There is a growing attention towards personalised digital health interventions such as health apps. These often depend on the collection of sensitive personal data, which users generally have limited control over. This work explores perspectives on data sharing and health apps in two different policy contexts, London and Hong Kong. Through this study, our goal is to generate insight about what digital health futures should look like and what needs to be done to achieve them. Using a survey based on a hypothetical health app, we considered a range of behavioural influences on personal health data sharing with the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation model of Behaviour (COM-B) to explore some of the key factors affecting the acceptability of data sharing. Results indicate that willingness to use health apps is influenced by users’ data literacy and control, comfort with sharing health and location data, existing health concerns, access to personalised health advice from a trusted source, and willingness to provide data access to specific parties. Gender is a statistically significant factor, as men are more willing to use health apps. Survey respondents in London are statistically more willing to use health apps than respondents in Hong Kong. Finally, we propose several policy approaches to address these factors, which include the co-creation of standards for using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate health advice, innovating app design and governance models that allow users to carefully control their data, and addressing concerns of gender-specific privacy risks and public trust in institutions dealing with data.

As Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) gets integrated in design processes, building trust in these systems is critical for effective human-AI collaboration. This study introduces a framework aimed at translating the abstract concept of trust into practical strategies for design teams, focusing on four trust factors: transparency, accountability, similarity, and performance. We tested the framework’s impact on trust-building and trust learning using a mixed-methods approach, incorporating design tasks and structured workshops involving university students. The results highlight the framework’s ability to enhance participants’ understanding of trust in AI. Insights from this study contribute to advancing educational approaches for embedding trust in AI-driven design, revealing that design activities alone are not enough to impact trust learning.

European institutions are widely recognized as wielding regulatory power in a globalized market, exporting its standards across borders and between sectors. This paper asks what institutional dynamics catalyze European external regulatory impact on pharmaceutical governance in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The research focuses on two European regulatory bodies, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Patent Office (EPO), and explores the dynamics of their technocratic outreach beyond European borders. We find that trust is a key underlying institutional dynamic facilitating some forms of European external relations. The agencies extend their influence through technical assistance, collaboration, and work-sharing with LMIC regulators, fostering a one-sided relationship of “technocratic trust.” This trust, reinforced by international regulatory frameworks that position the EMA and EPO as “trustworthy” regulators, enables these agencies to expand their regulatory influence beyond Europe. By critically examining the impact of this trust-building on LMICs’ regulatory autonomy, this research contributes to the broader discourse on European regulatory power in global health governance and highlights potential implications for pharmaceutical markets and access in LMICs.

Extant studies on cross-border venture capital (VC) investment predominantly focus on how country-level formal institutions impact the flow of VCs across borders, but the potential role of country-level sentiments in this process has received less attention. Drawing upon the trust literature, we explore how home country political sentiment affects cross-border VC investment. Using data on Chinese VCs’ cross-border investments from 2000 to 2021, we find that home country political sentiment positively affects the amount of cross-border VC investment. Government VC (GVC) and connected VC (through sentiment transmission) positively, while investor managerial team education and investor host country experience (through sentiment suppression) negatively, moderate the influence of home country political sentiment.

The secrecy of intelligence institutions might give the impression that intelligence is an ethics-free zone, but this is not the case. In The Ethics of National Security Intelligence Institutions, Adam Henschke, Seumas Miller, Andrew Alexandra, Patrick Walsh, and Roger Bradbury examine the ways that liberal democracies have come to rely on intelligence institutions for effective decision-making and look at the best ways to limit these institutions’ power and constrain the abuses they have the potential to cause. In contrast, the value of Amy Zegart’s and Miah Hammond-Errey’s research, in their respective books, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence and Big Data, Emerging Technologies and Intelligence: National Security Disrupted, is the access each of them provides to the thoughts and opinions of the intelligence practitioners working in these secretive institutions. What emerges is a consensus that the fundamental moral purpose of intelligence institutions should be truth telling. In other words, intelligence should be a rigorous epistemic activity that seeks to improve decision-makers’ understanding of a rapidly changing world. Moreover, a key ethical challenge for intelligence practitioners in liberal democracies is how to do their jobs effectively in a way that does not undermine public trust. Measures recommended include better oversight and accountability mechanisms, adoption of a ‘risk of transparency’ principle, and greater understanding of and respect for privacy rights.

This article argues that a relational and trust-based understanding of fides can explain its use and impact in a variety of secular and religious settings, but particularly between members of different religious communities and especially in commercial contracts. The Latin word fides can be translated in a variety of ways, from ‘faith’, ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’, to ‘proof’ and ‘belief’. Within these meanings there are complex religious and legal implications. Most understandings focus on the ways in which the term defines and creates relationships within a community. Contracts from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Barcelona and Mallorca demonstrate the meaning and significance of the use of the term between merchants and investors from different religious communities. The article provides a new understanding of the place of faith language within the creation of trusting relationships.

This article contributes to debates about the theoretical underpinning for legitimate expectations. Building on existing arguments that what underpins the doctrine is public trust in government, it draws on scholarship on trust from disciplines outside law to reimagine the “trust conception” of legitimate expectations. It argues that the current trust conception lacks conceptual clarity, including several areas of ambiguity which have generated problems for it. The article claims that with the conception so reimagined, trust can offer the necessary theoretical underpinning for legitimate expectations and thus provide much-needed certainty to this confused area of administrative law.

This paper introduces the concept of self-fulfilling testimonial injustice: a distinctive form of epistemic injustice whereby credibility deficits become true by shaping the very conditions that sustain them. Much of the literature on testimonial injustice has rightly emphasized cases in which credibility deficits are rooted in false beliefs, themselves underwritten by ethically bad affective investments. Yet such a focus risks obscuring a structurally significant variant: namely, those credibility deficits that are rendered true through self-fulfilling mechanisms. Drawing on insights from economics and psychology, I distinguish between motivated cognition-based and cognitive bias-based testimonial injustice, which together furnish the background conditions under which self-fulfilling testimonial injustice can take hold. I develop this account by drawing on both theoretical and experimental work on labor market discrimination, which illuminates the ways in which credibility deficits may become self-fulfillingly entrenched. Finally, I explore the distinctive harms of this form of injustice, focusing on its corrosive effects on epistemic self-confidence or self-trust and epistemic self-esteem, and suggest that its insidiousness and relative invisibility render it both difficult to detect and potentially more pervasive than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Citizen trust in public institutions has become a major concern for policy makers, but how institutional design affects institutional trust is not entirely clear. Existing research has mainly focused on the macro-level of welfare regimes or on the micro-level of citizens’ or frontline workers’ attributes. Our knowledge about interrelations between organisational aspects of welfare delivery and (dis)trust-formation at the meso-level of institutional design remains scarce. In the article, we investigate how users experience institutional fragmentation and how this impacts their trust in the welfare system. Based on forty-three interviews with social assistance users in Germany and Poland, we demonstrate that fragmentation is indeed relevant as an experiential context for (dis)trust-formation. However, we found that low institutional fragmentation is not, per se, trust-promoting and that higher fragmentation can be a driver for developing trust in individual caseworkers. Citizens’ perceptions of procedural justice and experienced administrative burdens are discussed as possible mediators.