More people trust chatbots than elected leaders
What new research reveals about our evolving relationship with AI—and how chatbots are filling the trust gap in the social contract.
Thirty percent more people trust their AI chatbot than their elected representative. Nearly 38 percent believe AI could make better decisions on their behalf than government representatives.
These findings come from the Global Dialogues on Human–AI Relationships, a collective dialogue with people across 35+ countries and 7 languages run by the Collective Intelligence Project. The fourth round of these global dialogues involved 1,052 participants across 230 population segments across 68 countries, exploring how people engage emotionally, ethically, and politically with AI.
Among the results: 58% of participants said they trust their chatbot to act in their best interests, compared to just 28% for elected officials. When asked if AI could make better decisions on their behalf than government representatives, 38% agreed.
Participants joined structured online sessions facilitated through Remesh, a digital platform designed for real-time deliberation at scale.
Emotionally attached, politically detached
The Global Dialogues also shed light on the evolving role of AI in daily life:
Nearly 15% of participants use AI for emotional support daily, and another 28% weekly.
Three in ten have at some point thought their chatbot might be self-aware.
Most do not believe AI genuinely cares—but they turn to it anyway.
Chatbots are widely seen as ‘helpful’, even as the companies creating them score 23 percent lower on trust by users.
These findings echo recent reporting by the Guardian of people forming deep, sometimes romantic attachments to AI companions, valuing their constant and non-judgmental availability. These attachments often stem from loneliness, anthropomorphism, and transference according to University of California Health Sciences Clinical Professor Joe M. Pierre.
Declining institutional trust
These insights reflect a broader sense of societal and institutional disconnection—and a growing perception that the systems meant to serve people are unresponsive, while digital tools, paradoxically, are.
This backdrop is reflected clearly in the OECD’s 2025 report ‘Tackling Civic Participation Challenges with Emerging Technologies: Beyond the Hype’, which emphasizes the need for new tools that enable more inclusive, transparent, and responsive policy design.
“Emerging technologies are not a silver bullet for civic disengagement, but they can provide new entry points for inclusive participation, transparency, and more responsive policy design.” — OECD 2025
This builds on earlier findings from the OECD’s 2024 Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions, which quantified the importance of voice in building trust:
“Of those who feel they have a voice in government actions, 69% report high or moderately high trust. In stark contrast, this is just 22% among individuals who feel they lack a voice.” — OECD 2024
Together, the reports suggest that trust comes not from institutional presence alone, but from meaningful participation—where citizens see their input heard, synthesized, and acted on.
Reviving the Social Contract
This brings back into focus the social contract—the implicit agreement between citizens and institutions, grounded in fairness, accountability, and reciprocity.
According to Tim Davies, a social researcher focused on the intersection of technology, data, and democratic governance, the challenge is not just building new tools, but rethinking how governance happens in an era of fragmentation:
“Structured, at-scale and digitally mediated citizen participation can strengthen trust—but this is as much about leadership and design as it is about technology.”
— Tim Davies, May 2025
This is where tools like Remesh, Pol.is, Agora and other deliberative platforms come in—not to replace democratic processes, but to enhance their ability to listen and respond.
Building deliberative infrastructure
Many examples already point to what this could look like in practice:
Better Reykjavik enables citizens to propose and vote on ideas, with follow-up built into city governance.
Make.org has piloted Panoramic AI, a tool that helps citizens navigate complex debates by linking political speeches, legal documents, and policy materials. It was tested during the 2023 State of the European Union address to increase public engagement with EU policymaking.
In Pakistan, a chatbot that explains the constitution in plain language has helped demystify legal rights and improve civic literacy, according to the OECD’s 2025 report on emerging technologies.
The Council on Tech and Social Cohesion’s Blueprint for Pro-Social Tech Design Governance authored by Dr. Lisa Schirch emphasises how designing for participation can restore trust in institutions, noting the power of deliberative tech to “reduce grievance escalation, foster shared understanding, and increase social cohesion.”
But how to achieve the scale of participation we need in time to curtail the decline the risks of further citizen detachment and alienation?
Tools that enable listening at scale, bridge perspectives, and build common ground are now essential—not as “nice to haves,” but as governance infrastructure.
“We need to think about the whole system, build interoperable tools, and invest in ways that bring everything together into composable parts: a democracy tech stack,” wrote Dr. Schirch, former Taiwan Digital Minister Audrey Tang and five others in ‘Advancing Democracy as a Digital Public Service.’
This week’s Coalitions for Reform gathering in Washington, D.C., hosted by the World Bank, will take up exactly these questions. The meeting will explore how collective action and emerging technologies can drive governance reforms, strengthen the social contract, and rebuild institutional trust.
The Global Dialogues make it clear: people are not apathetic. They’re looking for places where they can be heard—and where what they say matters.
The task now is to design technologies and processes capable of earning that trust back.
Lena Slachmuijlder is Senior Advisor, Digital Peacebuilding at Search for Common Ground and Co-Chairs the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion.