Exploring the Future of AI, Technology, and Trust. The Trust Collaboratory is building new research activity, community relationships, and training programs around one of the most relevant issues of our time: How do societies interact with AI, how can we design trusted technology, and how can we do this work through participatory formats? Our first step in this new line of work is to train the next generation of engineers and data scientists to study the social effects of new technologies. Learn more about our newly launched interdisciplinary training program, the My Streetscape Summer Research Institute, organized in partnership with the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3) here.
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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
Program Launch: Community Research Internship in Trust and Technology
Announcing our participatory research program for MA Sociology students in partnership with the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3). Meet our first student cohort here.
Fresh Off the Press: How People Decide to Trust in Science?
Surveys purporting to document increasing mistrust in research are oversimplifying complex phenomena. Read our newest research findings. Read article.
Info Sessions for My Streetscape Summer Research Institute 2024!
Sign up for our webinars in late November and early December to learn about the application process for this interdisciplinary internship program for high-school students in NYC.
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 Institue, 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.
