Everything but the Kitchen Sink: Rethinking Trust with Onora O’Neill

From layered definitions to a sharper question: when is trust actually justified?

Competence, integrity, benevolence, predictability, transparency, shared values, vulnerability, risk, expectations. The list goes on. Open almost any academic paper or practitioner analysis on trust, and you will find a careful attempt to capture its richness by adding yet another component to the mix.

The intention is understandable. Trust is complex. It resists simple definitions. It operates across personal relationships, organizations, and entire societies. So the instinct is to include more, not less. To build a definition that does justice to that complexity.

But there is a cost.

When a definition tries to include everything but the kitchen sink, it risks explaining nothing. A concept overloaded with components becomes difficult to use. It loses its sharpness. It starts sounding like a checklist built through successive academic additions. Comprehensive, perhaps. But not necessarily insightful.

This is a pattern I have seen repeatedly in over 130 conversations on my TrustTalk podcast. Ask experts what trust is, and many will, quite reasonably, begin to layer elements. Each addition makes sense on its own. Yet together, they often blur the picture rather than clarify it.

It raises a simple but uncomfortable question.
Are we defining trust, or are we describing everything that surrounds it?

This is where I find myself increasingly persuaded by Baroness Onora O’Neill.

Her argument cuts through much of the noise. Stop obsessing over trust. Focus on trustworthiness instead. The real issue is not whether people trust institutions, but whether those institutions actually deserve to be trusted.

If you want to see this argument laid out clearly, her 2013 TED Talk, “What we don’t understand about trust,” is a good place to start. In just twenty minutes, she dismantles many of the assumptions behind today’s “trust crisis” narrative and redirects attention to what actually matters.

The same line of reasoning is developed more fully in her 2002 BBC Reith Lectures. There, she challenges the idea that trust can be restored through more transparency, more regulation, or more measurement alone. It is a subtle shift. But a powerful one.

If we take her seriously, many of those “kitchen sink” definitions begin to look somewhat beside the point. Competence, integrity, benevolence. Many scholars quite reasonably treat these as core elements of trust. But O’Neill invites a different emphasis. Rather than refining what trust is, we might do better to ask what makes trust justified. In that light, these elements can be seen as qualities that make a person, institution, or organization trustworthy and, therefore, deserving of trust.

This reframing sharpens another of her critiques. Transparency alone does not build trust. Flooding people with information may create the appearance of openness. But if that information is not usable or intelligible, it does little to help anyone judge whether trust is justified.

In fact, it may do the opposite.

Similarly, elaborate accountability systems, audits, metrics, and compliance frameworks can undermine the very trustworthiness they aim to guarantee. When people focus on ticking boxes, they may satisfy formal requirements while losing sight of the underlying purpose.

Seen through this lens, the problem with overloaded definitions becomes clearer.

They try to capture trust by listing everything that might contribute to it. In other words, by throwing in everything but the kitchen sink. But in doing so, they blur a crucial distinction. The difference between what trust is and what makes trust justified.

And that distinction matters.

If we collapse the two, we risk building theories that are descriptively rich but practically weak. We end up managing signals. Demonstrating competence here, signaling goodwill there. Without ever asking the more fundamental question: are we actually trustworthy? That question is harder. It is less comfortable. And it cannot be answered by adding another term to a definition.

There is also something demanding in O’Neill’s idea of intelligent trust. Trust should not be blind. Nor should it be manufactured through reassurance or perception management. It should be grounded in reasons. In evidence that someone or something is, in fact, worthy of trust.

Which brings us back, once again, to the kitchen sink.

Perhaps the goal is not to build definitions that include everything, but definitions that leave enough out to remain useful. Because when we try to say everything about trust, we may end up understanding very little.

Perhaps the real problem is not that we know too little about trust, but that we keep trying to say too much. Everything but the kitchen sink.