HEC Lab: Social Cohesion & Trust
Ambition
As our societies and organizations face rising fragmentation, loneliness, and distrust, the Social Cohesion & Trust Lab aims to place trust back at the heart of human dynamics.
It stems from a strong conviction: strengthening the bonds that unite individuals, teams, and communities is essential to achieving social justice as well as economic and social performance.
HEC Paris sees the world as a genuine living laboratory: a space where bold ideas, cutting-edge research, and real-world experimentation combine to imagine new solutions.
The school’s uniqueness lies in this rare alchemy: academic excellence, pedagogical innovation, and direct engagement with companies and society. Together, these pillars guide us in understanding real constraints and responding to the most pressing challenges.
HEC is launching the Social Cohesion & Trust Lab to unlock the full economic, organizational, and societal potential of trust and social cohesion.
Researchers will study the conditions that strengthen trust and cooperation within organizations and society, making them more equitable, more efficient, and more resilient.
Through rigorous research and large-scale, field-tested experiments, the Lab develops concrete levers to build a society of trust—one in which collective well-being becomes a true driver of sustainable and shared growth.
In this perspective, professors—coming from economics, sociology, management, AI, and decision sciences—explore trust and social cohesion in a new light.
Leveraging artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs), fine-grained behavioral measurement, and large-scale experimentation, they reveal and quantify the often-invisible value generated by trust and uncover the economic and human costs of a climate of distrust. Their work also shows how trust enhances the resilience of companies and societies in times of crisis, making it a decisive resource in an increasingly fragmented world.
But the Lab does more than understand: it transforms. It designs, tests, and deploys interventions that strengthen trust, participation at work, and social bonds. In collaboration with leading organizations, the Lab’s members also propose:
- new managerial practices that reinforce all dimensions of trust—trust in vision, in strategy, in managers, within teams, and in oneself—so as to foster engagement, accountability, and innovation;
- volunteer models that give deeper meaning to work and enhance companies’ social impact;
- strategies that broaden access to goods and services so that the value created truly benefits all stakeholders.
At the same time, the Lab is committed to training all students in degree-granting programs (Pre-Experience, MBA, Executive MBA) in essential skills—communication, cooperation, and the ability to create connection—needed to foster cohesion in companies and society.
To guide decision-makers toward action, the Lab will publish an Annual Barometer of Social Cohe-sion and Trust, a rigorous tool to assess, anticipate, and steer these essential dimensions within private and public organizations.
In addition, a digital observatory powered by AI will analyze real-time signals from social networks (such as Glassdoor) to identify risks, opportunities, and levers of trust in companies and society.
The Lab brings together 30 HEC Paris professors from diverse disciplines—economics and decision sciences, strategy, accounting, operations research, human resources and management, and finance—recognized as leaders in their fields on the social impact of organizations.
Because many of its projects rely on field measurements and experimentation, the Lab also draws on a team of Fellows who serve as a bridge between HEC professors and partner organizations.
The creation of this Lab is the natural continuation of several initiatives launched over the years:
- In 2010, HEC Paris co-founded the Action Tank Entreprise & Pauvreté and has since built a long track record of landmark scientific research and high-impact projects conducted jointly with the Action Tank.
- The Sustainability & Organizations Institute (S&O), which hosts this new Lab, has launched several experimental initiatives to identify the most effective strategies enabling organizations to build, maintain, and leverage trust and social cohesion:
- S&O collaborates with Schneider Electric to develop innovative approaches that strengthen employee engagement in volunteering, making sustainability challenges more tangible and actionable;
- S&O collaborates with the French Red Cross to imagine new ways to boost volunteer engagement, particularly during climate-related or social emergencies;
- S&O leads a research program within the major HOPES project dedicated to social entrepreneurship, thanks to essential support from the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller;
- S&O has secured public funding to study and assess the effectiveness of new work arrangements that enable employees to achieve a “work–work” balance, for instance by combining manual or craft activities with their tertiary-sector roles.
