A new open-access paper in Communication Theory introduces Trustless Strategic Communication: a theoretical framework for how organizations, institutions, and public communicators can encourage justified reliance when trust is low, damaged, or difficult to achieve.
Trust is often seen as the ideal outcome of communication. Governments, companies, media organizations, health authorities, and public institutions are regularly advised to build trust, restore trust, or fight mistrust. But what happens when trust is not available — or when asking for trust is no longer convincing?
In a new theory paper published in Communication Theory, Aviv Barnoy introduces the concept of Trustless Strategic Communication. The framework starts from a simple but socially urgent idea: in some situations, people still need to rely on organizations, institutions, or public communicators, even when they do not fully trust them. This is especially relevant in crisis communication, political communication, health communication, public diplomacy, journalism, marketing, and communication around emerging technologies such as AI.
Rather than treating trust as the only route to cooperation, compliance, or public reliance, the theory asks how communication can reduce the need for trust. It focuses on alternative ways to create justified reliance, such as providing evidence people can inspect, procedures they can verify, public transparency, third-party checks, contractual commitments, safety mechanisms, and other forms of assurance.
This perspective is particularly relevant in societies where trust in institutions, media, politics, science, and corporations is frequently contested. In such environments, simply asking people to “trust us” may be ineffective or even counterproductive. Trustless Strategic Communication offers a different logic: do not only ask for trust — design communication, procedures, and safeguards so that people have less need to trust blindly.
The paper contributes a new theoretical framework to strategic communication research and opens up new directions for studying how organizations can communicate responsibly in low-trust environments. It also has practical relevance for professionals who work in crisis response, public health, political communication, corporate communication, journalism, and technology communication.
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