Scientific Definition
The willingness to be vulnerable to another party's actions.
Plain-English Definition
The willingness to be vulnerable to another party's actions.
Feynman Explanation
Trust is the lubricant of every economy that actually grows.
Core Principle
The willingness to be vulnerable to another party's actions.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
The willingness to be vulnerable to another party's actions.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Sales cycles, hiring, and partnerships all compound on trust.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Trust is the lubricant of every economy that actually grows.
Examples
- Trust games; high-trust societies and the GDP that follows.
- Sales cycles, hiring, and partnerships all compound on trust.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Treat trust as a slowly built, easily destroyed asset on the balance sheet you don't have.
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Treat trust as a slowly built, easily destroyed asset on the balance sheet you don't have.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Players choose how much to contribute to a shared pot; selfish theory predicts zero, real humans contribute, and punishment of free-riders sustains cooperation.
Responding in kind — favors for favors, harms for harms.
Much of human behavior is positioning for status.
Combine extreme safety with extreme risk; avoid the middle.
Game theory adjusted for how humans actually play — including fairness, reciprocity, and limited reasoning.
Allocating finite resources across many fronts when the opponent does the same — no dominant strategy exists.
Coordinated action that produces outcomes unavailable to individual actors.
Unconscious psychological strategies that protect self-image.
Designing organizations to ride doubling curves — AI, data, compute, biotech — rather than linear improvement.
Decisions depend on what other strategic actors will do.
Individual rationality produces collective irrationality.
The ratio of useful information to irrelevant information.