristics are not the key drivers of trust losses/gains either. We also survey master’s students exposed to reading about these failures. Information about losses of others reduces trust but less than direct experience. Overall, our results emphasize the role of personal experience in determining trust and future investment decisions.

The erosion of international law is not unique in today’s world. Its crisis of legitimacy is characterised by polarisation in world affairs, declining trust among actors on the international plane and competing claims to authority. Existing perspectives on international law and international relations explain this erosion only partially since they overlook the relational processes through which international law acquires meaning and binding force. This article introduces the Theory on the Relational Normativity of International Law (TORNIL), which reconceptualises the sources of international law’s normativity as arising from the interaction of formal rules, moral values, and relationships— between actors concerned with and affected by its application and development—characterised along a continuum of trust and distrust. By operationalising this framework through the practices of principled negotiation, the article advances a relational understanding of international law’s normativity and offers a pathway for rebuilding legitimacy and trust in global governance.

This article examines how formal civil society organizations (CSOs) perceive and engage with informal actors in crisis management and investigates the relational dynamics that bind diverse actors in polycentric governance systems. Adopting a qualitative interpretivist epistemology, the study proceeds from the premise that social realities, including organizational relationships, legitimacy, and trust, are constructed through meaning-making and intersubjective understanding. Drawing on interviews, focus groups, and case studies with 53 CSOs across multiple European countries, the study employs a modified grounded theory approach, consistent with interpretivist traditions that prioritize contextual understanding over objective measurement. The findings reveal a clear divide among formal CSOs. One half dismissed informal actors as untrained risks requiring hierarchical control, reflecting a command-and-control orientation. The other half demonstrated a polycentric orientation, recognizing and legitimizing informal actors without attempting to absorb them. Where polycentric attitudes prevailed, relationships were characterized by four elements: trust built through recognition rather than hierarchy, flexibility in distinguishing specialized from transferable tasks, equality emerging through co-production, and temporality leveraged as a resource for adaptive, short-term cooperation. The article contributes to understanding the relational dynamics within polycentric crisis governance by specifying how these four elements are enacted in practice. In doing so, it helps operationalize polycentricity for crisis management, a contribution called for in the literature. From an interpretivist standpoint, these findings do not claim generalizable causality but instead offer a theoretically grounded understanding of how actors themselves make sense of, negotiate, and co-construct effective cooperation across organizational boundaries.

How does childhood exposure to large-scale criminal violence and militarized law enforcement shape political attitudes and behavior? We examine the case of Mexico’s drug war, where a generation has been raised amidst the country’s most violent conflict in over a century. Surveying nearly 3,000 urban youth to measure their political and interpersonal trust, we matched respondents to historical data on criminal violence and military confrontations and operations in their childhood municipalities. Disentangling the effects of criminal violence and military interventions, we find that exposure to homicidal violence during childhood erodes interpersonal trust and trust in law enforcement, while military interventions – especially those involving violent confrontations – broadly undermine trust in federal security institutions and generate political backlash against the parties that governed Mexico during the exposure period. These findings have important implications for young democracies affected by high crime and violence and advance our understanding of how criminal wars influence political socialization.

Health technology assessment (HTA) has advanced rigorous, transparent methods for informing resource allocation; however, persistent inequities, declining trust, and rapidly evolving technologies expose a gap between technical excellence and social justice. This perspective synthesizes Plenary Three of the HTAi 2025 Annual Meeting, which examined how HTA can contribute to more transparent, equitable, and fair health systems. Drawing on multistakeholder perspectives from patient advocacy, global health equity, health policy, industry, and HTA research, this article argues that transparency, equity, and trust must be treated as foundational principles rather than optional enhancements. It highlights persistent challenges, including opaque deliberation, context-dependent definitions of equity, limited feedback to patient contributors, and evidence bases that insufficiently reflect diverse populations. Emerging practices from leading HTA bodies illustrate practical pathways forward. The article concludes that HTA’s convening power can help transform it from a technical gatekeeper into a guardian of fairer health systems across diverse contexts.

Communication involves commitment to one’s words. These words often carry multiple layers of meaning. The explicit meaning may commit the speaker to one proposition, and the implicit to another. This raises the question: to which meaning are speakers seen as committed? This study examined whether listeners process commitment to utterances’ explicit and implicit meaning independently or integratively. Across three experiments, participants were presented with communicative scenarios and corresponding outcomes (each meaning’s truth-value). Participants’ perceived commitment to each meaning (explicit or implicit) was measured through a direct commitment probe and overall trust. All three experiments demonstrated that the truth-value of the implicit content influenced perceived commitment not only to the implicit meaning, but also to the explicit, despite the latter being independently true/false. The effect was asymmetrical: the explicit truth-value influenced commitment almost exclusively to the explicit meaning. Thus, we observed an ‘implicit dominance’ that was present despite variation in presentation and stimuli. Compared to direct commitment, trust was shaped by all truth-values, indicating that trust reflects a global evaluation of the speaker, while commitment is aligned with specific communicative intentions. These findings suggest that listeners integrate different meanings when evaluating a speaker’s commitment to their words.

Genetic management of threatened species to reduce extinction risk is sometimes considered controversial, with earlier surveys demonstrating that the general public are more cautious about genetic management than about some other conservation interventions including killing feral animals. This paper explores the acceptance of genetic management in greater detail, assessing whether people’s views change if more information is provided on why it might be necessary and what are the consequences of failing to consider genetic management of very small populations. Overall, we found that the acceptance of genetic management aiming to reduce the extinction risk of six threatened birds was 73% among respondents (n = 2,586) from Australia while 14% found it unacceptable and the remaining 13% had no opinion. Most respondents chose the same level of acceptance for all six threatened bird species presented as case studies, even though the intensity of genetic management varied from interbreeding populations to gene editing. We did not find support for the hypothesis that providing more detailed information to respondents about specific genetic management strategies would increase their level of acceptance. While longer, more-detailed introductory text about extinction risk and genetic management helped respondents form an opinion, it had no effect on acceptance. Moreover, when more information was provided in individual case studies, the level of acceptance was lower, although it remained above 50% for all cases. Instead, the level of acceptance was positively associated with respondents’ age, their trust in science and their risk-taking behaviour.

Collaboration between physician Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and the health care industry accelerates the adoption of new therapies, but public awareness of industry payments and research linking such payments to prescribing behaviors has fueled a sharp decline in trust. Meanwhile, for-profit, industry-aligned credentialing programs have begun to define and train KOLs with little public accountability. Without independent alternatives, these models may entrench standards that serve corporate interests over the public good. We review the evolution of the KOL role, from early communication theory to its integration into pharmaceutical marketing and examine the rise of Public Scholarship (PS) as an academic movement grounded in beneficence, transparency, and civic accountability. From this analysis, we propose a Key Opinion Leader Public Scholarship Certification (KOL-PSC) program, governed jointly by academics and patient advocates, to align KOL influence with public interests. The KOL-PSC model includes a skills-based curriculum in ethical science communication, patient engagement, and conflict-of-interest management, culminating in a public-facing capstone project. Governance safeguards will ensure independence from commercial influence while offering industry the reputational benefits of working with certified experts. This voluntary, non-regulatory credential offers a proactive means to restore public trust in physician–industry collaboration, thereby benefitting patients, physicians, academia, and industry.