Rethinking Trust

Something that’s been on my mind as of late, is the odd misappropriation of trust and expectations that I see as being all too common. Though I am not a psychological expert, I suspect that what I’m noticing may simply be an already well appreciated cognitive bias that sprouts up in people from time to time. While I am aware of our bias to place standards on others based on our standards for ourselves, I think that there is a bit more to the issue I have in mind than that. What I’ve observed time and time again, that I for whatever reason have long been hyper-aware of, is the odd appeals to decency and integrity that we make in relation to systems and organizations of people at large. Due to this observation, I’ve opted to talk a bit about trust, incentives and how we might benefit from analyzing different types of trust or expectations at different levels.

To begin, the first thing worth doing from my perspective is to make a few quick distinctions between different types of trust or expectations (which you could likely use interchangeably in this discussion). First off we have the sort of trust that you might have for a close friend, or family member. This is a sort of trust and set of expectations that probably comes from a long period of frequent interaction and a high degree of familiarity with the people in question. This type of trust is adaptive and likely totally warranted because you each benefit from knowing that you can rely on each other in various scenarios or in moments where either party needs a hand, and not having to wonder about whether so and so can be trusted saves a ton of energy and wellbeing that can applied elsewhere in life. The next sort of trust, recognizing more shades could be made, might be coworker trust, or perhaps neighborly trust. This too is built through repeated interaction that may happen semi-frequently, but you may have a less intimate relationship with people in this category. It still benefits each party to know that when certain events happen, that you could be called upon, or at least be trusted with basic things without incident. This is still the sort of trust that seems to be a totally understandable and good allocation of trust, though it is distinct from the first category. There are certain things you would not ask and in turn expect not to be asked, of people in this category that may be totally normal in a more intimate relationship. Consciously or otherwise, we logically shift our expectations based on our level of familiarity and perceived level of obligation on both sides of a relationship. For instance, we have an expectation that if we order a hamburger at a restaurant we will receive it even if the system that provides it is filled with strangers. This is a kind of faith that comes from obligation and not familiarity, as it benefits the business to serve your food efficiently and properly because of the profit motive.  Next we have the sort of trust or expectations that we apply at a more zoomed out level, the sort that we may apply to groups or organizations. Zooming out to include people at the level of neighborhoods, states, countries, or the totality of the human race completely changes the standards that it makes sense to have, and the sort of analysis it makes sense to do. While the incentives are such with a fiduciary to help you with your financial issues in a way that is more to your benefit, a broker has no such obligation, which should logically change our set of expectations. Similarly, a kind of focus on incentives and obligation is needed when familiarity is absent at every level of “trust tuning”.

The next logical question is, why did I take the time to make these distinctions that we are all probably aware of to varying degrees? The point was not to be redundant about things we get the gist of, but to get us out of gists and into details for a moment. Applying as we often do, the neighborly trust standard to groups of increasing size and complexity makes no sense. We can probably all empathize with the appeal to decency or integrity arguments, but to make such statements with the level of incentives or familiarity and obligation stats that organizations often have in relation to consumers, with a framework we use on individuals or families that live next door to us, is a bad appropriation of trust and expectations. Just as it makes more and more sense to look at statistics and data as we zoom out rather than anecdotes, it makes sense to base our expectations off of a rigorous and useful understanding of human nature, economics, incentives and so on when looking at behavior at more and more up-scaled levels. In other words, we will be met not just with disappointment in mismatching trust and sets of expectations to the wrong categories, but also with models of understanding the world that lack the explanatory and predictive capability that we may hope them to have.

As usual I suspect there is much more to say about this topic, and I’m sure I could find another ten nuances to dig into, but I’ll leave it here for today. As always I hope you found this useful in some way and in particular I hope this aids you in retaking some your well-being and energy from addressing potential misappropriations of expectations or trust in your own life. Be well.

Orion Aeneas Webster,

FourthEyeBlog author