A system and method are provided to establish trust between a user and a policy system that generates recommended actions in accordance with specified policies. Trust is introduced into the policy-based system by assigning a value to each execution of each policy with respect to the policy-based system, called the instantaneous trust index. The instantaneous trust indices for each one of the policies, for the each execution of a given policy or for both are combined into the overall trust index for a given policy or for a given policy-based system. The recommended actions are processed in accordance with the level or trust associated with a given policy as expressed by the trust indices. Manual user input is provided to monitor or change the recommended actions. In addition, reinforcement learning algorithms are used to further enhance the level of trust between the user and the policy-based system.