Chapter 4 further considers how the city informs young women’s means for realising their much hoped-for futures by focusing on how they navigate the social infrastructure that underpins its daily life. Paying particular attention to young women’s friendships with other young women, the chapter details this group’s fears of ‘fake friends’ and the anxieties they have towards those close to them having the potential to cause them (and their futures) harm. As the ethnography shows, mobile phone communication has afforded young women new styles of communication that allow them to overcome the fears of social intimacy, helping them to stay connected with others while maintaining social distance. Enabling young women to remain visible in urban life from the confines of their homes, and to engage in conversation without revealing personal information, mobile phones provide young women with an alternative social life, re-ordering their experiences of the city while enabling them to remain embedded within the social relationships that sustain it.

The term post-truth refers to circumstances in which objective facts exert less influence on public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. While not new, this phenomenon has intensified with the rapid speed that misinformation and conspiracy theories can spread online, compounded by rising political polarization. This book draws on leading research in psychology and other social sciences to explain how post-truth claims emerge, why they persist despite contrary evidence, and how we might respond to their challenges. My analysis integrates three distinct approaches to human reasoning: Bayesian models, dual-process theories, and social argumentation. I introduce the term wise deliberative spaces to describe forums that pursue truth and the common good through discourse practices that foster deliberative dialogue. These spaces have declined in recent decades due to reduced face-to-face community engagement, shifts in the media landscape, declining trust in knowledge-producing institutions, and deepening political divides. The chapter concludes by summarizing the book’s organization.

This chapter introduces Bayes’ theorem and uses it to ask critical questions about the diagnosticity of evidence – its ability to distinguish between competing hypotheses. It applies this framework to two controversies: whether vaccines cause autism and whether Biden legitimately won the 2020 US election. In both cases, one side relied exclusively on nondiagnostic evidence, facts that have alternative explanations. A key focus is the likelihood ratio, a term in Bayes’ theorem that can represent how much trust we should place in various sources of evidence (e.g., scientific experts, election officials) and in processes like peer or judicial review. The chapter critically examines the peer review system through the case of Andrew Wakefield’s retracted study linking vaccines to autism. Peer review failed to detect misreporting of data and a conflict of interests – highlighting the need to supplement peer review with scientific replication. Together, these examples underscore the importance of public understanding of epistemic institutions and the use of deliberative argumentation to explore alternative hypotheses.

Fundamentally, a psychiatric patient’s relationship with the health professionals treating her depends on developing trust and that trust relies on understanding on both sides: that is why it is so critical for a clinician to have as deep an understanding as possible of his or her patient’s perspective. It’s unusual for a patient with a physical ailment to feel a need to deliberately conceal things from her clinician but this is a common occurrence for women in a perinatal mental health setting. The main reason for this is fear; fear of having her children taken away, fear of being ‘judged’ for wanting to have a child while coping with a chronic mental illness. This chapter will provide an overview of the research I have conducted since 2010 to identify and record the experiences of women in receipt of perinatal mental health services or, in some cases, of women not in receipt of the services they needed.

Chapter 4 uses original survey data to test the book’s theoretical claims. The first set of findings focuses on property rights. Disputes over state land takings are concentrated where land values are greatest: close to urban centers. The second set of results focuses on how the legal system channels conflict; grievances of rural residents over state land takings often go unresolved. In the wake of state land takings, rural residents use law to fight village leaders and neighbors in order to get a bigger share of limited state compensation for lost land. The data also reveal which villagers are more likely to take action in the face of land grievances. Possible actions include mediating, petitioning, litigating, protesting, and contacting media or a local People’s Congress deputy. Personal connections to the party-state are key, while legal knowledge and party membership have no effect. The third set of results focuses on the official project of legal construction. Data analysis shows that state legal programming changes citizens’ legal consciousness and increases regime legitimacy, as measured by trust in the party-state, for the majority of citizens. Fourth, for the minority of the population that directly experiences grievances over land, trust in the state declines.

Chapter 2 lays the foundation for the book’s theoretical framework by introducing the collective action problem and examining how protest mobilization unfolds in practice. Drawing on global literature and empirical examples, it demonstrates that elite-driven protest is a widespread and influential form of collective action. It shows, however, that successful elite mobilization requires deep local knowledge, strong community networks, and trust – resources that many elites lack. To overcome this gap, the chapter introduces the concept of the protest broker: an intermediary who facilitates connections between elites and potential protesters. It explores who protest brokers are, what they do, and why their role is central to protest mobilization. It argues further, that existing theories of elite mobilization implicitly assume the presence of such intermediaries, yet rarely acknowledge them explicitly. By making protest brokers visible, this chapter reframes key assumptions in the protest literature and connects them to broader research on political and vote brokers. It also situates protest brokers among other grassroots actors – such as shop floor stewards and activists – clarifying their unique but overlapping functions in enabling protest and shaping its location and form.

Chapter 1 begins by addressing how faith was central to Augustine’s theology, reading of Scripture, and Christian experience. Although Augustine understood faith as intellectual, this fit within his classical understanding of the human person. Moreover, though faith is intellectual, it is never without some motivating affection, is deeply interpersonal, and frequently has the sense of personal trust. Three early works ground and foreshadow his mature thinking on justification by faith. In de vera religione (True Religions), faith emerges as theological because it truly relates one to God through the incarnation; it is not merely pedagogical and instrumental, as in Neoplatonism. In de utilitate credendi (The Advantage of Believing), Augustine appeals to the necessity of faith in the case of students and friends to demonstrate how faith is virtuous. Lastly, de fide et symbolo (Faith and the Creed) shows how faith is fundamentally ecclesial through the inseparable relationship between the faith animating the believer and the faith received from the Church.

This chapter addresses the role of oxytocin and vasopressin in shaping social behavior, reviewing both human and animal studies. The chapter critiques the early optimism around oxytocin’s ability to foster trust and emotional understanding, providing evidence from failed replication studies and highlighting the effects of sex, context, and brain region-specific interactions. It also assesses clinical research on oxytocin as a potential treatment for autism spectrum disorder, pointing out the limitations of current approaches and the complexity of translating animal research into human applications.

This chapter focuses on the role that allusion plays in establishing a shared language of intimacy. It describes how Wollstonecraft and Godwin, in their letters to one another, trade literary allusions as a way of flirting. That practice cast doubt on the transparency of speech, however, since the difficulty of openly expressing feeling, versus the relative ease of slipping into a literary cliché, led to the sense of distrust that also features throughout their letters. The tension between transparency and trust is further explored in the pair’s novels. Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria presents a heroine who falls in love with a man based on the books he reads, in a manner which suggests either quixotic delusion or a defiant trust in the imagination. Godwin’s novels depict scenes of shared reading which rethink his earlier philosophical discussions of personal affection versus independence, and openness versus secrecy or reserve.

Chapter 3 dives deep into the beating heart of cryptocurrency, the paradoxical technology that has made early adherents billions, while adding nothing of real value to society. By any measure, crypto has failed at its stated goal: creating a better financial system. Looking to Bitcoin, we show how the core innovation – a distributed encrypted database – makes a terrible payment system, with slow, expensive, uncorrectable transactions. But crypto enthusiasts ignore more than a decade of failure, doubling down on grandiose claims about solving everything from financial inclusion to corporate governance while ignoring the far easier, low-tech solutions to these very real needs. We include an interview with an early supporter of the massive crypto currency Ethereum, who came to see how crypto became “just a tool for the wealthy to become wealthier” rather than fulfilling its promise of financial inclusion for the world’s 1.7 billion unbanked people.