Modelling Trust

Public trust in expertise is falling, on vaccines and children’s health, on climate and on education. Some of that distrust is hostility to expertise as such, and some of it has good grounds. Telling the two apart, and working out when trust in an expert is warranted and how broken trust can be rebuilt, are questions for the epistemology of trust.

That field’s usual method is to test theories against the theorist’s own intuitions about imagined cases. Those intuitions vary across culture, gender and background, and the field has stalled between rival theories. Modelling Trust tries a different method. We borrow modelling techniques from the mathematical social sciences and study trust the way scientists study complex systems they can’t observe directly: build many simplified models, and keep the conclusions that hold across them.

Over 2026–27 we’re running three thematic workshops, a public talk series and a conference in Glasgow, and building a network of philosophers, economists and social scientists who work on trust.