“We feel like trust is stable, but every single moment your brain is tracking your environment, and running a calculation whether you can trust the people around you and bond with them,” says DeSteno. “Trust comes down to context. And what drives it is the sense that you’re vulnerable, that you need others and can’t do it on your own.” Normally, we think about trust and vulnerability the way we think about standing on solid ground and leaping into the unknown: first we build trust, then we leap. But science is showing us that we’ve got it backward. Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust—it
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