We Learn Distrust and Unlearn Trust

A two-year-old walks up to a stranger. Laughs. Reaches out. No hesitation. No calculation. No "trust has to be earned first."

Twenty years later, that child sits in a boardroom. Checks every email before it goes out. Personally approves every vacation request. And calls it "good leadership."

What happened in between?

The Wrong Assumption

"Trust has to be earned." You hear it everywhere. In leadership seminars. In management books. In job interviews. And it sounds reasonable. Mature. Smart.

It is wrong.

Erik Erikson described it in 1950 in "Childhood and Society," and developmental psychologists have confirmed it ever since: trust is the default state of human beings. Infants come into this world with basic trust. It is the factory setting.

Distrust is what gets learned.

As a physician, I see this pattern every week. Executives who second-guess every decision. Who get three quotes before accepting one. Who need a 40-page contract to start a collaboration. And who call all of this professional risk management.

It is not risk management. It is learned distrust.

The Biology Behind It

Pitula and colleagues published a remarkable study in Developmental Science in 2017. They examined children who had experienced early institutional neglect and compared them with children from stable families.

The result: children without early neglect shared willingly with other people. They trusted, even when the other person did not immediately reciprocate. Children with early deprivation did the opposite. They preferred investing in a lottery over investing in a human being.

The critical point: these patterns remained stable. Years after the children had been placed in loving families. The early experience had permanently altered their trust system.

This does not only happen in orphanages. It happens in families where mistakes get punished. In schools where obedience matters more than curiosity. In companies where "trust but verify" is framed on the wall.

Every one of these experiences teaches a lesson: do not trust. Control.

The Control Trap

I worked with a CEO of a mid-sized company. 120 employees. He worked 70 hours a week. Not because the business demanded it. Because he had to make every important decision himself. Every single one.

His reasoning: "If I don't do it myself, it gets done wrong."

I asked him: "When did you learn that?"

Silence.

Then he told me about his father. A master craftsman who had told him as a teenager: "Don't rely on anyone. In the end, you're always alone." One sentence that had programmed his entire leadership behavior.

Ellen Langer described the "Illusion of Control" in 1975. In a series of experiments, she showed that people systematically believe they influence outcomes that are purely random. Participants who chose their own lottery ticket valued it at $8.67 on average. Participants who were assigned a ticket valued it at $1.96. Same odds. Four times the value through perceived control.

This illusion is everywhere in boardrooms. More meetings. More reports. More approval loops. All mechanisms that create the feeling of control. Without controlling anything.

What Control Really Costs

De Jong, Dirks, and Gillespie published a meta-analysis in 2016 covering 112 independent studies with 7,763 teams. The finding: trust within teams correlates with team performance at an effect size of ρ = .30. That is an above-average relationship, stronger than 60% of all other organizational psychology variables.

In plain language: trust is one of the strongest levers for performance. Stronger than most leadership instruments taught in business schools.

And the flip side: control destroys exactly this lever. Research shows a correlation of r = -0.49 between micromanagement and trust in leadership. Those who control get less performance. Not more.

Recognizing the Pattern

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, we call it experiential avoidance. People avoid uncomfortable feelings and create their problems by doing so.

Hayes and colleagues define it as the attempt to "alter the form, frequency, or intensity of private experiences such as thoughts, feelings, or memories, even when doing so is costly, ineffective, or unnecessary."

Control is experiential avoidance of uncertainty. The controller avoids the feeling of not knowing whether everything will turn out fine. They trade real uncertainty for fake safety. And they pay for it with their health, their relationships, and their company's performance.

My client with the 70-hour weeks? When he recognized that his control behavior was not protecting his company but protecting his feelings, he learned to let go. Not everything at once. Step by step. Today he works 45 hours. His company grows faster than before.

Not because he delegates better. Because he learned to sit with uncertainty.

Trust Is Not Weakness

The irony: people who control consider themselves realists. "Trust is naive." "You have to be careful." "I know my people."

But research says the opposite. Trust is not a sign of naivety. It is a sign of strength. The ability to trust means: I can handle the possibility that something goes wrong. I do not need fake safety.

The real question is not: whom do I trust?

The real question is: what do I feel when I give up control? And am I willing to sit with that feeling?

Most executives have never been asked that question. Instead, they learned that control is strength. That distrust is wisdom. That trust has to be earned.

They learned distrust. And unlearned trust.

The good news: what was learned can be changed. Not through a seminar on trust culture. Not through a poster with company values. But through the willingness to face an uncomfortable question.

What would you do differently if you were not afraid of uncertainty?

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Sources with URLs:

1. Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and Society. W.W. Norton & Company. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK556096/

2. Pitula, C. E., Wenner, J. A., Gunnar, M. R. & Thomas, K. M. (2017). To Trust or Not to Trust: Social Decision Making in Post-institutionalized, Internationally Adopted Youth. Developmental Science, 20(3), e12375. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5069074/

3. Langer, E. J. (1975). The Illusion of Control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(2), 311-328. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1977-03333-001

4. De Jong, B. A., Dirks, K. T. & Gillespie, N. (2016). Trust and Team Performance: A Meta-Analysis of Main Effects, Moderators, and Covariates. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(8), 1134-1150. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27123697/

5. Jesus, J. B., Tenedero, M. A. I., Solis, E. C., Gemodo, K.-C. G., Amen, A. C. V. & Loberanes, M. V. (2025). Toxic Micromanagement in the Workplace: Its Impact on Employee Productivity, Trust, and Innovation. Psychology and Education: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 17(9), 922-956. https://philarchive.org/rec/JESTMI-2

6. Hayes, S. C., Levin, M. E., Plumb-Vilardaga, J., Villatte, J. L. & Pistorello, J. (2013). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Contextual Behavioral Science. Behavior Therapy, 44(2), 180-198. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3635495/