2026 Edelman Trust Barometer
I opened the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer with the emotional enthusiasm of a middle- (r)aged hangry man being handed a 70-page PDF (for fuck sake) at 11:47pm on a Tuesday, accompanied by the three deadliest word-combos in corporate civilization: “Quick read. Key takeaways. Important.” You know what comes next. You scroll once, twice, and suddenly you are holding a very direct and polite document that, between the lines, is basically everybody in the world shouting: “Yeah, we don’t trust anyone outside our bubble anymore.”
Edelman has been doing this survey for 26 years, a quarter of a century and then some. This edition is built on an annual online survey across 28 countries with 40.000 respondents, fielded end 2025. Big sample, solid fieldwork… Sober mood, bordering on grim. It’s Edelman, so I keep one eyebrow raised at all times. A PR firm measuring “trust” has the same vibe as a cigarette brand publishing a lung health whitepaper: I don’t automatically bin it (hey, it’s Edelman), but I’m not tattooing it on my chest and calling it scripture either.
Still. There’s a word in this report that has actual teeth.
Insularity
They call it insularity. A big word: not “polarization,” not “division.” Insularity is the move people make when they stop arguing across difference and start retreating into the smallest circle that feels safe. It’s social shrink-wrap. The onion peel exercise. A safety reflex: the comfort of familiar tribes, familiar facts, familiar sources. Less bridge-building, more moat-digging. And no, it’s not cute.
Edelman says seven in ten people are now hesitant or outright unwilling to trust someone who differs from them in core values, the facts they believe in , the sources they trust, their culture, background, lifestyle, or even their approach to solving societal problems. Seventy percent. That’s a structural, seismic shift: 30% unwilling, 40% hesitant, 30% open.Which matters a hell of a lot because “polarization” used to imply a table, two sides, some shouting, some negotiation. Maybe a badly catered sandwich tray and stale Coke Zero. This is something else: people leaving the table, taking the chairs, and then bitching about “boundaries” like they just discovered emotional maturity.
Before anyone files this under “society is broken, HR should handle it,” Edelman drags it straight into your organization chart. Insularity is not staying on Twitter sorry: X): it is crawling into workplaces, into teams, into projects, and turning collaboration into a hostage negotiation. I got slightly nauseated by the graphs: 42% of the polled employees say they would rather switch departments than report to a manager with different values. Another 34% say they would put a lot less effort into helping their project leader succeed if that leader has different political beliefs.
Read that again, slowly, in the tone of a CFO staring at a line item called “miscellaneous leakage.” A third of your workforce is basically saying ideology now outranks mission. Forget about a “culture” problem in the posters-and-slogans sense… This is a crippling productivity tax, smelling like sabotage risk. The worst, scary part is how elegantly it scales, the way all bad systems do.
Edelman is basically describing a power transfer. Among employees, “my employer” scores 78% trust to do what is right. Business as an institution sits at 64%. NGOs land at 58%. Media at 54% (as an old journalist and proud part of a global media group: ouch!). Government at 53%. Edelman’s own rule-of-thumb calls anything 60+ “trusted.” Which means, in plain language, two things are still standing when the trust tide goes out: your employer, and business in general. Everything else is paddling.
If you’re a business leader reading this and thinking “nice, people trust us,” slow down. That trust isn’t applause, it’s responsibility. When Edelman talks about “institutions,” they mean the four big systems people rely on: business, government, media and NGOs. And when they say these institutions are expected to “bridge divides,” they’re not talking about some vague kumbaya exercise. They mean something concrete: bringing together people who differ in politics, values, background or worldview and still making cooperation possible.
Anxiety
The report asks two blunt questions. First: are these institutions obligated to help reduce division? Second: are they actually doing it well? The answers hurt.
Roughly three quarters of people say employers are obligated to help bridge divides. Only 58% think employers are doing it well. Business does worse. NGOs do worse again. Media gets judged harshly. Government is the full-blown credibility crater.: 81% expected, 39% delivered. Ouch.
So the message is simple. People are looking at the big systems that shape their lives and saying: you need to help us cooperate again. And then, in the same breath: you’re not doing a very good job. That’s the bit boards keep underestimating. They keep treating it like a comms problem. You can’t outsource it to comms, because comms can’t redesign how work gets done. You can’t dump it on HR, because HR can’t rewrite incentives on its own. And you definitely can’t solve it with a values poster in the lobby, because the lobby is empty three days a week and your values poster has the emotional credibility of a crypto ad.
The trust you have is real, but it is also conditional… and the meter is running. Insularity doesn’t grow in a vacuum, it grows in the dark, fed by uncertainty.
Edelman shows anxiety spiking around trade and recession. Sixty-six percent worry that international trade and tariff conflicts will hurt the company they work for, up from 58% in 2019. Sixty-seven percent worry about losing their job due to a looming recession, up from 61% in 2020. When people feel economically cornered, trust becomes miserly. They stop investing it broadly. They hoard it locally. Familiar becomes a shortcut for safe. And then the future itself starts looking like a scam.
Globally, only 32% believe the next generation will be better off than today. In several wealthy European countries, that drops into the single digits and teens: France at 6% (!), Germany at 8%, the UK at 14%. That’s beyond cute pessimism. That’s a broken promise. When the promise breaks, people stop trusting the institutions that used to carry it.
Edelman also tracks how “societal events of the past five years” changed trust. The winners are painfully intimate: neighbours, family and friends are up. Coworkers are up (among employees). “My CEO” is up (among employees). The losers are the big shared systems: national government leaders down hard, major news organisations down too.
This is the shift that shook me, in numbers, without poetry: from institutions to circles. From broad “we” to narrow “me.”
Add the information mess and it gets even uglier. 65% worry that another country is contaminating their information environment with fake news to inflame differences, an all-time high in 16 of 28 countries. Combine that with the fact that only 39% say they get information from sources with a different political leaning at least weekly (ow boy)… that exposure dropped 6 points in a single year. So people think they’re being manipulated by foreign actors, while also narrowing their own intake, and doing it at frightening speed. If you were designing a society that struggles to cooperate, you’d look at this blueprint and nod approvingly like a satisfied villain. 1984, anyone?
Edelman’s Trust Index
Edelman’s Trust Index, the average trust across business, government, media and NGOs, sits at 57 globally. Developing countries score 66. Developed countries score 49. That gap is enormous. It says something uncomfortable about “mature democracies” and how good they’ve become at producing wealth while starving meaning. Country-level, the spread is wild: China and the UAE at 80, Japan at 38, the UK at 44, Germany at 44, France at 42, the US at 47. And then you get the part that explains why two people can live in the same country and inhabit totally different realities: trust inequality.
Something nastier shows underneath the averages: trust is splitting by income. The gap between high and low income groups has more than doubled over the past decade. Two populations living in the same country with completely different assumptions about whether the system works, rather than “a bit of inequality.” In the US, the gap is 26 points. When a single society experiences trust that differently depending on income, you’re managing parallel universes with a shared Teams channel.
Here’s the annoying part, because it ruins the comfort of my beloved cynicism: the report suggests this gap is not fixed. When people feel institutions broker trust well, trust jumps materially. In other words, trust isn’t a personality trait. It’s a response to whether people feel treated fairly, listened to, and not quietly screwed by systems designed for someone else.
“Local” is becoming a trust shortcut. In country after country, companies headquartered “here” are trusted far more than companies headquartered “elsewhere.” Canada is the clean example: 75% trust for domestic companies versus 44% for foreign. That’s not nationalism as a slogan but nationalism as survival instinct. Buy local, trust local, assume foreign comes with stinky strings.
Edelman’s suggested response is “polynational,” which is their polite way of saying: stop parachuting into communities with a global playbook and a translated tagline, then acting surprised that nobody hugs you. When they ask what would earn trust in a company from another country operating locally, the answers are gloriously boring. Which is exactly why most leaders ignore them. People want you to invest for the long term and hire from the community. Not just show up during a crisis, throw money at a problem, and disappear again.
No campaigns, no hashtags, no glossy “we care” video with soft piano and diverse hands in slow motion. They want you to be there, consistently, and put locals on payroll and pay taxes. Trust is built with local receipts.
Trust brokering
I found it very interesting that Edelman uses the phrase trust brokering. They define it as the behaviours and practices that counter insularity by building trust across difference. A trust broker can be a person, an organisation, an institution that different groups will actually listen to when they share a common problem. The move is translation, identifying common interests. Designing cooperation without trying to “convert” people.
That translation piece is the entire game. Most leaders still treat disagreement as reputational risk. They try to smooth it, neutralize it, bury it under euphemisms and alignment sessions until everyone is too tired to push back. Trust brokering is messier and more honest. You accept disagreement as a structural fact and you build conditions where people can still get things done.
Edelman even tests what actually increases trust when a company is forced to respond to a divisive social issue. And the result is oddly reassuring: people aren’t asking to echo their tribe. The strongest signal is the opposite. They want leaders to encourage cooperation on solutions without turning the company into a political mascot. The public is basically begging businesses to stop cosplaying as parties and start acting like the one place where people with different realities can still build something together.
The expectation is clear and brutal: leaders are now supposed to bridge divides, not just “run the business.” And the verdict is equally brutal: most people don’t think CEOs are doing it well. There’s a gap there big enough to drive a reorg through. That gap is your real performance metric for a while, whether you like it or not.
The role changed. Nobody asked you. Congratulations: you’re now expected to be part central banker, part referee, part architect of cooperation. You don’t get extra days off for emotional labor. And good luck explaining “trust brokering” in a CFO-grade ROI model without sounding like you’re pitching scented candles.
What do people want from boards, in plain language? Less hermetic decision-making. More contact with people who don’t share your assumptions. More willingness to engage critics and contrarian thinkers without treating them like a PR fire to be extinguished. If your gut reaction is “that sounds like a distraction,” that’s your ego being a pain in the ass.
Set minimum standards
Now, this is where the internet usually throws five leadership lessons at your face and offers a downloadable template with a stock photo of a diverse team laughing at salad. I’m not doing that (getting a bit tired -or lazy- at this hour of the night). The world has enough templates. What it needs is fewer leaders hiding behind them.
Start with one brutal question: where does your organization force people to cooperate across difference(s), and where does it quietly allow self-segregation? Many companies I see are accidentally built to reward insularity. Teams cluster around similarity. Hiring worships “culture fit.” Performance systems punish friction. Meetings reward whoever speaks the dialect of the dominant tribe. Then leadership acts surprised when innovation dries up and politics infects everything. (And then, they call me 😊.)
Edelman asks what would actually help people build trust across those fault lines. The answers are not glamorous. They’re operational. People want a shared identity that means something in practice, not in posters. They want teams designed so that success requires working across difference instead of avoiding it. And they want people trained to handle conflict without turning every disagreement into a slow-motion meltdown. None of this is sexy. All of it is design. Strategy. Work. Sweat. Some shouting. Pizza. Occasionally, popping a cork when it finally clicks..
This is also where “culture” efforts go to die, because leaders try to do shared identity as branding. They build a slogan, they publish a manifesto. They run an offsite where everyone pretends trust falls are a normal adult hobby. Shared identity is so much more than a poster. It’s the lived experience of solving real problems together while disagreeing about the world outside. It’s the muscle memory of cooperation, built in work, not in empty workshops.
The #DannyThings version: trust is not a cheap pharmacy comms asset. It’s a strategic operating system feature. If you don’t build for it, you get whatever the default human software ships with, and the 2026 default is…. -drum roll-: insularity.
If you’re a leader in a business right now, you’re sitting on one of the last pools of institutional trust. Edelman shows it in bars like a scoreboard. That trust won’t survive as a nice brand attribute. It survives only if your organization becomes a place where people with different realities can still cooperate without feeling humiliated, erased, or forced into ideological surrender. That’s what trust brokering is once you strip away the academic wrapping: building conditions where cooperation remains possible.
It’s exhausting work. It requires talking to critics. It requires listening to people who don’t think like your board. It requires designing teams and incentives that create productive discomfort without turning the place into a perpetual culture-war reenactment. Most leaders will avoid it until they can’t. The usual corporate rhythm: denial, then panic, then a workshop.
Also, you’ll notice I didn’t even use the magic word “AI” in any of this. Now imagine I did. Imagine what it adds as a fear multiplier and an insularity accelerant. Sit with that.
If you’re still wondering why the answer is 42, you have absolutely been paying attention. Unfortunately.
