Research

INTRODUCTION

Building and protecting public trust in the individuals and organizations tasked with managing water systems is an important element of navigating the intersection of society and the natural resources upon which it depends. Given the extremely technical nature of decisions like which sources to use, how to prioritize among repair needs, and how best to respond to threats, the public often lacks the ability to determine whether their drinking water is safe and must instead rely on experts to reduce or eliminate the potential for harm (Jardine et al. 1999). This reliance, in turn, creates an important public vulnerability to the actions or omissions of governance agencies. Trust, as a willingness to accept this vulnerability (Mayer et al. 1995), is therefore especially important in this context (Slovic 1993). Indeed, this interplay of expertise, risk, and reliance is a fundamental element of all governance relationships and, as a result, building trust is often recognized as critical (Stern and Baird 2015). Recognizing this importance, a considerable body of research has explored the nature and dynamics of trust and, to a lesser degree, distrust. The typical account of this process suggests that trust (distrust) follows assessments of trustworthiness (distrustworthiness) and approaches that leverage this argument typically suggest that increases in evidence of trustworthiness or distrustworthiness will result in more trust or distrust, respectively (e.g., Dietz 2011, Six and Latusek 2023). Others, however, challenge this perspective suggesting that, in place of this roughly linear relationship, individuals engage in motivated processes by which they search for, attend to, and ultimately bias their interpretation of (dis)trustworthiness information (Bachman 2001, Williams 2001, Van der Werff et al. 2019).

The current manuscript takes this as its point of departure from the standard account of trust and leverages resilience theory (Holling 1973) to argue that trust and distrust can best be understood as alternative stable states (i.e., distinct, self-reinforcing states, separated by a threshold). We argue that this better positions scholars and practitioners to effectively manage governance relationships, especially by foregrounding the need to account for the self-reinforcing nature of both states. We then explore this stable-states conceptualization in qualitative data collected from and coded in partnership with residents during the Flint Water Crisis, an unfortunately prototypical example of a governance failure in which a community was exposed to dangerous contaminants through clear failures in risk management (Butler et al. 2016). More specifically, we investigate the correspondence between the theoretical machinations elucidated here and the community’s experience, but we also consider the extent to which those experiences challenge and build on our arguments. We accomplish this by leveraging our positions as members of two collaboratives: The Flint Water Community Narrative Group, a research and outreach collaboration of academics and community leaders working to illuminate the experiences of the Flint community during the crisis through its own narratives (Johnson et al. 2018); and the Flint Special Projects Steering Committee, an outgrowth of the Narrative Group that conducted the research reported here (Carrera et al. 2019, see also MICHR 2020). We conclude by discussing the implications of this conceptualization and especially how it can be leveraged in navigating future governance failures.

Trust and governance

Managing social systems is, in many ways, a question of managing risk (Giddens 1991). The past few decades have seen the rise of what has been called the “risk society,” characterized by an increasing awareness of the potential for experiencing harms that run from mild inconvenience to death (Beck 1992). To address these individual and collective vulnerabilities, virtually every society around the globe has adopted some kind of system of risk governance. These systems vary considerably and run from relatively simple approaches primarily managed by individuals or small groups to multi-level, bureaucratic systems made up of smaller governance entities that specialize in the management of individual hazards but share a collective goal of managing the potential for and impact of harm. These governance agents then rely on the public to support and empower them in taking action to manage risk (Pomeroy and Berkes 1997, Lenard 2008). Whether by divine fiat or direct democracy, the ability of a given governance actor to make deliberate decisions that impact the likelihood and severity of potential harm necessarily rests on the extent to which their assertions of authority are generally met by the approval (or at least not the active opposition) of the public (Citrin 1974, Citrin and Stoker 2018).

Thus, governance can be understood as a dialogue, in which the governed empower government actors with the authority needed to manage the potential for a wide variety of harms. This then creates a distinct potential for public harm from the actions or omissions of government that, in turn, impacts how the public is willing to respond (Bottoms and Tankebe 2012, see also Montgomery et al. 2008). The effectiveness and efficiency of a given regime therefore heavily rests on its ability to foster the public’s willingness to accept its potential for experiencing harm rooted in governance decisions (i.e., trust; Hamm et al. 2019). To be sure, untrusting communities often accept government action in the short term, at least in the absence of clear alternatives. Indeed, when the issue is simply that the level of trust in a community is relatively low, there may be little need to move beyond a situation in which normative acquiescence is simply taken for granted. However, when the governed distrust—that is, when they are unwilling to accept their vulnerability to government (Six and Latusek 2023)—they tend to resist increases in their dependence and, where possible, may actively work to reduce it (Miller 1974, Levi and Stoker 2000, Citrin and Stoker 2018).

Trust and distrust as alternate stable states

Recognizing this importance across governance contexts, practitioners and scholars have devoted significant effort to understanding the dynamics of trust and distrust. Traditional approaches tend to assume that (dis)trust follows the trustor’s assessment of the characteristics of the trustee that make it appear worthy of (dis)trust such that the more (dis)trustworthiness is assessed, the more a given trustee will be (dis)trusted (Dietz 2011, Six and Latusek 2023). This account is often sufficient for explaining relations within cross-sectional surveys as quantitative analyses typically identify strong relations among measures of trustworthiness and trust (Colquitt et al. 2007, PytlikZillig et al. 2016). Theorists and practitioners have therefore argued that trust can be built, and even regained, through a trustee’s efforts to signal that they embody trustworthiness characteristics (Lewicki and Brinsfield 2017) and there is some empirical evidence to support this claim (Gillespie and Dietz 2009, Tomlinson and Mayer 2009).

Problematically however, efforts to address distrust by signaling trustworthiness, especially in controversial referents, tend to be much less effective, even when the effort itself is received positively (Sitkin and Roth 1993, Kim et al. 2004, Schweitzer et al. 2006). Some of the challenge lies in the fact that trustworthiness is not solely rooted in the objectively assessable characteristics of the trustee and is significantly impacted by the life experiences of the trustor (Singh et al. 2012), especially early in the relationship (Alarcon et al. 2016). More poignantly, however, research from organizational contexts in particular points convincingly to the potential for entrenching processes. For instance, so called trust-traps describe processes by which trustors become biased toward maintaining an established level of “locked-in” trust (Möllering and Sydow 2019). Similarly, the self-amplifying cycle of distrust suggests that once distrust is formed, it shades future perceptions and interactions (Bijlsma-Frankema et al. 2015). These self-reinforcing processes of trust and distrust have been couched in terms of a variety of cognitive biases (e.g., Patent 2022) and motivated reasoning (e.g., Kunda 1990, Zimmermann 2020) as well as through trust-specific phenomena like trust-as-choice (Li 2008), the spiral reinforcement model of trust (Zand 1972), and even the suspension of our evaluation of the trustee altogether (Möllering 2001).

We, therefore, argue that there is good reason to believe that the complicated relationship between (dis)trust and (dis)trustworthiness arises, in part, from the need to recognize that trust and distrust are self-reinforcing states. To elucidate this argument, we borrow from resilience theory, which centrally postulates that ecological (e.g., Gunderson 2000), institutional (e.g., Stern and Baird 2015), and intrapsychic systems (e.g., Angeler et al. 2018) exist in alternate stable states; that is, distinct basins of attraction that are reinforced by pressures from a variety of processes and feedbacks. This argument is often represented using ball-in-cup diagrams where the theory primarily concerns itself with the structure of the basin of attraction. Applied here, this suggests that trust and distrust can be conceptualized as two adjacent basins separated by a threshold where the level of (dis)trust in a given domain within a given relationship at a given time (Emborg et al. 2020) is represented by a dynamic ball, the position of which is driven by the major pressures within the larger system (see Fig. 1).

We postulate that two primary drivers determine the state of (dis)trust. Specifically, we argue that the entrenching (downward) pressure of the desire for certainty about a potential harm is a fundamental motivator across individuals (FeldmanHall and Shenhav 2019). Thus, although different individuals may be more or less comfortable with knowing less about harms they may experience, humans generally experience uncertainty in a valued domain as aversive and are typically motivated to increase their understanding of it (Luhman 1979). The effect of this desire for certainty on the ultimate state of trust or distrust is then governed by lateral pressures such that trust results when the trustor feels that the trustee will generally act to protect their salient vulnerabilities to harm. Conversely, distrust will result when the trustor feels that the trustee will not protect the salient vulnerabilities within their relationship. Importantly, these drivers are fundamentally subjective. Thus, although there may be a more-or-less strong connection between the objective and subjective importance of certainty in the focal domain and the extent to which the trustor’s salient vulnerability is protected, where they diverge, the ultimate state will be determined by the trustor’s perceptions.

Figure 1 illustrates three states to help elucidate our argument. Position “a” represents a state of ambivalence or low (dis)trust that is characterized by the trustor’s lack of certainty regarding the extent to which their salient vulnerabilities within the focal relationship are protected by the trustee. Although a conceptually important starting point, the maintenance of this position requires an acceptance of uncertainty such that individuals will generally only be able to remain in this state if their salient vulnerability is unimportant. When vulnerability is valued, however, individuals tend to seek some level of certainty (Luhman 1979). When this increased certainty manifests as a belief that the vulnerability is protected, individuals will fall into a state of trust (represented by position “t”). Conversely, when this increase in certainty manifests as a belief that the focal vulnerability is unprotected by the trustee, individuals will fall into a state of distrust (represented by position “d”).

The standard account of trust then positions trustworthiness signaling as the key determinant of the ultimate impact of the general desire to increase certainty. This means that, ceteris paribus, individuals with evidence of trustworthiness or distrustworthiness will be more or less willing to accept their vulnerability, respectively (Moody et al. 2014). Where we break with this account, however, is in centering the self-reinforcing pressure created by these states. Specifically, we integrate the arguments of others to hypothesize that as we come to believe that our vulnerability is protected—whether as a conscious calculation or because we take it for granted—we become increasingly motivated to maintain and deepen that certainty. We therefore center the adaptive capacity of the state of trust or distrust within our approach and build on research suggesting that trusting and distrusting individuals are often motivated to look for and find good reasons to support their beliefs (Sitkin and Stickel 1996, Bachmann 2001, Bijlsma-Frankenma et al. 2015, but see Redlawsk et al. 2010), that these self-reinforcing patterns likely operate through a variety of cognitive biases (Patent 2022, see also Kunda 1990), and they often persist, even in the face of contrary evidence (e.g., Möllering and Sydow 2019).

The current study

The current work leverages resilience theory to posit that trust and distrust are best understood as alternative stable states. We, therefore, start from the standard account of trust to argue that movement from ambivalence to trust is likely best explained by trustworthiness such that, all else being equal, individuals who have evidence of trustworthiness are more likely to be willing to accept their focal vulnerability within the relationship (Dietz 2011). Conversely, those with evidence of distrustworthiness are more likely to be unwilling to accept this vulnerability (Six and Latusek 2023). We expand on these arguments, however, by explicitly theorizing the self-reinforcing nature of these states. Building on other challenges to the “universal sequences” of trust and distrust (e.g., Bachman 2001) and arguments regarding the self-reinforcing nature of trust (e.g., Möllering and Sydow 2019) and distrust (e.g., Bijlsma-Frankema et al. 2015), we foreground pressures toward certainty in the search for and interpretation of confirming information. We then argue that, when the vulnerability within the relationship is important, a general desire for certainty creates an entrenching pressure. We further argue that whether this pressure results in trust or distrust depends on whether the increase in certainty manifests as a belief that the focal vulnerability is protected or unprotected by the trustee. To explore the extent to which these mechanisms present in the real world we now turn to qualitative data collected from and analyzed in partnership with the Flint community.

METHOD

Context

Flint, Michigan is a city of 95,541 (U.S. Census Bureau 2019) in which Black residents comprise the largest racial group (55%; 38% of residents identify as white). Historically, Flint’s automotive industry positioned it as a national leader in household income. Since the 1970s, however, Flint has been victim to a number of state and federal decisions that have relegated the city to one of the poorest in the United States (Salinsky 2016, see also Butler et al. 2016). Of particular note is the so-called Emergency Manager Law (MCL 141.1549). In effect, the law placed executive control of municipalities and districts in the hands of individuals appointed by the governor with the goal of addressing financial insolvency. The passage of the law was itself controversial—it was initially presented as a ballot initiative in 2011 and was rejected by voters only to be instated as an appropriation bill in 2012—and its use has been no less problematic (Nickels 2016, Hawthorne 2017). Emergency Managers have been disproportionately installed in so-called “minority-majority” communities (Washington and Pellow 2016) and their unilateral decision making has contributed to a variety of ills, not least among which is the Flint Water Crisis itself (Stanley 2016).

In April of 2014, the city began drawing water from the Flint River. The use of the river as a municipal water source required a technical intervention and new operating procedures to address high and variable levels of organic matter and the increased corrosivity of the water. To save money, and because of the confusing timelines for switching among the previous, current, and future water sources, engineers did not initiate a corrosion control system. As a result, residents almost immediately received discolored water and, soon thereafter, experienced a host of ostensibly related medical issues. In line with Flint’s long history of community organizing, residents mobilized, rallied, marched, and advocated in an attempt to shed light on the situation (Johnson et al. 2018, Carrera and Key 2021). Contradictory evidence regarding the state of the water system and its health impacts was rampant as residents struggled with reconciling their personal experience, official declarations, and statements from scientific experts. For example, despite official assurances regarding the safety of the water, both General Motors and the State of Michigan made changes to their operation to eliminate the need for using city water in manufacturing and as a drinking water source for employees (Fonger 2014). Nonetheless, the crisis was not officially recognized until late 2015. Although long-running for residents by this point, in September two academic studies confirmed the increased levels of lead in the water (Schwake et al. 2016) and in Flint youth (Hanna-Attisha et al. 2016), prompting lead advisories, city-wide testing, and, in October, a switch back to the initial water source.

In response, States of Emergency were declared by Mayor Weaver (14 December 2015), Governor Snyder (5 January 2016), and President Obama (16 January 2016). The State of Michigan also deployed “water resource teams” to distribute bottled water door-to-door and at community fire stations, and began the process of securing and deploying disaster relief funds. Official statements from the Governor’s office framed these efforts as trustworthiness signals and highlighted benevolence. In response to a vote authorizing $28 million in relief funds, Governor Snyder stated, “I am committed to fixing this for the residents of Flint ... [this vote] demonstrates to the nation that all of Michigan is standing together to help the people of Flint” (20 January 2016^[1]). Similarly, after announcing a proposal to provide $30 million in repayment for water bills, he said, “I greatly appreciate the acts of cooperation, bipartisanship and good will that are advancing Flint’s recovery” (4 February 2016^[2]). Around this time, the State also began the process of holding individual actors to account and again highlighted its concern for the community as key. In an official statement in which he announced his dismissal of the head of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance unit, Governor Snyder said, “Putting the well-being of Michiganders first needs to be the top priority for all state employees. Anything less than that is unacceptable.” (5 February 2016^[3])

In Flint, however, these efforts to signal trustworthiness were largely rejected. Instead, the official recognition of the crisis solidified growing skepticism about the extent to which the State of Michigan was acting to protect community vulnerability. Almost overnight, large scale discussions started regarding the likely impacts of the lead exposure, especially on the cognitive and behavioral skills of children (Healy and Bernstein 2016, Ezell et al. 2023). Residents learned that their exposure to lead by that point was likely considerable, even in the absence of clear neurological symptoms. Concurrently, inquiries into the decisions and processes that led to the crisis began to uncover particularly damning evidence. For example, evidence quickly came to light suggesting that the decision not to initiate the corrosion control protocol was made by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) and that county, state, and federal governance actors had long been aware of the situation and were actively working to prevent rectifying it (Key 2017, Fleming 2018).

Data collection and analysis

As media attention exploded in Flint, much of the community’s voice was drowned by the well-meaning but often self-serving interpretation of others (Carrera and Key 2021). The Flint Water Community Narrative Group was formed to address this by providing a platform for community members to add their own voice to the conversation (Johnson et al. 2018). The Narrative Group comprised academics and Flint community leaders with the goal of ensuring the integration of local perspectives throughout the research process. In 2016, the Flint Special Projects Steering Committee, an outgrowth of the Narrative Group, designed and implemented a multi-phase project to collect community perspectives (MICHR 2020, see also Carrera et al. 2019).

Phase One involved attending over 100 community meetings addressing the crisis and the thematic analysis of 17 recorded and publicly available legislative, media, and community events. The open codes identified in Phase One then served as the basis for Phase Two, which consisted of a series of 13 focus groups conducted to shed light on the experience of the Flint Water Crisis. Discussions were convened with homogeneous groups of participants to increase the extent to which they felt comfortable discussing their experiences. We therefore purposively recruited groups of youths, seniors, faith-based leaders, and members of a coalition of Flint individuals and organizations working to advance community involvement in research (Community Based Organization Partners, CBOP) as well as groups of community members who specifically identified as Black, Hispanic/Latinx, or mixed-race. One hundred fifty-three individuals participated in the focus groups and of those individuals, 72% self-identified as Black.

The focus group discussions were transcribed, and data analysis was conducted through a participatory, group concept-mapping process for developing grounded theory (Jackson 2008, Charmaz 2014). Specifically, the Flint-based research team, which is skilled and experienced in conducting community-based participatory research, recruited focus group participants as ambassadors to collaborate with the research team in refining the themes and identifying connections across them through an axial coding process (Williams and Moser 2019). Ambassadors were trained by the research team and paid for their time. In this coding process, all members of the research team and the ambassadors iteratively read the initial transcripts, divided them into meaning units, and physically sorted cut-outs of those meaning units into themes represented on poster board. Collectively, the team and ambassadors then worked to develop theory by interpreting the connections across these themes and constructed meaning as described and understood by Flint residents.

The results of this participatory analytic process provided the data for the current analysis. Because they suggested that trust was a prominent theme that was foundationally connected to all other themes including health, water/infrastructure, finances, communication, and racism, the team first convened a workshop to discuss the initial findings and develop initial insights into trust as a core concept for the community. Next, the first and second author re-analyzed the transcripts and codes to focus on trust as a cross-cutting theme. They coded new intersecting themes of trust and distrust connected with government, institutions, community, historical context, racism, vulnerability, and change/stability over time. The first and second authors developed these codes into memos and shared these with the larger team to check for consensus interpretation. Based on the emergent findings from the data, the team developed a conceptual model of the community’s experience in Flint. The model was then integrated with the theoretical arguments posed in the literature and the first and second author explored their correspondence with the results. At all stages of memoing and manuscript development, the first and second author shared drafts with the entire team for analysis, interpretation, and content development.

RESULTS

Responses strongly suggested that participants had long been unwilling to accept their vulnerability to government and were generally quite certain in their belief that those vulnerabilities were unprotected. An 86-year-old participant in the senior group who was born and raised in Flint, felt that although the water crisis itself was unprecedented, the difficulties in Flint dated back to the departure of its major employer, General Motors. Participants in the mixed-race focus group pointed to other contamination events such as incidents with brownfields and the discovery of contaminated soil while building housing developments. A participant in the Hispanic/Latinx focus group said that housing and immigration issues played a role in their general unwillingness to accept vulnerability to government. They expressed that getting support from “organizations that provide the resources” was part of a larger struggle. They continued,

I don’t have a green card. I’m not a U.S. citizen. So, how can I find the resources? ... And, then I [have] health issues because of the water. So how can you help me when I don’t have the education? I don’t know how to read and write. How can you help me? It’s not just the water, it’s within the Hispanic community. It’s all of the above ...

Regarding the water itself, a mixed-race focus group participant provided a typical example of the kinds of concerns that predated the switch. They said,

... there have been so many times that we had problems with the water years back. You couldn’t even put your food in that water. And all of the sudden they are to have us drinking that water. No, I didn’t trust them at all. And I knew this was going to be a disaster ... We were not drinking the water. We were drinking bottled water anyway.

Responses also highlighted evidence of unprotected vulnerabilities in the community’s relationship with government during the water crisis itself. One senior group participant said, “they knew what was going on and ... they didn’t care.” A Hispanic/Latinx group participant similarly said, “they didn’t tell everybody in the beginning. They kept it a secret when they should have come out and be honest so we could, you know, trust them.” A participant in the CBOP session elaborated,

I think in the beginning it was the community that said it was something wrong with the water and all the institutions, government, educational, et cetera said, ‘Oh, no, no. There is nothing wrong with it.’ So, they minimized every one of us for a couple of years. And actually, they are still doing it ... And, then the media sort of caught on to it and then, for years in fact, we found out yes, they were lying.

A participant in the mixed-race group expressed betrayal after having put their trust in government saying,

... they violated that trust ... And, then to find out that my son died because he had an immune system [condition] and you didn’t treat the water which caused his death. That, to me, is the most distrustful thing a person can do. And so, you violated my space, you violated my trust. I cannot ever redeem that person. And so, yes, that’s why I feel the way I did. I watched my son have a mental breakdown because ... of what it did to his body. So, based on my perspective, from a human perspective, the spirit of humanity have left our politicians. So, I speak high against trust.

Another mixed-race group participant said,

You can tell me that the lead didn’t do it and I understand that. But, when you say the water didn’t do it and you have people that have had tremendous repercussions from that. That’s to discount them. That’s to tell them that what happened to you didn’t happen to you. And you can’t do that and expect people to take your word for anything. Now, I don’t have any confidence.

While many participants directed their distrust to government broadly or to state institutions, a number of participants expressed distrust in officials at the city level. One CBOP group participant described particular concerns about corruption. They said,

... people on the council ... I just feel like it’s corrupt. I feel like the mayor is being pulled this way. She’s pulled that way. I don’t feel like she makes her own decisions. I feel like somebody makes her decisions for her or she is being told what to do or being bribed what to do ... And, then if you just look at the council period and you look at their credentials, I don’t feel like they are even ready to sit up there. So ... I just feel like there is too much corruption. Too many decisions being made, not for the city of Flint but for other things, other businesses besides Flint.

Similarly, in the mixed-race focus group one participant said, “When they switched the water, they didn’t know how to treat it. And the people were not qualified at the water plant ... So, I have a lack of trust there ...”

As expected, many of the responses also suggested strong, pervasive reinforcement processes in distrust. One CBOP meeting participant said,

But, if the systems are broken and the systems are built on a good old boy approach or racist approach, until we fix ... No, until we demolish the systems and rebuild them, there is still not a chance of developing trust. Because the systems themselves are flawed.

As a result, distrust had strong temporal stability. One CBOP meeting participant said, “And, I will say, just in terms of water, around water, it’s gonna be generations before, I think, people really trust that, if at all. It will be generations before that happens.” Another CBOP meeting participant said,

And, when you start talking about government that may never come back. If we can ever had it, I think some of us did but, I don’t think we as a community will ever come back to a point where we will blind trust anybody.

Another CBOP session participant said, “There is no way in hell, again, that trust will ever [happen]... I have no intention, ever, of trusting ...”

A mixed-race focus group participant stated emphatically,

I’m from the generation that ... We don’t trust any politicians ever. We never have. We never will. It’s not going to happen. You can try all day long to rebuild it. But, if you are a politician, I therefore distrust you. And I can’t help it. It’s something that is ingrained in me.

Another participant from the mixed-race group added,

I don’t know if I have the energy. It would take a lot for me to have trust in the government or those agencies that you listed. Because the energy and the courage I have now, after retiring and being 64, I want to put them on myself. I would have to go back and think about, ‘do I want to trust somebody else’ ... But I don’t know if I have the energy or the courage to trust any governmental agency.

Another CBOP participant said,

There is no reason to trust them. There never has ... I mean, from the election. They mess with their own election. So, you know what they are gonna do to us as a collective. I just think the question is kind of maybe we will trust them. And it’s like, ‘no!’ No! Never! Ever! But I would teach my grandchildren and great grandchildren not to trust them too.

Emergent findings

As might be expected given the pervasive levels of distrust in Flint, both before and after the water crisis, our data provides no evidence that the community trusted in government. Instead, our data strongly suggests that participants were generally quite certain that their focal vulnerability was unprotected. As a result, our data does not speak to the dynamics of trust itself. Nonetheless, our participants did reveal an unexpected dynamic in the form of an unrealized desire for trust. A mixed-race focus group participant said,

I guess I want to say the same thing I said before. If we don’t trust anybody, any politician ... We’ve got to trust somebody. We’ve got to trust somebody. So, give both new sets a chance. Put some politicians in that you think might and follow them. Sometimes we put people in and we don’t pay them any attention. But follow their agenda and in four years’ time, if they haven’t done what they are supposed to, get them out and get some more. You’ve got to start somewhere trusting. Without trust we’re not going anywhere. We’re not going anywhere.

Another mixed-race group participant said,

I have a young child and my elderly mother. So I have to hold my hope up that it can be repaired. I think some critical and key things have to happen. The first step in terms of regaining trust or repairing it or rebuilding it has to be transparency. As well, dovetailed with honesty. People have to be able to hear and see what is really going on. Not just what you want them to believe and not just what you are willing to tell them.

One CBOP session participant echoed this desire to trust but qualified it with a need to be somewhat critical. They said,

Trust but verify. I think to say no ... To just say an outright ‘no’ hurts us more than it hurts anybody else. You know? We might be thinking we are hurting somebody else by saying ‘no I don’t trust you.’ But actually, it hurts you the individual because it leaves you in a very negative place. And so, long term, I don’t think we can afford to be negative. We have to be positive if you are going to pull up. If you are going to ever pull up, you’ve got to be positive. So, be positive, be a part of the solution, trust but verify.

Our data therefore suggest that some participants reported a desire to trust government that was frustrated by their high level of certainty that it would not protect their focal vulnerability. Interestingly, some of these participants seemed to direct their motivation to trust toward their community. One youth focus group participant captured this sentiment well:

Flint residents are not going to really believe more or trust the government again. We rather have trust in each other throughout the community. The community came together, we can make something happen more and better than what the government is doing.

A Hispanic/Latinx focus group participant similarly said,

And, I don’t think it’s from within the community. I think it has to do with the ‘higher ups.’ Because, we like, as the community, we trust each other. So, if I were to tell, like, all of you, ‘don’t drink the water.’ I’m telling you in good faith not to do it ... I would never sabotage the community.

A mixed-race group participant expressed a sentiment of collective self-reliance in their statement,

Things are going to get worse if we don’t say, ‘We got to get past this ourselves.’ We have got to take ourselves past where we are right now. Well, we can’t depend on nobody else because you don’t trust nobody else.

A CBOP participant stated,

I have no intention, ever, of trusting [anyone] other than my community and my neighborhood, which is the residents of the city of Flint. I would say my community and my neighborhood.

DISCUSSION

Our data suggest that community distrust of government is a long-running feature of the relationship between the Flint community and governance agencies. Participants pointed to systemic issues of white-flight, disinvestment, and disenfranchisement throughout the community that resulted in vulnerability to a variety of individual and social harms that participants were certain that government would not protect. This historic distrust provides important context for our inquiry but, given the focus on the water crisis, the discussions often moved quickly to relationships with the various actors participants felt were responsible for managing their vulnerability to the water system. These discussions were also rife with evidence to support participants’ unwillingness to accept focal vulnerabilities that they believed to be unprotected. In general, this evidence was presented with a great deal of certainty, suggesting that they were clearly entrenched in the distrust portion of Figure 1. As expected, this led to clear evidence of self-reinforcement. Many participants characterized the ongoing response efforts as doomed to failure and were explicit in their belief that no amount of trustworthiness evidence could overcome their certainty regarding their unprotected vulnerability. Thus, these responses provide some support for our arguments regarding the relations between distrust and distrustworthiness. As expected, these generally distrusting individuals reported considerable certainty regarding the extent to which they feel that their focal vulnerability is unprotected. More relevantly, they clearly avowed a motivation to maintain that distrust and were unwilling to engage with contrary evidence.

It is important at this point to note that our data here does not speak to the entire model as drawn in Figure 1. Specifically, it does not speak to the nature of the trust basin or to the proposed state of ambivalence. This is not especially surprising given the many, long-running challenges in Flint’s relationship with government, but it does challenge our efforts to explore the dynamics of these two states. As discussed in the introduction, ambivalence is likely a state reserved for relationships where the focal vulnerability is unvalued: When the vulnerability is valued, our general desire for certainty regarding our potential for injury will usually ensure movement to one side or the other. It is therefore likely to be relatively rare, at least when the safety of a valued service like municipal water provision is salient.

Similarly, our data provides no evidence that any of our participants were in a state of trust. As a result, we are unable to empirically explore the hypothesized relations on this side of our proposed model. Interestingly, however, our initial analysis did provide some emergent evidence that, despite being in a clearly self-reinforcing state of distrust, our participants felt some level of motivation to trust. This motivation was often positioned against the social and psychological costs of distrust and suggested that participants felt that its continued maintenance came at a cost, primarily to themselves. Integrating this motivation to trust into our model then creates a third force determining the state of a given relationship, but one that is relatively weak. Indeed, none of our participants provided any evidence to suggest that it was sufficient to achieve a state of trust. Instead, our data suggests that the key implication of this emergent finding is the role that motivation seems to play in creating a pressure to trust a different target altogether. Our participants clearly reported a desire to place their trust in something, but their certain belief that governance agencies would not protect their vulnerabilities seems to have prevented this pressure from actualizing into trust. Instead, our participants tended to discuss a desire to trust in their community and some explicitly connected it to their entrenched distrust in the agencies responsible for managing the water. It is important at this point to note that these insights regarding the motivation to trust and its role in facilitating trust in a new trustee are inconsistent with the model as initially drawn. Nonetheless, this postulation tracks well with research touting the considerable benefits of trust (e.g., Guinot et al. 2014) and costs of distrust (e.g., Fukasawa et al. 2020). Within our data, participants clearly noted a desire to be in a state of trust and directly connected their certainty that government would not protect their vulnerability to a desire to believe that their community would.

Practical implications

The application of resilience theory to trust research highlights a number of opportunities for managing trust. The data analyzed here clearly suggest that the Flint community is, and long has been, entrenched in a particularly resilient state of distrust. Paralleling discussions of engineering resilience (see Martin-Breen and Anderies 2011), traditional approaches to addressing distrust focus on overcoming the threshold separating the states, often by reducing the resilience of the undesired state. Applied here, this approach would suggest that trustworthiness signaling is the key task. In Flint, the State of Michigan has exerted significant effort in working to insist on its trustworthiness through official statements attesting, especially, to its benevolence and by demonstrating that the community’s vulnerability to mismanagement of the water is protected. From Obama’s televised drinking of Flint water (Freking 2016), to legal proceedings against state (Derringer 2016) and federal actors (Whitcomb 2017), and the city-wide replacement of lead lines (Shapiro et al. 2021), these efforts seem to have had little impact in moving the community from the state of distrust.

Our arguments here, instead, highlight a need to conceptualize resilience as an emergent property of the system itself (see Allen et al. 2019). Thus, in place of working to engineer a coerced regime of trust, we argue that more attention should be paid to understanding the dynamics within the system (Angeler et al. 2020). A key opportunity highlighted in the data here suggests that believing that the focal vulnerability within a particular relationship is unprotected generates a motivation to believe that vulnerability is protected in other relationships. Paralleling arguments for the need to consider scale in resilience thinking (see Berkes and Ross 2016), our data highlight an opportunity to consider the cross-target implications of trust and distrust. Environmental governance is a nested institution of actors in the U.S., with local actors’ actions nested within state, federal, and, to some extent, international agencies’ jurisdictions (Garmestani et al. 2008, Stern and Baird 2015). To the extent that participants here distinguished among these actors, there does appear to be some potential to leverage the motivation created by an inability to trust one trustee in working to build trust in another. Indeed, knee-jerk responses to distrust in a number of contexts often operate from this implicit assumption. Changing leaders, mobilizing a new agency (or a new element of the same agency), and the use of external agencies to identify and correct problematic behavior only work if distrust in one trustee does not translate to other agents but they become even more likely to succeed if affected communities are motivated to believe that they can trust the new target (e.g., Boufides et al. 2019).

Problematically, however, many communities have long histories of negative interactions with a variety of governance actors that motivate generalizing across them. Flint is an extreme but unfortunately common example of a community that has been subjected to decades of neglectful, if not actively harmful relationships with housing, criminal justice, and state executive actors. This is then compounded by the centuries of subjugation experienced by primarily Black communities, which may result in a pressure for these communities to conceptualize “government” at a more general scale where “they’re all the same.” Indeed, in our data, participants often characterized the central distrust relationship, not as with a specific agency, but with “city officials,” “state government,” or, most often, with “government” itself. This abstraction likely forecloses the opportunity to redirect the motivation for trust to another trustee of the same class.

Although beyond the data collected here, the application of resilience thinking allows us to speculate as to best practices in both trusting and ambivalent communities. Specifically, in place of working to engineer trust, resilience thinking suggests that governance agents should work to understand and then leverage existing system dynamics. This may then mean that, in a trusting community, governance agencies should focus on trustworthiness signaling. Trust is widely recognized to be a psychologically beneficial state that assuages the experience of vulnerability (Möllering 2001). It may therefore be something of a default state that then motivates individuals to look for and find good reasons for it (Bachmann 2001). This may mean that individuals living in trusting communities do not need much evidence of trustworthiness to fall into trust but, once there, they are likely to be motivated to find more. Ensuring their ready availability would, therefore, likely serve to bolster the resilience of this state of trust to future disturbances.

Ambivalent communities may also be responsive to a trustworthiness-signaling approach but here there is likely an added complication in the need to account for the extent to which certainty is desired (Grupper et al. 2021a, b). Thus, when the vulnerabilities within the focal relationship are not important, evidence that they are protected is unlikely to generate benefit in the short term. Importantly however, these low salience contexts may increase in importance if, for example, a previously taken-for-granted resource is contaminated. As impacted individuals work to make sense of the situation, the ready access of good reasons for trust should increase the likelihood that they fall into it. This likely underscores the need for proactively working to signal trustworthiness as anticipating when unvalued vulnerabilities will become important is challenging.

Where the application of resilience theory suggests a greater divergence from standard practice is in communities entrenched in distrust. An important argument within the resilience literature concerns the need to let go of normative assumptions regarding the desirability of a given state (Allen et al. 2019). Most governance efforts, however, premise on the assumption that because distrust in a given relationship stymies the effectiveness of the focal trustee (Citrin 1974), the key task in distrusting communities is overcoming it. This, however, neglects the functional role of distrust in helping to avoid future injury (Conchie and Donald 2009). Thus, when communities like Flint have long-running evidence to suggest that their focal vulnerability is unprotected by governance agencies, it is likely not in their best interest to engage in trust repair, even if that process would make it easier for the agency to protect their vulnerabilities. Instead, distrust likely serves an important purpose in these communities by motivating monitoring and self-protective behavior. Nonetheless, the technical nature of most risk management tasks often necessitates some level of continued governance agency involvement. In some communities, there may be an opportunity to direct the desire for trust we identified here to another governance agency, but this will likely only be effective when individuals conceptualize governance relationships at a relatively small scale. For those who aggregate governance actors to larger scales, the availability of non-distrusted targets may be limited as a large swath of agencies may be automatically distrusted because they are perceived to be roughly interchangeable. In these cases, the motivation to realize the benefits of trust is likely to be directed to safer alternatives. In Flint, for example, considerable research corroborates the inward turn identified in our data and suggests that it bolstered the already elevated roles of trusted community organizations (Johnson et al. 2018).

This then creates an important opportunity for governance agencies who could, instead, (re)direct the considerable resources that are often available after a crisis to community-led efforts that are better positioned to capitalize on this motivation to trust. Indeed, this logic underlies strategies that encourage governance agencies to rely on already trusted sources within communities for information provision during emergencies (e.g., CDC 2018) but this inward reliance may also serve an additional role. When community groups can be sufficiently empowered to reduce the actual risk of harm, whether directly or through a regulatory oversight role, they may be able to reduce the value the community places on their vulnerability to governance agencies. Although this is likely to be insufficient for directly repairing trust in governance agencies, reducing the need to rely on them to keep communities safe should reduce the need for certainty within that relationship, potentially allowing that relationship to move into a state of ambivalence. Research on collaborative monitoring may, therefore, be relevant here (e.g., Cundil and Fabricius 2009) as these approaches are likely to be helpful in regulating distrust as part of a two-stage process of trust repair (Gillespie and Dietz 2009). More relevantly, however, these approaches may help to reduce the reliance on a rightly distrusted agency by explicitly disempowering it in favor of elevating communities in collaborative decision-making processes (Stern et al. 2021). Indeed, this logic implicitly underlies citizen oversight committees in the policing context, but this comparison highlights an important point of concern. Research generally suggests that these boards fail to increase community trust in policing because, despite being offered as a potent regulatory force, they often fail to shift real power from law enforcement to communities (Beardall 2022). Thus, for this empowerment of communities to generate any real benefit in decreasing the need to rely on distrusted governance agents, the shift in power must be more than symbolic.

Future research

Our insights here point to several opportunities for future research that we integrate with our current findings to create Figure 2. First, our integration of resilience theory in a model that conceptualizes trust and distrust as alternative stable states adds to the wider multidisciplinary literature on trust. Although both states have previously been argued to be self-reinforcing, we explicitly model how this process may occur. Regarding the dynamics of the distrust basin, our data do suggest that, in Flint, the long-standing distrust of government that was compounded by the water crisis did result in many of the expected dynamics. Specifically, we find that the influence of certainty regarding unprotected focal vulnerabilities is an important part of maintaining an established state of distrust. This conceptualization can then be generative for future research, especially by facilitating inquiries that incorporate noncognitive influences on trust, thus answering recent calls by theorists (e.g., Dirks and DeJong 2022). For example, affective and motivational states like implicit motives and values may be studied as antecedents of certainty about vulnerability to harm and the resulting states of trust or distrust to achieve greater insight into how both may be maintained. Relatedly, our focus on Flint leaves open the question of whether these dynamics would exist in communities that have only experienced a subset of the harm caused by processes of marginalization and exclusion like redlining, urban renewal, and the preferential siting of hazardous materials.

Regarding the dynamics of the basin of trust, our results contribute less clarity regarding its shape and dynamics. Figure 2 explicitly integrates this uncertainty by presenting three possible structures that are ripe for future inquiry. Position t₁ represents our initial hypothesis, which is that the same processes that serve to entrench distrust have a roughly equivalent impact in reinforcing trust as well. Thus, it may be that as certainty about protected focal vulnerability increases, the same confirmatory processes trigger direct searches for good reasons to defend that certainty. Although our data do not speak to this, there is some research suggesting that these trust traps do, in fact, exist and are strong enough to maintain trust, even when distrust would be more adaptive for the relationship (Möllering and Sydow 2019, see also Patent 2022). Nonetheless, it remains possible that even if the same processes are generally at play, there is something fundamentally unique about the trust basin. Position t₂ demonstrates this possibility, suggesting that although increasing certainty about protected vulnerability will entrench trust, it cannot reach the same depths as certainty about unprotected vulnerability. This aligns with arguments regarding, for example, trust asymmetry, which suggest that trust is especially fragile (e.g., Slovic 1993, but see Siegrist 2021) and a general finding in psychology that suggests that, across situations, negative information is more powerful than positive (Baumeister et al. 2001). Position t₃ takes this line of reasoning to its extreme and suggests that the effect of increases in certainty about protected vulnerability is, in effect, null. Thus, even when we are certain that our focal vulnerability is protected, the effort required to move to ambivalence or distrust remains minimal.

This speculation notwithstanding, our data do suggest that trust is reinforced by pressures beyond what we initially postulated. In particular, our data suggests the presence of a general motivation for trust that, while insufficient for generating our community’s trust in government (Target A), may have played a more important role in increasing the trust that participants felt in their community (Target B). This, then, leaves open important questions for trusting relationships. Thus, although we might assume that communities that report trusting a given target likely have greater evidence of its trustworthiness, it may be that these motivational and self-reinforcing processes play the more important role, potentially by negating signals of distrustworthiness. An especially important subtype of these communities may include those that are heavily reliant on a limited source of industrial production for labor and economic supply, especially when those sources have historically caused community harm (e.g., McKenna 2009).

Regarding the dynamics of the plateau of ambivalence, our data has even less to say. Although a conceptually important element of our initial model, none of the discussions here made any reference to this state at all, which may suggest that it, functionally, does not exist. Future research interested in this state may be especially well-served by exploring trust in communities where the salience of the focal vulnerability in their relationship with government is relatively low. Affluent communities may present an especially important opportunity as residents will generally have the power, privilege, and positionality needed to protect most vulnerabilities themselves. In these communities, relationships with agencies responsible for important but typically invisible services like municipal water, building safety, and roadworks may be characterized by the lack of certainty regarding these unvalued vulnerabilities that could signify ambivalence (see Grupper et al. 2021a, b). Conversely, however, there may be reason to expect that, in the absence of information about the extent to which these focal vulnerabilities are protected or unprotected, the desire to trust we identified here would create a presumption of protection that may, in itself, be enough to trigger the self-reinforcing processes of trust.

CONCLUSION

Trust is critical for effective governance. The need for communities to rely on governance agencies to effectively manage risk is well understood and underpins a large chunk of the public-facing efforts of these agencies. Most of these approaches operate from the assumption that this building and rebuilding trust can be engineered via trustworthiness signaling. Although occasionally effective, these efforts are often unable to successfully address distrust, which, we argue, arises from a misconceptualization of the constructs. Using resilience theory, we argue that trust and distrust are better conceptualized as alternate, self-reinforcing states separated by a threshold. We further argue that the actual position of a given system within these basins of attraction is governed by two forces—a desire for certainty and the extent to which individuals believe that their salient vulnerability within the focal relationship is protected—which, together, serve to entrench the system within one or the other state. Systems that fall into either state are then stabilized within them via motivated processes that seek out and identify confirming information.

Through our analysis of the narratives of community members who directly experienced the Flint Water Crisis, we show that the distrust that is rampant in that community is explicitly reinforced but paradoxically, may also create its own pressure toward trust. Because trust in government appeared to be foreclosed by our participants’ certain belief that their focal vulnerability is unprotected, this motivation often manifested in increased desire to trust the community itself. We therefore argue that the application of resilience theory to trust and distrust in governance elevates consideration of the dynamics within the system over externally engineered solutions. In particular, we argue that governance agencies should leverage this increased motivation to trust the community by empowering community-led initiatives to make real progress in reducing objective risk. Taking a lesson from failures in citizen oversight boards that have precisely this purpose, we argue that this empowerment will only be successful when it genuinely disempowers distrusted agencies in favor of elevating communities.

__________

^[1]https://www.michigan.gov/flintwater/resources/news/2016/01/20/gov--snyder-statement-on-passage-of-supplemental-spending-bill-for-flint
^[2]https://www.michigan.gov/flintwater/resources/news/2016/02/04/gov--rick-snyder-swift-senate-approval-of-30-million-for-water-bills-shows-strong-commitment-to-fli
^[3]https://www.michigan.gov/flintwater/resources/news/2016/02/05/gov--rick-snyder-former-head-of-deq-water-quality-unit-removed

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