In a seemingly broken world, what still feels possible to rebuild, reimagine, or make credible with the audiences you communicate with?
I posed this question to students at the University of Greenwich and the University of Oklahoma during recent lectures on trust, DEI, and the future.
The answers carried both hope and foreboding. One that stayed with me: the call for radical transparency. It wasn’t framed as a demand. It was a diagnostic. A signal that trust must be shown, shared, repeated and proven.
I wrote recently that technological brilliance without human belonging breeds suspicion. That to build the future, people must be more than recipients of innovation, they must be co-owners of it.
This got me thinking that what Gen Z is showing us is how trust is more than a reputational asset. It’s a live system, tuned to an age of technological acceleration and fragility, and recalibrated in real time.
What Disillusionment Left Behind
What we’ve learned through our data over the past five years is that the pandemic didn’t just pause the world. It narrowed it. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: The Unseen Impacts of COVID, there was a loss of truth: 47% of Brits and 56% of Americans say they now only trust a more curated, narrow set of news sources as a result of living through the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, 66% and 60% respectively believe business used the pandemic as an excuse to raise prices.
For many in Gen Z, this became a loss of faith: 51% of young adults (age 18-34) across Brazil, India, the UK, and the US say they’ve lost faith that their country can come together in a crisis. This has deepened into a loss of belonging: 61% of young adults report increased economic stress because of the pandemic.
When that happens, optimism goes with it. It’s hard to plan for a future you don’t believe you’ll inherit.
And it’s harder still when we hear the same from others. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, only 36% of people globally believe the next generation will be better off than today. That loss is compounded by rising fear. Fear of experiencing discrimination increased by double digits since last year in 15 of 28 countries surveyed.
This is more than disillusionment. It’s the quiet grief of families, communities and societies who can no longer assume their young can live a safer, better life.
When optimism fades, trust erodes with it. And grief, when left unanswered, doesn’t just dissipate. It calcifies into mistrust, distance and ultimately grievance.
Because without belief in a shared future, what holds us in the present?
How Gen Z Is Recalibrating Trust in Real Time
What makes Gen Z distinct isn’t just how they respond but how they interpret. Coming back to my lecture at Greenwich, what I heard in that room was the practice of co-authorship. It was what trust sounds like when a generation doesn’t just want to be heard, they want to help shape the system that decides what’s said, and who gets believed.
The cracks in the system to them are not a failure but an opening.
They’re not naive. And they’re not resigned. They’ve inherited fractured systems but haven’t given up on influence. According to the 2025 Trust Barometer data, Gen Z are the least aggrieved cohort, yet the most likely to endorse forms of hostile activism to drive change. They are emotionally wired to notice what’s missing and culturally trained to speak out when they do. This is not the most triggered generation. It’s the most calibrated for change.
They don’t default to trust. They read for consistency, cultural alignment and tone. They interpret silence as signal and metabolize grievance into discernment.
When asked what makes someone a legitimate influence, 69% of Gen Z respondents globally say they must “understand what people like me need and want,” compared with just 60% who say they must “occupy a formal position of power.”
Their future does not default to authority. Authority is tested and its credibility moves sideways. In a study by UK broadcaster Channel 4 it was found that 58% of Gen Z in the UK trust social content from friends as much or more than journalism.
This also isn’t just about visibility. It’s about verification. Through the people they trust, the spaces they build, the instincts they sharpen in community. Research from Morning Consult has seen 70% of Gen Z say they always fact check what you say and will unfollow you if you’re not truthful*.
What happens when legitimacy can no longer be broadcast in a world where authority isn’t inherited, truth is checked laterally, and narratives are tested relationally?
Innovators moving at the speed of trust.
While we often describe trust as eroding, something passive, slow, or structural, what we see in Gen Z is different. It’s not erosion. It’s discernment.
For a generation shaped not by institutional continuity, but by rupture, they didn’t grow up trusting by default. They grew up verifying. For them, trust isn’t inherited. It’s situational, relational, and constantly recalibrated.
This isn’t just a post-pandemic adjustment. It’s a living pattern, visible in who they follow, believe, block, and build with.
If you're looking for what that looks like in practice, start here. This isn’t a generation waiting for innovation to arrive. They’re already living inside it, and shaping its terms. To move at the speed of trust is not to slow down. It is to design with the same fluency this generation already brings to the table:
- Lateral, not top-down: Trust that travels through networks of peers, not proclamations from authority.
- Relational, not performative: It’s built through presence and consistency, not through optics or intention alone.
- Verified in real time, not assumed by legacy: Past credibility doesn’t guarantee belief, each interaction is its own test.
Because the future won’t be built through persuasion. It will be built through participation.
Gen Z is already showing us what that can look like. The task now isn’t just to reach and build with them, in a language they already speak.
Trust, verified. Innovation, shared. Future, co-authored.
Sat Dayal is Managing Director of Technology at Edelman UK.