Bar Talk and Belief: What a Nashville Honkytonk Taught Me About Trust

What makes one source trustworthy and another not – and why can’t we agree on this?

On a recent road trip, my partner and I ducked into a honkytonk in downtown Nashville and claimed the last two seats at the bar. As the band played Whiskey River over shouted drink orders, I found myself in conversation with a corrections officer – the kind of chance encounter that often reveals more about modern America than formal research.

Thanks to decades of experience reading people, the woman quickly assessed me as safe and shared her story freely. Twice divorced, longing for true love, but with few close friendships, she confessed an inability to trust others. “People lie,” she explained matter of factly.

Yet, when our conversation drifted to current events, her hard-coded skepticism vanished, replaced with a solemn and devout reverence for those who spread the word of God. The same woman who claimed to universally distrust people placed complete faith in any who preached Biblical prophecies and the impending End Times. According to them, civilization had seven years left.

The music ended. I made my excuses and slipped away before our conversation could become contentious. I doubted I could convince her that humanity is essentially good and Armageddon unlikely. Similarly, she could not persuade me that we are irredeemable liars and God has set a timer for our extinction.

But I haven’t been able to shake this chance meeting and the questions it raised:
What makes one source trustworthy and another not – and why can’t we agree on this?

Photo by Nick Agee on Unsplash

The Rooms We Build

I spent decades studying how brands earn and sustain trust, and those explorations revealed patterns that stretch beyond marketing and into politics. The same psychological principles that make us loyal to Spotify, Lululemon, or the Golden State Warriors shape our allegiance to information sources and belief systems.

Although we think our decision to trust is rational and evidence-based, it rarely is. Instead, as we mature our brain develops filters and rules that help us examine new input and decide whether it’s trustworthy or not. This process can be logical, but it also can be emotional. It can be influenced by context, associations, triggers, and a host of other inputs.

When we encounter novel information or meet new people, we quickly evaluate them using these pre-existing standards, and route them toward a “room” that best matches our established trust criteria.

When the corrections officer meets a potential partner, her brain instinctively ushers them to her “suspicious, be on alert” room. But when hearing from religious advocates, that same brain escorts them to her “accept without question” room. She isn’t being inconsistent – she is responding to distinct rules her brain has developed for categorizing people based on their perceived trustworthiness.

While we all build these separate chambers of trust, we don’t construct them in the same way, even when we have a common starting point. Early experiences with authority figures, community values, and institutional reliability create the blueprints for our future trust rooms, but these are only foundations – our experiences over time shape their final structure.

I have six siblings and all of us were born within ten years. We were raised in the same household, attended the same schools, played in the same neighborhood, and watched the same media. But as adults, we have radically different trust architectures.

This used to baffle me, but now I understand that our differences evolved over time. College exposed us to new perspectives. Relocation changed who influenced us. Career challenges, relationships, parenthood – each experience either added to, reinforced, or remodeled our originally similar trust rooms. The early experiences that made us similar are still there, but they have been reshaped or diminished by later influences.

The Structure We Enforce

These constructed categories become more rigid over time, codifying our beliefs and restraining our ability to accept new ideas and influences.

This dynamic is particularly evident in media consumption, where we all tend to gravitate toward news outlets that align with our trust frameworks. As though we’re using a dating app for the truth, we seek out information sources that align with our existing beliefs. These sources, in turn, swipe right on us, validating our existing perceptions. The structure we’ve built is reinforced and continues its quest to look for matches and to reject anything that’s not a good fit.

This reciprocal relationship is most obvious with legacy media like Fox News and the New York Times, which have distinctly different audiences, but it extends to social media as well. Any successful podcast, YouTube video, or blog that aggregates the news caters to its audience’s preferences and matches their trust framework. This helps explain why simply exposing people to “the other side” rarely changes minds.

Consider the Continuing Resolution debacle that happened at the end of 2024. Viewing this as a Democrat, you saw an unelected billionaire usurping the president-elect and disrupting a months-long bipartisan negotiation that had settled on a compromise bill. Viewing this as a Republican, you saw a wildly successful entrepreneur speaking truth to power and insisting on a more frugal approach. Both versions are factual, but what you believe happened depends on which of your trust rooms was in charge and the facts it accepted or discarded.

This divide may seem unbridgeable but understanding how these structures work offers a way forward. By learning to broaden and adjust our frameworks, we can create space for more shared understanding. We can expand our trust rooms and consider new perspectives without sacrificing our core values.

Expanding our Trust Rooms

My move from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe offered me a pop-up laboratory for studying trust formation. In a new environment with no friends or reliable resources to draw on, I had to build new relationships from scratch. Each interaction with local service providers – from mechanics to medical professionals – required conscious evaluation rather than automatic categorization.

Choosing a doctor in Palo Alto was relatively easy – the Stanford medical brand dominates the area. But in my new neighborhood, no such icon exists. Instead of being swayed by pre-existing credentials or hidden influences, I found myself paying attention to more fundamental measures. How carefully did a doctor listen to me? Did they explain their beliefs and approaches clearly? Were they honest about their knowledge gaps? Each meeting strengthened or weakened my trust, building a foundation based on direct experience rather than inherited assumptions.

This “trust from zero” experience revealed something profound: when we can’t rely on our usual filtering systems, we become better architects of trust.

This same approach worked in evaluating my local political officials. Despite my progressive leanings, I support a conservative county commissioner. This wasn’t random or forced – it resulted from watching him navigate complex local issues over time.

In community meetings, I saw him engage with different viewpoints, acknowledge valid criticisms, and follow through on commitments. As he consistently followed his convictions and worked for the community’s benefit, he challenged my pre-set political categories. Although he’s a Republican and I often disagree with him, I needed to create a new trust room that recognized him as someone who is neither conservative nor liberal – an opening for both of us.

I believe I can refine my engagement with national politics in this same way. Rather than automatically filtering information through my established political trust rooms, I can look for politicians who demonstrate fundamental trustworthy behaviors, regardless of their party affiliation. I can be open to their impact rather than rebuffed by their alignment.

There are current examples on both sides of the aisle. Bernie Sanders has championed healthcare reform for decades, often challenging his own party’s norms. Mitt Romney’s vote for Donald Trump’s impeachment demonstrated his commitment to principle over party loyalty. Cory Booker has worked across party lines on criminal justice reform, and Lisa Murkowski did the same in helping pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill.

To be open in this way doesn’t mean abandoning existing belief systems or core values. Just as I didn’t need to become conservative to trust my local representative, I don’t need to adopt new viewpoints in order to evaluate them fairly. Instead, I can create space for a more nuanced assessment – one based on proven character and competence rather than tribal affiliations.

Curating Your Own Experts

The challenge, of course, is that national politics rarely offers the kind of direct experience that made my Tahoe trust-building possible. We necessarily rely on mediated information, filtered through various sources with their own categorization systems.

To remedy that without moving to Washington DC, perhaps shaping our information sources more consciously and independently will work. We can watch or listen to our favorite newscasts, but also add in perspectives from experts in specific fields who share what they know.

Your list will differ from mine, but I offer it here as an example. In terms of explaining the impact of technology on business and culture, it’s hard to beat Kara Swisher or Packy McCormick. Heather Cox Richardson offers abundant and well-cited historical context on current events. For competing legal opinions, I look to Laurence Tribe and Michael Luttig, and I follow Paul Krugman and Douglas Holtz-Eakin who offer differing views on economic policy. To feed my mind with new ideas and unique models, I learn from experts in disciplines far from my own including geology, construction, fashion design, and food.

Reviewing and consolidating the thoughts from diverse experts takes more effort than consuming a 30 minute podcast or watching the nightly news, but the reward is a more balanced viewpoint and a more accurate assessment of risks and rewards.

The goal isn’t to tear down our existing trust architecture – these rooms serve important functions in helping us navigate a complex world. Rather, it’s about building more thoughtful additions: rooms with stronger foundations, clearer sight lines, and walls permeable enough to let in new evidence.

In a political landscape increasingly divided by competing truth claims, this conscious approach to trust-building could help us foster deeper understanding, reduce polarization, and create space for more meaningful dialogue. Most importantly, it might help us recognize that trust isn’t about finding absolute certainty, but about developing the wisdom and the will to navigate uncertainty together.

Your Turn

You don’t have to take a road trip to learn more about trust and its structure. Here’s some ways to broaden your perspective without leaving home:

1. Audit your information sources. Are they all conservative or all liberal? Are they predominantly traditional media or predominantly new forms of social media? If you’re over-indexed on one side or the other, consider balancing your news portfolio.

2. The next time you’re in a bar, hair salon, or cab ask whoever is working with you about their perspective on a specific topic. Learn which public voices they trust and why.

3. Ask your kids or your parents who they’d most like to invite to dinner and what topics they’d discuss with them.

If you have some expert resources you respect, please share them in Comments. I’m always looking for new teachers.

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If you’re new here, an algorithm probably guided you. In that case, I recommend you confirm who I am, where my expertise lies, and what biases I may bring to my posts. If you want to read more, I’d suggest you start with my foundational post, The Hidden Influence of Branding in American Politics.