What does it mean to design for trust when incentives are misaligned?
context.
Many of the systems people rely on today, from platforms, institutions, automated tools, are opaque by design. Most participants didn’t build them, don’t control them, and weren’t trained to reason about them. These systems, whether technological, institutional, or organizational, often demand good judgment without offering the conditions needed to develop it.
Formal onboarding, documentation, or policy rarely capture how decisions are actually made in practice. As a result, people are left to infer expectations, risks, and norms through experience rather than instruction.
This question sits at the center of my interest in how judgment forms when authority is diffuse, feedback is uneven, and accountability is asymmetrical.
the tension.
Modern systems frequently assume that clarity can be achieved through rules, training, or compliance mechanisms. Yet judgment is not something that transfers cleanly from documentation to action.
The tension lies between environments that require intuition and structures that fail to support its development. People are expected to “know better” without being given the opportunity to learn how.
This gap often becomes visible only when something goes wrong.
what this points toward.
Sitting with this question suggests that judgment develops socially, through observation, analogy, shared language, and informal feedback, more than through formal instruction alone.
It also points toward the importance of legibility: systems that make decision-making processes visible tend to support better judgment than those that rely solely on rules or enforcement.
Rather than treating judgment as an individual trait, this framing treats it as something shaped by environment, incentives, and collective practice.
