Was wiseness a strategy for everyone? Would people with less enfranchised identities, those occupying lesser roles in the Wilkerson play, be comfortable using it?

For these people— women, minorities, gays, white men in diversity workshops, low-income earners— hearing that they should offer “trust” in diverse settings could trigger more “remembering” than “forgetting.” And there waiting for them is a compelling argument: “How can I trust people from groups that have done bad things to my group, people who benefit from advantages won by those bad things, people who often justify those advantages with dehumanizing stereotypes of my group, people who often see my group’s progress not as a good thing, or as justice-restoring, but as a zero-sum loss? Wouldn’t being ‘wise’ just make me more vulnerable to them— women to men, Blacks to whites, gays to straights?” And their churn wouldn’t stop there. It would also ask: “Why does responsibility for building trust in these settings fall to me? Shouldn’t it be first the responsibility of the more empowered?

As a general rule, for diverse settings to be wise, it’s best for the more empowered to move first— the teacher before the students, the manager before the employees, the doctor before the patient, the parents before the children, the minister before the parishioners, the white students before the small number of minorities in a classroom, the coach before the athletes, the CEO before the rank file, the Black professor of African American history before the minority of whites in the class, the board before the organization’s administration, and so on. This isn’t to leave the less empowered off the hook. At some point, they, too must be wise— able to see full humanity in difference and put their trust in a setting. The point here—considering the identity power dynamics in a setting— is about who goes first in making wiseness a normative standard. The answer is clear: the more empowered. Most often that means the leadership.

Power and status differences then, can frustrate trust building in a setting. And wiseness can counter that frustration. But for that to happen, it’s best that wiseness come first from the top. It’s too much to expect the vulnerable to risk further vulnerability by trusting first. (Though this can happen, as we shall shortly see.) Once leadership offers trust, like the wise feedback-giver in the Cohen experiment, it becomes a path the vulnerable can follow. So, the advice offered here is that in diverse settings— be it an interaction between a doctor and her patient, a lawyer and her client, a teacher as his students, an institution and its constituents, a business and its customers— the more empowered identity should lead with trust.

Leaving out trust instigated by the less empowered would miss how behaving out of trust— with faith in other people’s capacity for fairness— can be its own source of power, even when, or especially when, it comes from people lower in the social order.

Second, these efforts should involve the participation of as many people as possible. When people feel they haven’t been heard they tend not to trust. But when their input is a regular, normalized part of how a setting functions, they’re better able to trust it even when they disagree.