6 Trust-Building Habits Emotionally Intelligent People Master
From micro-communication to emotional attunement, these habits explain why some people make relationships feel effortlessly safe.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | December 2, 2025
Psychologists define trust differently from the layperson, who may attribute it to intuition or happenstance. But as researchers see it, trust is often the outcome of select cognitive and emotional processes that unfold in predictable ways. And highly emotionally intelligent people tend to approach those processes very differently than everyone else.
Research suggests that emotionally intelligent individuals don't just form trust more effectively. They also manage and maintain it differently, invest in it more strategically and repair it more skillfully when it breaks. In other words, they build trust with deliberate and consistent intention, not just intuition.
What It Means To Be Emotionally Intelligent
One of the core components of emotional intelligence is the ability to accurately perceive emotions, both your own and other people's. And this matters because the primary foundations of trust are built on interpretation. If you misread someone's tone, intentions, motivations or discomfort, you will inevitably misjudge the degree to which you can trust them.
A 2023 study published in Frontiers in Psychology highlights that people with higher emotional intelligence are more accurate at identifying emotional cues within interpersonal exchanges. Similarly, the more accurately they perceives another's emotions, the more likely they are to accurately predict their behavior and anticipate their needs. These accurate predictions can eventually lead to stronger trust-building from both ends.
In other words, emotionally intelligent people are less likely to trust impulsively. But they're also less likely to distrust prematurely.
This is the primary reason their relationships, both personal and professional, tend to be more stable. The question that arises, then, is how are they able to make such accurate perceptions? The answer isn't that they have a natural or special talent for it. In fact, there are several habits and practices that they engage in regularly that cumulatively translate into this intelligence — here are six of them.
1. Emotionally Intelligent People Separate Emotion From Impulse
Trust-building often goes wrong when emotional reactions overpower rational assessments. If someone annoys you, challenges you, disappoints you or if they simply trigger an old insecurity of yours, the likelihood of your emotional reflex overriding the bigger picture of the situation increases substantially.
Emotionally intelligent individuals have stronger emotion regulation abilities, which helps protect trust from unnecessary damage. Research published in Psychological Science suggests that emotion regulation (particularly the skill of reappraisal) is linked to better interpersonal outcomes and greater relationship stability.
This doesn't mean emotionally intelligent people suppress their feelings or put them aside to deal with them another day. It simply means they pause long enough to make sure that their reaction to an emotionally triggering situation is justified and that they aren't projecting a misplaced emotion on it. That pause is often the difference between maintaining trust and unintentionally weakening it.
2. Emotionally Intelligent People Communicate With Clarity
Another hallmark of emotional intelligence is the ability to express needs and boundaries clearly. In trust formation, clarity is a non-negotiable. Misunderstandings are one of the most common sources of relational fractures, especially in workplace settings.
Emotionally intelligent people reduce this margin for misunderstanding. They are explicit about their expectations, transparent about their intentions and forthcoming about the limitations of their relational skills. Research on interpersonal communication consistently finds that clarity strengthens relational trust and reduces perceived interpersonal threat.
A March 2025 study published in Nature Communications illustrates this. The research sought to find a solution for the decreasing levels of trust between community members and police officers. It was found that, after 500 hours of naturalistic observation, when community officers questioned people without clarifying their intention, their trust naturally decreased.
However, when they prefaced routine questioning with a brief clarifying statement like, "I'm walking around trying to get to know the community," they felt less threatened and reported greater levels of trust.
Evidently, when people understand where someone stands, they don't waste cognitive energy guessing. And that psychological safety accelerates trust, whether the relationship is personal or communal.
3. Emotionally Intelligent People Don't Equate Warmth With Trustworthiness
Emotionally intelligent people tend to take a balanced view of human nature. They're not cynics, but they're not idealists either. Renowned research by Mayer, Davis and Schoorman — whose trust model is one of the most cited in psychology — breaks trust into three dimensions: ability, integrity and benevolence.
People high in emotional intelligence naturally evaluate trustworthiness in a person by looking for evidence-based answers for the following questions:
- Are they capable of doing what they are saying?
- Do they say what they mean and do what they say?
- Do they have good intentions toward me or the concerned group?
This means that an emotionally intelligent person is far less likely to assume someone is trustworthy simply because they are friendly, familiar or charismatic.
Emotionally intelligent individuals distinguish between warmth and trustworthiness; these are two traits that often get conflated or entangled because of psychological biases like the halo effect. Being mindful of this distinction protects them from betrayal and disappointment while allowing them to form deeper, more sustainable trust.
4. Emotionally Intelligent People Repair Trust Instead of Abandoning It
Many people treat trust as a fragile binary: it's either there, or not. And once it's broken, they lose all hope of resuscitating it. But emotionally intelligent individuals approach trust breaches with a different framework. They understand that trust is a dynamic system that's capable of weakening, strengthening and recalibrating over time.
Research on trust repair shows that three factors help rebuild trust, in this order:
- Acknowledgment of harm
- Explanation
- Consistent corrective action
Emotionally intelligent people consistently work at and excel in all three areas. That is, they apologize without defending themselves first, they explain without shifting blame and they adjust their behavior without being prompted repeatedly.
This is one of the reasons emotionally intelligent individuals tend to lead healthier teams and relationships. They treat trust rupture as a problem they can solve with sincere and consistent action, rather than as a permanent demerit on their character and reputation.
5. Emotionally Intelligent People Know When Trust Is No Longer Healthy
Another subtle skill emotionally intelligent people have is recognizing when trust has become redundant in a relationship. Sometimes, certain relationships demand self-sacrifice in the name of loyalty, or enablement in the name of forgiveness or encouragement.
Emotionally intelligent individuals tend to monitor their relationships with an eye toward psychological reciprocity, or the balance of energy, respect and reliability. When that balance is disturbed and the relationship tips too far in either direction, they immediately begin reassessing.
Research shows that people with higher emotional intelligence are better at identifying relational asymmetry and are more willing to set boundaries or create distance when needed. This ability prevents long-term burnout and preserves emotional resources for relationships where trust can thrive.
6. Emotionally Intelligent People Are Selective About Whom They Trust
Emotional intelligence doesn't make people universally trusting. In fact, it has the opposite effect. People with high emotional intelligence tend to be more discerning about whom they allow into their inner circle.
This selectivity is supported by research showing that people with strong interpersonal skills are better at recognizing patterns of behavior over time. They pay attention to consistency, not just charisma or convenience.
As a result, they often avoid high-conflict personalities, emotionally volatile people and individuals whose actions do not align with their words. This selective investment protects their emotional bandwidth and creates higher-quality relationships overall.
Trust grows where it is nurtured. Emotionally intelligent people know this, so they choose their environments intentionally.
Are you an emotionally intelligent person? Take this science-backed scale to know your EQ score: Emotional Quotient Inventory
A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes.com, here.