Epistemic trust is defined as the willingness to regard information as trustworthy, relevant, and generalizable (Knapen et al., 2022; Fonagy & Allison, 2014 ). Therefore, it is considered as a key mechanism for successful psychotherapy but also other professional group processes such as group-therapy, the optimization of inter– and supervision, and the design of societal and political discourses.
To date, epistemic trust has been primarily operationalized as an individual trait rather than as a relational phenomenon that emerges through interpersonal interactions. But individuals in communication processes are not only recipients of information – they actively shape the process and, consequently, the quality of epistemic exchange through their interactions.
Until today, there is a gap for measuring and understanding how process trust develops in contexts of interpersonal exchange and learning – such as group psychotherapy, supervision or political discussions.
To address this gap, a multifaceted scale of relational epistemic trust is currently in development. It is designed to assess the multidimensional concept of epistemic trust that have been proposed and discussed in literature (Fisher 2023; 2025): Sharing, We-Mode (shared understanding), Learning. These three facets are operationalized by five dimensions: Self-Disclosure, Listening, Establishing a Shared Understanding, Epistemic Self-Efficacy and Learning.
This project not only aims to develop scales to measure multi-directional processes of trust-building in epistemic exchanges but also to derive procedures to strengthen corresponding indicators in therapy, mediation and conflict transformation.
The study will be completed in October 2026.
Authors: Christoph Hahn, Prof. Dr. Siegfried Preiser
Research Grant: Erhard Höpfner Stiftung
Fonagy, P., & Allison, E. (2014). The role of mentalizing and epistemic trust in the therapeutic relationship. Psychotherapy (Chicago, Ill.), 51(3), 372–380. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036505
Fisher, S., Fonagy, P., Wiseman, H., & Zilcha-Mano, S. (2023). I see you as recognizing me; therefore, I trust you: Operationalizing epistemic trust in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, 60(4), 560–572. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000501
Fisher, S., Fonagy, P., & Zilcha-Mano, S. (2025). More than meets the “I”: A panoramic view of epistemic trust in psychotherapy. Psychopathology, 58(2), 80–93. https://doi.org/10.1159/000541667
Knapen, S., van Diemen, R., Hutsebaut, J., Fonagy, P., & Beekman, A. (2022). Defining the concept and clinical features of epistemic trust: A Delphi study. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 210(4), 312–314. https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0000000000001446