The Dark Side of Trust
An examination of the costs and risks of trust, countering the assumption that more trust is always better. Argues that high trust can reduce vigilance and monitoring in ways that create vulnerability: trusting parties may become complacent, fail to scrutinise each other's actions, and grant latitude that enables exploitation or poor decisions. Connects to the normalisation of deviance and groupthink — the slow erosion of standards that high-trust groups are particularly prone to because the drop in monitoring removes the friction that would otherwise catch small departures. A key reference for understanding why psychological safety requires protection for dissent rather than trust alone.
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