Empirical debates about a “crisis of trust” highlight long-lived pockets of high trust and deep distrust in institutions, as well as abrupt, shock-induced shifts between the two. We propose a probabilistic model in which such phenomena emerge endogenously from social learning on hierarchical
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Empirical debates about a “crisis of trust” highlight long-lived pockets of high trust and deep distrust in institutions, as well as abrupt, shock-induced shifts between the two. We propose a probabilistic model in which such phenomena emerge endogenously from social learning on hierarchical networks. Starting from a discrete model on a directed acyclic graph, where each agent makes a binary adoption decision about a single assertion, we derive an effective influence kernel that maps individual priors to stationary adoption probabilities. A continuum limit along hierarchical depth yields a degenerate, non-conservative logistic–diffusion equation for the adoption probability
, in which diffusion is modulated by
and increases the integral of
u rather than preserving it. To account for micro-level uncertainty, we perturb these dynamics by multiplicative Stratonovich noise with amplitude proportional to
, strongest in internally polarised layers and vanishing at consensus. At the level of a single depth layer, Stratonovich–Itô conversion and Fokker–Planck analysis show that the noise induces an effective double-well potential with two robust stochastic phases,
and
, corresponding to persistent distrust and trust. Coupled along depth, this local bistability and degenerate diffusion generate extended domains of trust and distrust separated by fronts, as well as rare, Kramers-type transitions between them. We also formulate the associated stochastic partial differential equation in Martin–Siggia–Rose–Janssen–De Dominicis form, providing a field-theoretic basis for future large-deviation and data-informed analyses of trust landscapes in hierarchical societies.
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