Most people think trust is something you either have or you don't. Ann Merrit Rikke Nielsen, assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen and vice director of Centre for Interaction Research and Communication Design (CIRCD,) thinks it is something you build, one turn of conversation at a time.

In this episode, we talk about why trust is nearly invisible until the moment it is tested, and why Ann stopped trusting surveys and interviews to study it. Instead, she records real conversations between social workers and the vulnerable citizens they support, and listens back  - sometimes pause by pause  - for the exact second trust is built or broken.

Ann brings a recording to illustrate this: a man recently released from prison, listing the changes he has made, stumbles mid-sentence over a word he doesn't want to say. What his caseworker does in the next eighteen seconds decides whether he will trust this institution more than the last one. In another recording, a client discloses a relapse — and it is the caseworker's silence, not her words, that keeps the trust intact.

Ann also introduces a method she calls “the Montessori of trust”: playing practitioners' own recordings back to them, so they discover for themselves what built or broke the trust in the room. Why does trust rarely get spoken out loud, even by the people building it every day? And what does it actually sound like when it works?