How Do We Learn to Trust?

• Transcript

  Ron Dahl Trust is a core feature of human development. It is essential to forming relationships and to the functioning of communities, societies, and governments.

  Eveline Crone So, trust is basically the glue of our society. And you can see that at a small scale level, such as in families, but also trusting your friends, and trusting also people around you that you don’t know.

  Ron Dahl Trust is learned. And the process of learning to develop trust often relies on feelings. Like an emotional sense that gives us a quick intuitive feeling that someone deserves to be trusted.

  Charlotte Just, like, her warmth that she showed me and her openness, like, both verbally and non-verbally, kind of made it feel like she was someone that I can trust.

  Ron Dahl Learning how to trust begins in childhood. Yet, our adolescent years create new opportunities for building trust in deeper, more vulnerable ways. By taking emotional risks and learning how to repair and rebuild when trust is broken.

  Jennifer Rodriguez It probably is actually like a literal muscle where the way you build muscle is you tear it a little bit and then you let it repair, and when it repairs, it’s stronger, and then that’s what allows you to build actual physical muscle over time. But I don’t think trust is any different.

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  Ron Dahl I’m Ron Dahl, founding director of the Center for the Developing Adolescent, and this is Adaptivity, where we explore the science of adolescence, untangling misconceptions about the years between childhood and adulthood. We explore new insights into the rapid cognitive, emotional, and social changes that happen during these years. And how the developing adolescent brain is primed to promote healthy and adaptive learning.

  The most formative experiences that occur during our adolescent years often involve social learning–about ourselves and others. Developmental changes in our brains motivate us to form deeper, more vulnerable relationships, despite the sometimes terrifying risks of rejection or betrayal. 

  This is where the importance of building trust comes in. Building trust is the basis of enduring friendships and romantic relationships. The ability to form trusting relationships at a larger scale is foundational to our species–enabling us to cooperate in large communities, to work together as societies, to build public institutions, even to sustain a democracy. 

  But developing trust is a complex process. Deciding who to trust – and when to take emotional risks – is a bit like a high-wire balancing act. Navigating emotionally vulnerable situations in adolescence can be terrifying; yet this may be essential to discovering the deeper rewards–learning to trust, and also learning how to repair and to forgive. 

  Moreover, adolescence is a key time for learning to build trust not only at the level of interpersonal relationships, but also developing trust in institutions, organizations, and society. 

  How can we help adolescents develop these capacities, particularly in an era of mistrust, disinformation, and misinformation, as it keeps getting harder to trust what we read and see. 

  On this episode of Adaptivity, we’re talking about adolescence as an important window for learning how to trust. First we’ll talk with Eveline Crone, professor of developmental neuroscience at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, who studies social connection in adolescence, including how youth develop trust. 

  Then we’ll talk with Jennifer Rodriguez, executive director of the Youth Law Center in San Francisco. She has learned how to build trust with young people who have the most reason not to trust others through her own experience growing up in the foster care system.

  Before we get to them, let’s hear from two college students about what trust means to them. Charlotte and Seth share two critical aspects of trust: vulnerability and trusting feelings, and reliability.  

  Charlotte I was at an airport. I was flying home from college. Um, and I was like, on a really long layover, and it was like my first time flying alone. My charger died and, like, I wanted to be able to call my parents and tell them that I was okay. And I’d been sitting with this woman for a while, and she, like, had kind of opened up to me about her life and where she was going, that she was going to see her family for the holidays. So I think, the fact that she was open to me and she was like, telling me about, like, her life outside of the situation that we were both in, like, kind of made me trust her. And just like her warmth that she that she showed me and her openness, like, both verbally and non-verbally, kind of made it feel like she was someone that I can trust. And I ended up asking her for a charger, and it was really nice that I could have someone to trust and lean on in that moment.

  Seth I think all of it comes down to even though like, there might not be a lot of initial trust, a lot of it comes down to like showing up and doing the effort. Say for like track and field or like we’re doing like a relay race. I start building trust with you because you show up, you know, every day for practice. You put in the time. And I can see that you’re putting in effort. And then like, slowly over time, I come to like trust and rely on you as a teammate. It’s like, yes, I know so and so will be here for practice. I know they’re going to, like, try during like the big meet or whatever. I think in those new, new scenarios when you’re with a group of people, there can be a little bit of a spark, where you connect with some people, but some of that deeper trust, I really do think just comes with time and experience.

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  Ron Dahl Thanks to Charlotte and Seth for sharing their thoughts. We will talk more about the topics they introduced–building trust through a process of sharing vulnerably, or showing up consistently–in our interviews. We’ll start with our first guest, Eveline Crone, professor of developmental neuroscience at Erasmus University Here’s our conversation.

  Ron Dahl So welcome Eveline. I’m so excited to have you here participating in our podcast and thinking with us about the science of adolescence that can inform these really important issues facing young people in our society.

  Eveline Crone Well, thank you for having me.

  Ron Dahl So let’s begin by talking a little bit about what we mean by trust and how we are beginning to understand, I think, in new ways, the importance of adolescence as a window of time for developing trust in young people. And as it’s easy to imagine, there are lots of different aspects of trust: trust between two people, trust between an individual and an organization or society. And in some ways, it’s a feeling. In some ways it’s a bit of an attitude and it influences our behaviour. And so I would love to hear you think with us a bit about how you think about trust, particularly in ways that we can gain some insights by understanding how the developing brain and the developing neural systems involved in trust during adolescence may add additional insights.

  Eveline Crone Yeah, I love talking about trust because it’s so super important. Um, so trust is basically the glue of our society. And you can see that at a small scale level, such as in families, think about trust towards your parents and vice versa, but also trusting your friends and trusting also people around you that you don’t know. 

  The important thing with trust is that, um, often people think about, well, trust and reciprocity. Right? So trust is what you give to someone in order to also build a social relationship and have reciprocal relationships. But the interesting thing with trust is that it’s not always reciprocity that happens immediately. So think about, for example, a friendship. You trust that when you help a friend that that friend will maybe help you move or drive you to the airport weeks later. You know, it’s a relationship that is really built on this reciprocity. But it doesn’t always have to be “I do something for you, and then you do something for me.” That’s often how we try to capture it in our experiments, but the experiments are still a little bit too limited to really get towards the exact details of what trust means. And as you were saying, it’s almost a feeling.

  Ron Dahl So I love those comments and that framework. And  what you’re highlighting immediately here is that trust and relationship are intertwined. And that in some ways, building trust is forming some type of a relationship or bond or way of interacting with someone that’s different. And so it also implies the importance of trust in developing a new relationship. And I’m wondering if you could comment a bit about that process and what is unique about adolescence, in addition to the childhood experiences and adult experiences. What what seems to be potentially, you know, windows of opportunity or vulnerability in this space in adolescence?

  Eveline Crone Sure. Yeah. So let’s think about this a little bit from a developmental window. So when you’re an infant, you build trust relationship with your parents. And it’s a small environment, so not a lot of people are involved, but you learn to trust other people. And actually some children grow up without a trusting relationship, and that has consequences, uh, well, sometimes the rest of your lives. So the building blocks are clear, uh, and then when you go to, well, maybe primary school, then trust is often very norm based. So it’s something that you do because you’ve learned to do it. And those are the rules for how you interact. It’s also what children learn in school so that you have to be nice to others and should, uh, not get into fights. 

  But then adolescence starts or puberty kicks in. Um, well, kids start to realize that their social world grows. Uh, they also get new relationships with kids that they don’t know. For example, think about going to middle school or later, even high school. And then something super interesting happens because young children are still very much a tit-for tat-  trust strategy. So if you’re nice to me, I’m nice to you. If you’re not nice to me, I’m also not nice to you. 

  But in adolescence, what happens is that you build a relationship, and sometimes your trust is betrayed. But that doesn’t mean automatically that you then well want to get rid of the whole relationship. So you have to kind of learn almost in a probabilistic way, that trust is reciprocated most of the time, but not always. So that tit-for-tat strategy no longer works, because then you would end every relationship immediately, because no one can always be trusted fully for 100 percent according to possibly the expectations of the other person. 

  And that is, well, a complicated window, and it really involves learning. But that happens during that adolescent period to eventually grow into an adult who can build trusting relationships not only with the people that you know well, but also people around your common social circle. And that’s super interesting to study.

  Ron Dahl So thank you. That was a great description. And what, again, I think you’re highlighting here is that part of what is shifting in this adolescent period is that it’s not simply transactional behavior about, you know, uh, someone treating you nice and you treat them nice, but it’s forming a different kind of relationship that has more flexibility that someone challenging or not completely, consistently behaving can still be part of. And in fact, some level of forming a relationship often involves vulnerability and repair in new ways.

  Eveline Crone Yeah, and also learning to understand yourself. It doesn’t only affect your relationship with others, but also to think about if you can yourself always be trusted.

  Ron Dahl So can you talk a little bit about the behaviors or patterns of behavior, or some of the nuances of what may increase the likelihood of developing a trusting relationship? You know, skills, capacities, luck, versus what may undermine or interfere with healthy development of these more flexible, relationally based, trusting relationships.

  Eveline Crone Yeah, absolutely. So when we want to understand a concept as complicated as trust, what we do as scientists is that we try to disentangle it in the lab. And the way that we’ve been studying that is that with a very simple economic game, it’s referred to as the trust game, where basically it works as follows. You have two players. One player gets a certain amount of, um, money or goods or resources from the experimenter, let’s say $10, and then that person can divide the $10 with another person, so player two. But what that first person can also do is trust that full amount to player two because what happens then is that it gets tripled. Um, that means that there’s all of a sudden $30 in the game. 

  So you would think, well, that’s super beneficial because basically we have tripled the amount of money that we can share. But the tricky thing is that now the second player can decide what to do. So the second player can either reciprocate and say, well, let’s split it and then we both benefit. But the second player can also betray the trust. And in that case, um, well, maybe you end up with nothing because the second player keeps everything. So there’s a certain amount of risk taking in also trusting other people. And that’s also what we see in daily life. 

  And the other thing is that we have to think about the intentions of the other person. So if, for example, the second player sees that you took a lot of risk by trusting the other, then they’re usually more likely to reciprocate. And what we have observed is that, um, there are certain rewarding feelings to also reciprocating trust and that perspective taking is especially developing during adolescence, where you may also sometimes think, well, the person doesn’t reciprocate my trust the way that I anticipated, but maybe this person is in high need for resources. And well, in that case I can understand the decision. So you start to also reason about, well, what could have been the motivation of the other person to either, um, trust and reciprocate.

  Ron Dahl So thank you. Let me just zoom in on, um I don’t want to oversimplify this, but sort of look at two dimensions that could be relevant to what you described. Um, you described this in the perspective and reasoning space. Well, I think about what the person’s doing and whether they’ve taken a risk and how they might respond. And then the second thing you refer to is a feeling. It feels good to share and be rewarded. And so it’s not always it’s not going to be one or the other. They interact. And then this third is where very self conscious individuals, um, especially in adolescents. And so how one wants to be perceived as a generous versus a selfish person by the investigators or by the other person. I know you’ve done so much research in different ways, can you talk a bit about what you have found particularly interesting in the set of ways in which young people may be learning to trust and establishing trust?

  Eveline Crone Mmhm. Yeah. Because the first step–giving trust–um, I mean that’s actually quite, well, understandable. It’s worthwhile to trust sometimes, because you may also benefit by the reciprocity. 

  But the reciprocity is also super interesting because in an experimental setting, there’s actually no economic benefit to reciprocating. Um, usually in these experiments you either play these experiments with people you know, and then it makes sense that you reciprocate because you build a relationship. But sometimes it’s also with people that you don’t know. And people reciprocate trust, even if they get trust from people that they don’t know. And that’s the beauty of us being humans, that we want to build relationships. It’s inherent in our system. It feels good to also reciprocate trust, even when you walk out of the door and you will never meet that person again for the rest of your life.

  I would say that our society is built on that glue. Uh, so we live in a turbulent world. I will not say much more about it because there’s a lot to say, but even more, we rely on those smaller circles of people wanting to do good things for the people around them and get that rewarding feeling from that. 

  Ron Dahl What are the other aspects of trust and supporting building trusting relationships that you would that you think could be important to consider?

  Eveline Crone Yeah. So what we’re currently studying is trust in institutions, and that can be an institution such as, well, youth work, trusted by some, not by others. It can be the police, helpful to some, not to others. So these institutions that the level of trust that we have in them is important on the experiences that you had so far. And what we’re trying to fully understand is how societal experiences shape the trust that you have towards those institutions. And once we know that, to also understand how trust can be rebuilt. Some youth have experienced, for example, ethnic profiling. So they have much less trust in the police than others who have not experienced that.

  So we find it important to fully understand those levels of trust, not only at the behavioral but also at the brain level, and to understand how that differs depending on the experiences that you had in your life. But once we have discovered that, then for me, the most important goal is to understand how it can be rebuilt, what is needed to have that trusting relationship again

  Ron Dahl And so any insights or tantalizing aspects of the research in this space that may give us some hints about how to support some of that, that repair process.

  Eveline Crone. Yeah, so, what I now conclude, based on the research that we’ve done so far, is that if we talk about trust in institutions, we often right away want to solve it at kind of a national level. So having trust again in your government. But that’s usually not the right starting point. It can be a smaller trusting relationship with um, with a teacher, with a youth worker who really sees you for who you are. With that type of person where you feel like, okay, it is possible to trust someone who is not part of my family but who is still approachable for me. And then you can also start to rebuild it. 

  If you want to really work towards trust towards governments, well, it can start at the municipality level or even churches–that can also be places where people can start to have these experiences where you start to repair trust. And then slowly you can work towards those larger goals. 

  Ron Dahl Eveline, thank you so much for this really great conversation. Really thankful for all of your insights, wisdom and the questions you’re raising.

  Eveline Crone Oh, thank you for having me. 

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  Ron Dahl These scientific insights into the process of learning to trust on a deeper, more vulnerable level, lead to pragmatic questions. For example, what can we do as adults to help more adolescents benefit from this window of opportunity? As Eveline said, a caring adult can play a crucial role. When youth interact with someone who believes in them and gives them a second chance, even after their trust has been broken, this can provide powerful opportunities for formative learning in an adolescent’s life. 

  My next guest, Jennifer Rodriguez, knows from first-hand experience what it takes to rebuild trust in adolescence. Jennifer has lived this journey in her own adolescence as she cycled in and out of the foster care system. She was able to rebuild trust; with some help from a few caring adults. These experiences helped her to get on an impressively positive path–and attend law school. Jennifer is now the executive director of the Youth Law Center in the Bay Area. The Youth Law Center works to transform the foster care and juvenile justice systems. Here’s our conversation. 

  Ron Dahl I’m really excited to have you be participating in this discussion as a part of our podcast, as we explore some ideas about trust and the importance of trust in adolescence.

  Jennifer Rodriguez No, thank you for having me. I’m very excited.

  Ron Dahl There are so many interesting aspects to this. And in particular, we’re interested in not only the the importance of trust as kind of the glue of society and as you know, the heart of developing healthy relationships, having mutual trust, but also the idea that adolescence can be a key time for rebuilding trust, particularly among young people who may have very strong reasons for having difficulties and challenges with trust. And that’s what we are really looking forward to hearing some of your thoughts about and that you have direct experiences, at a couple levels. So I’d love to just hear your sort of general thoughts from all your work with young people, but also your own experiences as to why you find these questions about rebuilding trust to be particularly interesting.

  Jennifer Rodriguez Absolutely. I think about rebuilding trust all the time in so many different ways. So as a lawyer and an advocate who needs to trust that both systems and the people that make up systems actually are able to see young people’s humanity, to change their behavior, to reflect the worth that youth have. That all requires trust. 

  In my own personal life, having been somebody who grew up in foster care and then was incarcerated as a teenager, I certainly have had my own struggles and challenges with trusting folks that are in power and the systems that are supposed to care for us. And then as a mother, part of my work has been around trying to ensure that my children develop the sense of trust not just in me as their mother, but in the world.

  Ron Dahl Yes. Thank you. Well, let me begin by asking you about some insights about the challenges to trust that you had in your own experience. And I find it fascinating that you focused on, particularly in situations where someone else or a system has power over you or us? What created challenges in the ability to trust in that space for you?

  Jennifer Rodriguez Well, I think the biggest challenge, and probably the place that I was most misunderstood, and where I see other young people being most misunderstood, is that trust was not my default. It was a choice that I had to make over and over and over again. That really required all of my emotional reserves, and required me to make myself vulnerable. And a lot of times I felt like folks felt like trust was missing, or that I was withholding trust. But really, the truth was I was protecting my trust because of past situations. 

  I mean, we hope that children get born into the world learning that their first lesson is when I have a need, an adult is going to respond to that need in a safe and supportive way. But then there are some of us who are born into the world, and we learn the opposite lesson that when we have a need, no one is going to be there to respond. And then that learning gets reinforced over and over and over again. Not just from people that are supposed to take care of you on an individual level, but also from systems. 

  And so I think if I had to tell the adults that worked with me and are working with youth, one thing about that, it’s that that protection of trust is really wisdom on the part of young people. It’s not pathology. You know, trust isn’t just a feeling. It’s really a repeated experience of safety and consistency and repair. And the system often asks you to trust people who have power over them without ever having earned that power. And then, you know, labels young people as resistant when they don’t.

  Ron Dahl Thank you. It’s fascinating how you focus on two really crucial aspects of the experience of trust and how young people build trust. One being a feeling. It’s a semi-automatic appraisal that’s based on patterns of behavior and experiences that build up over time and that guides us. 

  And the second is sometimes we need to make decisions in our behavior to take a risk, to extend trust when we don’t feel it. And you used the term emotionally exhausting because you’re overriding your feelings in order to take that risk or be forced to take some risks because sometimes you have to trust someone, even if it doesn’t feel appropriate. And while that can be an opportunity, it’s an enormous vulnerability, because if that’s betrayed even in small ways, it must become even more difficult to do that again and again.

  Jennifer Rodriguez A thousand percent. And, you know, for me, like so many other youth that are involved in systems, we’re not just asked to do that with one person or one adult. It’s literally hundreds of adults. Um, if you’re a young person who’s moved from placement to placement like I was then, there are dozens of new adults. Every single time there are therapists, there are psychiatrists, there are doctors, there are teachers, there are lawyers, there are judges. So that emotional exhaustion of analyzing every single time, you know, am I willing to be vulnerable? Is this person going to violate my trust? And at worst, you know, are they going to harm me because I have trusted them in some ways? And that was, that was real. That was my experience at least a quarter of the times that I trusted somebody who, an adult who I was supposed to trust is that that actually came along with, with a violation of my trust. 

  Ron Dahl Yes. Um, the challenges of that pattern of experiences. Let me reflect on something else that I’m hearing you describe that I think is an important again, as we think about youth in these situations. One is the the need for a young person navigating those kinds of circumstances to develop strong vigilance, to be really discerning and careful about even choosing to extend a trusting behavior and a general, just sort of expectancy, that there’s a high likelihood that trust will be violated. 

  And then the second part is the importance of developing at least one or two trusting relationships without having an experiential basis of a trusting relationship. How could one ever change that general mode to override the feeling of not just not wanting to trust, not being able to trust. And so I’m wondering if you had experiences of developing a trusting relationship that were key for you to change the path you were on, the trajectory you were on?

  Jennifer Rodriguez I did, and I’m going to preface this by saying that I think that daily work to trust in other humans and trust that other humans are coming from a place of goodness and care fundamentally–I will probably be working on that until the day that I die. And so I can give you some examples, but I think it’s really important that people understand that even when I trusted people, there were limits to that trust, and it was somewhat conditional. And I think we have to appreciate whatever element of trust youth give us, even if that trust is not absolute. Because here I am, a grown woman with children of my own, and I’m still working at this. 

  So, you know, one of my first examples of having an experience with an adult that I had to trust was after I exited my last foster care placement at 18, I exited to the street and I was homeless, literally living on the street for several months. And I was a reader, so found at the library some information about Job Corps, a federally funded program where you can get housing and medical care and learn vocational training. And in order to apply for Job Corps, you had to go to this office called Women in Community Service. The office I went to was in downtown San Jose, and I walked in and said, I’m here to apply for Job Corps. And they said, oh, okay, well, we need to know, like what was your last address? Have you ever been on psychotropic medication? Have you ever been arrested? All of these questions. 

  For me, because I’d been in foster care, they wanted to know last address for, like, the past three years. And I had had so many that I couldn’t remember them. I remembered my last address, and so they said, no problem. It’s going to take us some time to track down all the information. And so I didn’t have a place to live, and I had nothing to do in the daytime. So I offered to do what is in my comfort zone, which is to be helpful, and started hanging around the office and filing papers, answering the phone, running to go get coffee for the folks that worked in the office. 

  And over that time, I would say I noticed that they started trusting me, they trusted me first. So they trusted me with their phone. They trusted me to like, greet people coming into the office. They trusted me with giving me money to go buy them coffee. And they really gave me the benefit of the doubt before I had proved that I deserved it. They were curious and they weren’t judgmental.

  You know, when information started coming in that looked as if I was not going to be eligible for Job Corps, because, as you could hear, there were several. I had been arrested, I had so many mental health diagnoses, and had been on psychotropic, multiple psychotropic medications. I’d had physical assaultive behavior in some of my placements. I’d been in juvenile hall, all of that. They actually, rather than just looking at the paper and making assumptions about who I was, they asked questions and then they stopped requesting further information so they could let me in. 

  They reframed some of the things that I had experienced as, like, self protection, not as being bad. I think they normalized some of it. Like this is just, we see a lot of people that have been in foster care. This is like typical. So it was more like a stance of given what you’ve been through, this all makes sense. We’re not going to worry about it. 

  And you know, really over that short period of time while they were gathering my records, I feel like the ask was not just to get me to trust them, but they really helped me build trust in myself. And, you know, just the experience of being able to, like, be helpful in the office was helping me feel like I had more agency and like, I was competent at doing something.

  So, and I could say that same pattern was true for the therapists that I had while I was attending Job Corps. Her name was, Cecily in San Jose. She had that same sort of pattern of behaviors. Then I had a teacher in community college who, you know, to this day, I’m still actually astounded. She was a biology teacher. She took an interest in me. It was my first semester at community college. I didn’t know what I was doing. I signed up for her class. I had been in special education. I hadn’t graduated from high school. I had barely gone to middle school, and so I was really in over my head. 

  So I didn’t understand how college worked, and I was afraid I was going to hurt her feelings by dropping her class. So I went into her office hours to do a, like, it’s not you, it’s me kind of talk with her. And she said, I’ll make a deal with you. You stay in my class for the semester, and if you’re failing at the end, I’ll do like an illegal withdrawal for you. 

  But one of the things that she did was she gave me her house keys to come clean her house and walk her dog. And to this day, I still think, like I worried about her so much when she did that. Like, why would she give somebody like me her house keys? But it was such a beautiful extension for me of like, she was willing to trust me enough, which let me know that whoever she saw in front of her, like, wasn’t how I saw myself, which immediately it both made me trust her more, and it made me want to protect her because I was like, you can’t be giving people like me your keys. Um, but of course, you know, I did. I went in and did a terrible job at cleaning her house. She had a Great Pyrenees who would lick the sliding glass door window, and I didn’t even know how to clean a window, so, you know, it was just, it was a lot. 

  But that small act of extending trust to me when I hadn’t earned it, and when she knew a lot because I had vomited out everything about my background when she asked me, well, why do you think you’re going to fail? I did what we’re trained to do in foster care, which is like, let me tell you my entire life story and all the things that are wrong with me. And she still trusted me in that way.

  Ron Dahl Wow. That is such a moving description of the challenges. And then the process that was transformational. I want to ask you a bit about a couple of things that you said. One is that you displayed a really high level of agency and risk and responsibility to be generous, to give, put your effort into helping in ways that kindled them, to turn around and extend–you described it more trust than you deserved. But those interactions of each side of that process extending created incremental advances in trust each time something was above the expectation, it was part of a learning experience that then kept growing. 

  But that’s as you described it. It’s such a precarious process. It’s so easy for that to slip. And yet it kept building. How can we take insights from these kinds of experiences and help others, especially parents, teachers, coaches, uh, professionals who are working with young people who are struggling to learn how to trust? 

  Jennifer Rodriguez Well, I really appreciate you identifying it as precarious because that’s exactly how I think about it. And in all the instances where I have been able to develop a function, I’ll say a functional level of trust with an adult, that was necessary to get what I needed, I think one of the core aspects was that it really took a lot of time. It was a very slow process. So with the Women in Community Service Job Corps situation, I was in their office every day for like six to eight hours, for weeks. With my biology teacher at community college, I was cleaning her house, I was grading her papers, I was tutoring her students, I would study, like locked in her little office. I’d spend time with her and eat lunch like we had a lot of time together. And it wasn’t for the purpose of, like, building trust, it was just doing things together. It was very slow and methodical. 

  With my therapist, I think I actually, I never believe in this when people are like, what was the moment? And I’m like, there’s never a moment. But I actually do remember with her a moment that I was really surprised and this is all these years later. 

  I remember, I had gotten my first, like, apartment that was in a voluntary living situation. And to that point I had been like an institution, bunk beds. The room I was renting before that had a mattress that was on the floor. So I was very excited about getting a bed in my new apartment. And I had, like, found this person who was selling this impossible but gorgeous, like, wooden bed frame. It had stained glass in it, it had a million different pieces on it. And in my apartment my room was upstairs. And so I found this thing, I paid for it. I could not figure out how to get it to my place. And in my therapy session, I was upset about this and talked about it with my therapist like it was going to be the first, like, beautiful thing that I actually had of my own. And she said, I’ll bring my truck and I’ll come get it. And and then she not only did that, she helped me carry up all the pieces, and she spent like six hours helping me to put this, like, ridiculous bed together. That was so beautiful and so not functional, like there was no reason for this bed to be as complicated as it was.

  But she sat there with her–I didn’t know how to use tools, and you know, screwdriver, hammer. She brought a toolbox. She did all of the things with me. And like, our relationship was just different after that because I could see there was something– nobody had ever related to me, like, I wasn’t the client. I was always like, there was a difference between us, but we just, like, felt like two people. Putting that bed together, it didn’t feel like there was distance between us in that way. The conversation was not about, you know, therapy goals or how do I feel about that? It was really about her getting to know me. 

  And probably more important than that, she told me so many personal things about herself, and she continued to do that. Like I still remember at some point I was homeless again. I was living in a truck and like, like a 18 wheeler truck and caught up with all the things at that. And I was in a very unhappy and abusive relationship. And I remember I told her about this, and I excused a lot of the dynamics that were going on with, you know, it’s really stressful to be in a small space with somebody 24/7.

  And she said, “You know, when my husband and I were dating, we got a VW bus and for a year just were around Europe together. And it didn’t feel the way that you’re describing.” 

  And I was like, wow, she just told me about herself. And that just takes a lot of time and care, and I kind of worry about the world that we live in now, where everything is so fast and so rushed, like a clinician might have 45 minutes or maybe even shorter to get to know you and to diagnose whatever is going on and to figure out, is it an organic thing, or is it an external thing and really needs you to trust them to be able to share all of the information they need. And we don’t have that. I mean, this is really about building relationships with other people, and that work will never not take time and care because it is precarious.

  Ron Dahl Yes. That’s so powerful. Jennifer, I want to focus on three themes that you described so strongly as a key to what happened. One is the kindness and generosity in both directions, hours of effort and time given to this other person. And the second part of that is what you’re describing is authentically valuing each other. There’s a sense that both the sender and the receiver of valuing each other as humans, not in our roles, that was so powerful. 

  And then the third thing, which is so, you know, fundamental and a bit of a paradox or yin/yang about trust is it requires vulnerability over and over again. What people are doing when they give you the keys to their place, when they reveal something about themselves to do this is the vulnerability. And when that’s reciprocated, you made yourself vulnerable in different ways. That builds a bond that is different than just having a professional relationship. And that happened. How do we do better at promoting what begins as small bits of kindness, generosity, and vulnerability but builds into something truly transformational?

  Jennifer Rodriguez I feel really heard right now. I was just thinking about what you’re saying and reflecting on a conversation I had recently with youth who had been in foster care and are now doing advocacy work, and they were very excited about the idea of an AI chatbot doing therapy, and more excited about that than an actual human. And as you were talking, I was thinking, oh, one of the reasons that’s true is because they don’t have to trust another human being in order to engage with the chatbot. 

  And there’s a role, certainly, for AI chatbots to support, but my opinion is that they are never or hopefully will never replace the role for the kind of human relationship and graciousness and kindness and kind of being together that is so necessary for everyone, but it’s even more necessary for teens who have been taught through their experience that they are not worthy of trust and care and love and, that their well-being just doesn’t matter. That actually we have to do more to give those youth the time. 

  And so, I’ll say I’ve tried to practice this also before I was a lawyer. I was an organizer with my peers, with young people who had been in foster care, and I was working with them to have them think through their experiences in the system and translate their experiences into ideas for policy change. And so in order to do that, they had to establish some level of trust. And so some of the takeaways that I have out of that is, you know, I started with talking about the self-protection element and how much we actually have to appreciate and celebrate that with young people because in fact, they have navigated a world that is dangerous and difficult. And if they didn’t have that kind of self protection, they would be so vulnerable in so many different ways. 

  So I think starting a relationship with just naming that explicitly saying, you know, it makes sense that you would need to be really careful with your trust and you’re the expert on your own life, you know, and you testing the trust, it’s not disrespect, it’s information gathering for them. I think making sure that we are showing them–by showing I don’t mean like grand displays of, like, trust-building activities or I’m going to do this major thing for you. I actually think it’s really the small, the small moments, like putting together the bed or, you know, sitting with somebody and working with them that mattered the most. 

  And so, you know, making sure that you do whatever you say you’re going to do. So if you said you’re going to send a follow up text that you do that, that you show up on time, that you remember, like the details that are really important and significant, like birthdays or, you know, what somebody said their girlfriend’s name is. That you’re giving young people choices whenever it’s humanly possible to give them choices. Like even those little micro choices, like, where do you want to sit? What do you want to eat? Do you want to talk about this now? Do you want to talk about it later? All of that is really important 

  And then, you know, this idea of not being judgmental, but instead just being really curious about who that youth is, and not just like the worst experiences on the worst day of your life. Not just why those things happen, but like the full range of who they are. 

  Like, I think now as an adult, back to my experience and care. And I could give you analogous experiences of so many youth that I’ve worked with where I think, wow, it’s actually remarkable that nobody figured out that, like, I was a nerdy, like, book lover. You know, that’s my favorite thing to do, to read. It’s actually probably what allowed me to navigate foster care and then be able to get through college and law school is I got my literacy not in school, but through books. It’s part of what allows me to have my imagination for how the world could be different, because, you know, I’m so used to reading about different experiences in books and like, that was a detail that was not important to anybody in a system. They were much more interested in the fact that, like, I had experienced commercial sexual exploitation, that I was a runner, that I was a cutter, that I had been in a psych hospital, and those are like all experiences. But they really didn’t tell you who I was. But it did allow a lot of people to judge me.

  Ron Dahl Wow. There’s so many aspects of wisdom and insight that you’ve just covered and described. I want to highlight that this emphasis on it’s the small actions so often, and following through and the reliability in those actions. And I also want to highlight what I think was implied, and just name it, is that it requires authentic feelings. The difference between caring about someone or trying to intentionally show them that you’re doing these things. 

  And I think this is relevant to two of the things that you said, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. One is that curiosity is often an easily accessible, authentic feeling. It’s a genuine thing. And young people are so sensitive, and so trying to go down the list and ask them about activities versus being genuinely curious. Who is this person? What what excites them? 

  And the second one comes back to where you started with the AI and a chatbot, which is–and I like the way you said this–it could have a role for people to practice ways of responding and get some experience with going back and forth and getting certain kinds of responses and thinking and feeling, and yet that genuine feeling of vulnerability, of being valued, of caring from another human is not going to be part of that experience. It can’t be, certainly not from these large language model chatbots as they exist and maybe could never be. And so how something like, you know, a chatbot therapist or chatbot coach could be helpful, but not become this crutch that prevents young people from going to that vulnerable space, taking the risk and interact with other humans that really do care, that really do show those actions because they value what they’ve discovered through their curiosity in the other person.

  Jennifer Rodriguez Yeah, I love what you’re saying because I think you’re exactly right. The curiosity is something that’s available to us all at all times about who that young person is. You know, I remember when I was doing youth organizing work, going to some training where the person was, in my opinion, was giving some ridiculous suggestions about, like, well, you need to make sure you show up in, you know, the freshest kicks, the same shoes that the youth like. And, you know, you could gain their trust by putting on figuring out what’s the latest hit and then bumping that in your car. And I thought, that’s so stupid. Like I would know immediately if someone looked like they could not walk in those particular sneakers. Right. Like they I’m and I’m going to see they’re too white. Like, you’ve never worn those outside before. But I do think that adults who are genuinely curious, even if you hate the music or you hate the style, about like, tell me what you like about it. Like, curious about what young people’s interests are and wanting to know more, like that is just so welcome. So that’s one thought I have, is just how accessible it is for us at all times to turn from being judgy or, you know, punitive to instead just being really curious like nothing else. You could probably change any interaction in that way. 

  But the other thing that I was just thinking, when you were talking about the AI chatbot, what flashed in my head is that I think the goal for the chatbots is actually to make no mistakes, right? I mean that we’re certainly not there, as a lawyer I’ll say we’re definitely not there with large language models. But I think the ultimate goal is to basically try to make them perfect so that they don’t ever make mistakes. They don’t ever cause harm. They don’t ever say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing, right, to the extent that they can do, and that is actually, I think part of the necessary work in trust is making mistakes, because like as I was, I as I was thinking about how you build the muscle of trust, I was thinking that it probably is actually like a literal muscle where the way you build muscle is you tear it a little bit and then you let it repair, and when it repairs, it’s stronger, and then you tear it a little bit more. And that’s what allows you to build actual physical muscle over time. 

  But I don’t think trust is any different. I think you actually have to have those mistakes. I said the wrong thing. I forgot the small detail. I didn’t actually show up when I said I was going to, and I’m going to tell you that I understand that I may have hurt you, and I’m sorry and, like, give me a chance to do better. I think that’s where the trust builds up between teens and adults is through those interactions, which is, again, it’s like not the goal of AI at all. The goal is to like always be the perfect responder. 

  Ron Dahl Or even say what the person wants to hear, and never make them uncomfortable. And I think that what you’re describing as a really powerful and, I think, appropriate metaphor of like building muscle is exactly how aspects of building and rebuilding trust happen. 

  I want to, um, leave a little bit of time to talk about another aspect in addition to this most important, building a trusting relationship like you described and how core that is. Trusting institutions, trusting basic aspects of society and systems is another dimension related and yet another dimension. And increasingly in an age of so much Misinformation and disinformation and hyper-realistic AI level misinformation. How can we promote trust that is so, so central, so much the glue of our society with so much difficulty with misinformation, disinformation, how do young people trust anything?

  Jennifer Rodriguez Yeah, this is a big question. And I would say, of course, as an advocate, my first inclination is to say we need to change the institutions. Anytime that institutions are violating trust, that is a crisis for democracy as a whole. But of course, I know that is too large of a charge, particularly at this moment in time. But what I will say is that I think that all of this starts actually for youth with the one-on-one ability to trust in an individual relationship and how, how somebody is going to respond to them. Because, you know, you have to walk before you can run. And so many youth who are in foster care or who are involved in juvenile justice have never had a situation where an adult was trustworthy, um, not a single one. Many of them have had experiences where when they did have that moment where they made a relatively small- or medium-sized mistake, where that was reacted to with immediate punitive consequences, with an immediate disruption, they were pulled out, kicked out of their living situation. Their caregiver said, I’m not dealing with this any longer. The school expelled them, the mental health provider said you’re no longer eligible where everything was taken away. And so you can imagine how far back that sets up young people. 

  So then asking them to trust in any institution. I mean, I talked to so many young people during the beginning of the pandemic who were immediately like, I’m not getting vaccinated. I’m not letting people put who knows what in my body. And their immediate inclination was actually a stance of distrust against the system, which is completely predictable and almost sensible based on what they experienced about systems up to that point. And they didn’t have a single, trustworthy, caring adult who they could go to to say, like, I really want accurate information. 

  And so that just has to be priority number one. Is that we make sure the work isn’t actually on the youth, the work is on the adults, particularly the adults that are closest to a young person, we’re making sure that they have a stable, loving caregiver or adult relationship. It doesn’t need to be the person they live with who is their go-to person, where they can learn these like lessons that then build to their feeling about institutions.

  Ron Dahl Jennifer, thank you so much wholeheartedly for your inspiring and emotionally powerful insights.

  Jennifer Rodriguez Ron, I want to thank you for being such a wonderful interviewer and also for creating the space and charge to talk about this issue, which is sort of core to whether we are going to be a society that lasts or not.

  Ron Dahl Thank you.

  *****

  Ron Dahl Our human ancestors could not have survived–and flourished as a species across our planet–without trust. Yet this powerful human capacity is inextricably intertwined with vulnerability. It relies on nuanced feelings. Trust must be learned, and developed over time. It takes repeated experiences, and some painful mistakes, as we flawed humans learn to build and then rebuild trust. It requires risk and emotional vulnerability.

  Adolescence is a crucial window of opportunity for learning to trust on a deeper, more vulnerable level. Adults can play an important role providing support and scaffolding—particularly for adolescents who may have strong reasons NOT to trust others. For example, by showing up consistently, with caring and curiosity, and taking some risks to be vulnerable ourselves.

  And in a world that seems increasingly riven by mistrust, the stakes couldn’t be higher. This generation of youth are navigating unprecedented threats to building trust—with rampant misinformation, disinformation, and political polarization. There has never been a more important time to promote this essential, formative, and powerful aspect of human capabilities–-learning to trust each other and cooperate on a grand scale. 

  Thanks so much to Eveline Crone and Jennifer Rodriguez for their wisdom and insights. 

  I also want to thank Seth and Charlotte, the youth who shared their thoughts about trust with us. 

  If you’d like to learn more about the science of adolescence, visit us at adaptivitypodcast.org or share your thoughts through the contact information at our website or by using the hashtag #adaptivitypod.

  Our podcast is produced at UC Berkeley for the UCLA Center for the Developing Adolescent. Our senior producer is Polly Stryker. Our producer is Meghan Lynch Forder. Our engineer is Rob Speight. I’m Ron Dahl. Thank you for listening.

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