How to tell if you can trust someone

Trust makes the world go around. It's what undergirds a functioning civil society and is a necessary aspect of all our interactions.

So how can we tell who around us we can trust? Specifically, if someone has given us cause for doubt, how can we determine whether or not we can trust them? Philosopher Professor Colin Klein is here to help.

In our conversation, we also cover trust in the context of the Me Too movement, on Reddit, and in dating situations.

Please note: this episode contains explicit language.

Colin Klein is a professor in the School of Philosophy and a CI on the Humanising Machine Intelligence project at the Australian National University. He is a philosopher of science who focuses on neuroscience, computation, and the evolution of cognition. Before ANU, he held posts at Macquarie University and The University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his PhD in 2007 from Princeton University. His 2019 Australian Research Council Discovery Project “Trust in a Social and Digital World” (with Mark Alfano, Macquarie University) is currently investigating the role of network structure in maintaining both healthy and dysfunctional communities.

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The theme music for Better Things is “One More Time” by Fab Beat.

Better Things is a production of the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences. It’s produced by Evana Ho. The production assistant for this episode was Brandon Tan.

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