Become a Trusting Person

In personality psychology, trust is understood as a facet of agreeableness, the Big Five personality trait that describes how we tend to relate to other people. Specifically, trust reflects how willing someone is to assume good intent, share information, and rely on others.

What many people don’t realize is that trust, like other personality traits, is malleable. Not only that, you can take a proactive role in becoming more trusting.

How trust patterns form

Your capacity for trust typically develops from past experiences that shape your default pattern of beliefs and behavior (i.e., your personality) when it comes to other people. Experiences like being punished for mistakes, criticised for expressing your feelings, or growing up in a situation where your needs were inconsistently met, have a powerful impact on what you expect from other people.

Difficulties with trust can also develop in adulthood, especially if you’ve been in workplaces or partnerships where minor missteps carried outsized consequences. For example, after a partner’s infidelity, it may become difficult to fully believe their explanations about where they are or what they’ve been doing.

In these contexts, patterns like anticipating risk, scanning for errors, double-checking everything, or feeling responsible for catching problems before they happen can feel protective.

They reduce the chance of being blamed, rejected, or hurt. For example, if you monitor your partner’s whereabouts, you may feel more in control, believing that staying vigilant will help prevent future infidelity or at least keep you from being blindsided again.

The problem isn’t that these patterns exist. The problem is that they often persist long after the context has changed.

How trust patterns get reinforced

If you have a lower capacity for trust, you might not be walking around thinking to yourself “I don’t trust people.” Instead, lack of trust often shows up in your behavior. Some behaviors that signify difficulty with trust include:

• Difficulty delegating or relying on others
• Excessive monitoring or checking
• Discomfort sharing thoughts or emotions
• Hesitation to ask for help
• Feeling responsible for preventing problems before they occur

Unfortunately, even if the reasons these behavioral patterns developed make sense, they can cause problems for us if they persist after they’re no longer needed. Micromanaging others, checking in frequently for reassurance, putting up walls – they can strain relationships. Ironically, these behaviors may increase the potential for conflict, which reinforces the belief that relationships are unsafe.

How to re-write the patterns

Being a trusting person isn’t a fixed identity. New experiences in relationships can re-write our default narrative about what we can expect from other people.

And you don’t have to wait until healing experiences or relationships come along on their own. Research on personality change shows that traits shift when people experiment with new responses in real situations, especially when those responses challenge long-standing assumptions.

For example, someone working on trust might:

• Delegate a small, low-risk task and resist the urge to intervene
• Share one piece of information they would normally withhold
• Tolerate the discomfort of not double-checking or seeking reassurance and observe what happens

When the feared outcome doesn’t occur, or is less catastrophic than expected, your brain files this information away. Over time, the data you collect from your experiments (trying out trusting behaviors) can solidify into new beliefs about trust like “maybe I don’t have to do everything myself” or “maybe asking for help doesn’t mean I’ll be rejected.”

When your patterns of behaviors and beliefs shift, and these changes are maintained over time, you have changed your personality to become more trusting.

The Takeaway

Becoming more trusting isn’t an all-or-nothing shift. You don’t have to abandon caution or force yourself into blind optimism about others’ intentions.

Trust Essential Reads

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However, you can deliberately grow your capacity for trust by conducting small, intentional experiments. This looks like trying out one new response, in one real situation, and letting the outcome update what you expect from others.

Over time, those small shifts add up. And when they do, you haven’t just changed your behavior, you’ve changed your personality.