Listening.
Entering dialogue. Building trust.
In response to recent conflicts at Columbia University, the Trust Collaboratory leads the Listening Tables campaign to chart a new compact for dialogue and understanding on campus. Listening is a fundamental prerequisite for better conversations, empathy for others, and trust. Listening Tables put front and center learning by engaging with different viewpoints and a commitment to the principles of pluralism and tolerance. We invite you to join this experiment and help us redefine how we, as a large and diverse community, can navigate conflict better and engage each other with respect and openness.
Find out more about locations and times and how to volunteer as a host or attend a Listening Table.
Advancing Knowledge on the Social Dynamics of Trust
The Trust Collaboratory at Columbia University is one of the nation’s first research centers exploring the social dynamics of trust through interdisciplinary, collaborative, and publicly engaged formats. We leverage our work to understand better how building and repairing trust can support a thriving democracy in the 21st century.
Trust and the Public: Learn more about how we link insights from the social sciences to the arts to advance public engagement around trust in our TrustWorkers project.
News from the Trust Collaboratory
Trust Collaboratory Leads New NSF Grant to Develop a Citizen AI
In collaboration with data scientists and engineers from Columbia and Rutgers, and with the support of community stakeholders, we are introducing this exciting new project that aims to reimagine how AI is developed. Read more.
Listening Tables Program Report 2024-25 Now Available
We are taking stock of a year of Listening Tables, crunching numbers, and summarizing what we have learned after organizing over 150 sessions attended by nearly 2,000 participants from across the Columbia campus. Read more.
2025 My Streetscape Summer Research Institute Launches
In collaboration with the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3), we are excited to announce the third cohort of our interdisciplinary summer research institute for students in NYC and West Palm Beach. Read more.
For more news abour our work click here.
Why Trust?
Trust is one of the defining issues of our time. It is the invisible yet sturdy stuff holding together social institutions, and it is at the core of our most intimate relationships. Trust is also vital in shaping how citizens interact with media, medical expertise, scientific knowledge, and technology. Trust, however, remains perpetually fragile in public life and elusive to scientific inquiry. According to the famous adage, “trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.” This situation creates significant challenges for maintaining trust in society, particularly in a moment of intense partisan polarization, rampant mis- and disinformation, anti-democratic populist movements, and growing social inequalities in the United States and abroad. The Trust Collaboratory responds to this crisis by building a more capacious and systematic research architecture to study this foundational and often taken-for-granted infrastructure of modern life called trust.
Community Health Workers on the role of trust in their job.
Our Scope
As one of the first institutions in the nation chiefly dedicated to illuminating the social dynamics of trust, the Trust Collaboratory draws on the expertise of scholars at Columbia University as well as external stakeholders, including journalists, community advocates, non-profit professionals, policy experts, and policymakers in NYC and beyond. Housed at Columbia University’s INCITE Institute, our initiatives focus on the following programmatic areas:
● Medicine and Science
● Media and Journalism
● Information Technology, AI, and Algorithms
Through these foci of research, we advance pioneering knowledge on what is needed to maintain and foster trust in a democratic society through education, public engagement, and collaborative partnerships.
Our History
With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Trust Collaboratory began operations in 2020 as the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Trust and Mistrust of Science and Experts. In its next iteration, the seminar transformed into The Trust Project with an expanded focus on public engagement with community partners in New York City. In late 2022, the Trust Collaboratory launched as a center at the INCITE Institute, where it contributes to a dynamic and interdisciplinary ecosystem of centers and projects seeking to transform society through assembly and innovative research. Looking into the future, the Trust Collaboratory will chart new avenues for comparative and multi-dimensional research on trust in contemporary democratic life.
