2026 Theses Doctoral

Building Trust for Collective Action: How Effective Trust Builders Learn Their Craft

Lyons, Savanna May

Trust is widely viewed as a key enabling factor for collective action. Yet, Americans have come to trust each other less and less over the past few decades. Given that declining trust has been linked to weakened civic participation and the erosion of support for democracy, we need a greater understanding of how to build trust in civic spaces and of how everyday leaders can contribute. Existing literature on trust is largely quantitative and conducted in managerial settings. Few studies explore how trust is built in settings of everyday democracy, where people work together voluntarily towards a common cause. Even fewer investigate how people learn to build trust.

The present study explores: 1) the barriers and risks associated with building trust for voluntary collective action, 2) how effective trust-building leaders influence diverse participants to trust each other for collective action, and 3) how these leaders have learned to build trust across differences. Drawing on Lave and Wenger’s situated learning theory, Bandura’s social cognitive theory, and an extensive literature review on interpersonal trust and collective action, I utilize narrative inquiry, quantitative and qualitative survey data, document review and portraiture to explore these questions. Data sources include interviews with 18 experts on collective action, Life Timeline interviews with 21 effective trust-building leaders, and detailed portraiture case studies on five of these leaders, drawing on additional survey and interview data from their collaborators. The study’s 90+ participants hail from across the U.S. and from varied arenas of collective action, including civic and political engagement, natural resource management, and community development.

Findings illustrate how internal and external risks and structural power dynamics shape the tasks of trust building that must be addressed in a given collective action context. I discuss six repertoires of skills and practices that leaders used to address six tasks of trust-building within groups. Leaders’ narratives also shed light on the factors and processes that contributed to their learning about trust, including the role of motivation, moral agency, experiences of betrayal, positive and negative role models, and communities of practice. I conclude by offering recommendations on how, through learning and leadership development, we might foster individual and collective learning to rebuild social trust.