Institutions were a remarkable invention.

They allow trust to scale.

They made it easier for human beings to trust people they had never met before – through the recognition of signals.

You probably don’t know the first name of your doctor, the person who manages your pension, or recognise the face of the person who cooks your food at your favourite takeaway – but none of that stops you from trusting them.

Technology has allowed those signals to travel further and faster than ever before.

Yet the institutions that allow trust and cooperation to scale are themselves suffering a crisis of trust.

So what’s going on?

It Takes a Village

As human settlements grew from villages into larger towns and, eventually, cities, the conditions under which people interacted began to change.

Instead of recognising your neighbours and the people you came into day-to-day contact with, it became more and more common to encounter strangers. One-off interactions became far more common. A sense of anonymity came with it.

As our social worlds grew in scale, so too did the distance between us.

Now, technology has done to the city what the city did to the village – scaling our ability to interact with increasingly distant and increasingly large numbers of strangers.

Loss of Signal

Scaling trust requires us to compress information. In our fast-paced modern lives there’s little time to carefully evaluate every person that we come across. So institutions allow us to do this with shorthand – the signals stand in for the thing itself.

Qualifications as a signal for competence.

Brands as a signal for reliability.

Good manners as a signal for civility.

Technology allows us to produce trust signals quickly and cheaply, and to send them great distances.

The problem is that – in the process – it also weakens the signal.

Red Flags

In 2008, one of the great causes of the financial crash was faulty trust signalling. Risks were buried under long chains of trust between strangers. Mortgages were bundled together, repackaged and sold on, distancing the people taking the risks from the people who would ultimately bear their consequences. Ratings designed to signal safety obscured how fragile some of those investments really were. When the signals failed, disaster ensued.

In higher education, we have lived through a period of unprecedented expansion in the number of people able to get a degree. But with that increase in the number of competence signals – once the golden ticket to a job opportunity – it has become harder and harder for employers to tell what each signal is really worth.

Dating apps allow us to scale the possibility of romantic interaction with hundreds if not thousands of local strangers. But the signals they give out are shallow: a few hundred words of text, a few photos, and the hope that they belong to the sender.

As the number of possible interactions has grown, we have compressed the information we use to decide who to trust. And in doing so, we have weakened the signals themselves.

The Price of Trust

Technology is good at producing trust signals that are quick and cheap. Unfortunately this comes with a hidden cost: that they are harder to test and easier to fake.

Financial fraud, AI-generated CVs and horror stories about ‘catfishing’ show just how easily the signals we rely upon can become detached from the things they are supposed to represent.

But the conditions in which human beings have traditionally learned whom to trust are almost the complete opposite:

Costly signals, demonstrated consistently and slowly – over time.

These are the conditions under which human beings are remarkably good at judging character.

Romance is full of these kinds of signals. Anyone can say that they care about someone. Making an effort for them at an inconvenient time is harder. Taking a risk for them is harder still.

But perhaps the strongest signal of all is consistency.

One grand romantic gesture might tell you something about a person. How they behave towards you over months and years tells you far more.

Because every new interaction is another opportunity to test the signal against reality.

Spend enough time with someone and you begin to see the pattern. You notice whether their actions match their words. Whether they keep their promises when doing so becomes inconvenient. Whether the person they present to you remains the same when tested under pressure.

Time makes faking expensive.

And the longer the relationship continues, the more work it takes to maintain a false signal. Eventually, the easiest way to consistently appear trustworthy is simply to behave in a trustworthy way.

The Real Deal

The good news is that we haven’t suddenly lost the ability to determine who we can rely on.

We have created an environment that increasingly asks us to make those decisions quickly, cheaply and at enormous scale – using signals that are increasingly easy to fake.

Perhaps those costs are not inefficiencies to be eliminated. Perhaps they are the price of knowing who we can trust: that the friction is a feature and not a bug.

Because nothing protects us better against fakeness than raising the bar.

We can demand more from those who ask for our trust. We can seek those signals in their strongest form – personal, costly, and proven over time.

We can create new rituals and new institutions that allow us to scale these signals reliably.

And if we are going to ask more of others, we should expect them to ask more of us – and we should welcome that.

Technology has given us a world of signals that are faster, cheaper and more scalable than anything our ancestors could have imagined.

But when it comes to trust, we may need to move in the opposite direction.

To slow it down. Raise the stakes. Ask more of people – and welcome being asked more of.