Deconstructing trust in our society.
Trust. Such an intangible thing, yet we all know how trust (or its opposite distrust) feels.
Feels… because trust is fundamentally a feeling or belief we hold about another party (1). A feeling, for if we had certainty or knowledge, trust would be unnecessary.
Trust, or its absence, has weighed heavily in media and discourse recently. Headlines proclaiming we face a ‘crisis of trust’ either in our politicians, political system, social or economic institutions regularly confront us (2).
For instance, a Google search of ‘crisis of trust’ presented nearly 3 million results ranging across politics, media, science and institutions (not too shabby when contrasted against around 9 million entries for ‘football results’).
The 2008 failure of trusted financial institutions and governments’ responses, the rise of disinformation campaigns andtechno-surveillance of populations are some of the culprits spurring this increased interest in trust.
Trust is considered so critical to human civilisation there is a belief that…
Without the general trust that people have in each other, society itself would disintegrate. (Georg Simmel, 1978)
So what exactly is trust?
Why is it so crucial to our society, and what does the future of trust hold?
Is our social trust system due for an overhaul, as blockchain proponents suggest - shifting from institutions as intermediaries of trust to cryptographic process-based trust?
If so, what could a techno-fuelled revolution of trust look like and can technologies be a force for good or not?
These are just some of the questions circling in my mind as I embark on my path to deconstruct trust and construct possible future scenarios.
This journey takes the form of two articles. The first (this one) unpacks what trust is, why we should care about it and trust drivers. The second will explore possible futures for trust partly inspired by looking backward to read the lessons from history.
What is trust anyway?
Trust is a feeling based on our expectations of how another will behave in the future.5 These expectations can be either explicit (as in an agreement or laws) or implicit (based on social customs, norms, or a track record of behaviour).
The catch is that when we trust, it can go wrong as trust involves being vulnerable to another and thus accepting risk.
We trust on many levels in our society; thus, ‘trust’ is a word fraught with many meanings and uses. To illustrate:
…trust in an attribute of an inanimate object, such as thpe... trust in the individual or corporation that manufactured or supplied that inanimate object; trust in corporate or government entities, such as the security of a savings account in a bank, or the safety and efficacy of medications allowed on the market by the FDA; trust in generic (not individually known) members of my community, such as believing that other drivers will virtually always stop at red lights, allowing me to drive confidently through a green light; and even, interpersonal trust... (Kuipers, 2022)
I will focus here on two broad classes of trust: Personal Trust and Social Trust.
Personal trust
Personal, or interpersonal trust, is the specific or thick trust we have in people we engage with, such as family, friends and colleagues.
Social 'Impersonal' Trust
Social trust is also often called generalised trust or thin trust. It is the degree to which we trust strangers (3) and the broad belief that most people and institutions in a society are trustworthy.
The worth of trust
So what makes trust so crucial to our society?
Well, it all goes back to human evolution, which saw us develop as social creatures. A trait that strengthened in our ancestry due to the survival advantages group cooperation offered our species over the millennia against the elements, the wild and other groups of people.
Cooperation is grounded in trust. In this way trust plays a central role in building ‘social capital’ - a good that facilitates coordination and cooperation across our society.
The scale and complexity of human coordination today have grown exponentially since pre-historic times. Further, humanity's current problems, such as climate change, require large-scale global cooperation and thus trust. Research shows that people who say that "in general, most people can be trusted" are more supportive of international cooperation and more favourable towards international institutions such as the United Nations.
At a societal level, trust is believed to play a role in areas including economic growth and market efficiency, as well as democratic stability and in enabling innovation.
For individuals, high trust is linked with society’s ‘winners’ “as measured in terms of money, status, and high levels of job and life satisfaction, and... happiness.”
Trustworthy
So trust is essential to human society and cooperation. But what determines whether to trust or not to trust?
This is where a weighing up (often subconscious) of factors plays a role in informing our feelings of trustworthiness.
I’ve deconstructed this into five elements (4) below:
Consequences of misplaced trust - inform the extent to which we weigh the object of our trust against the other four balancing factors below.
Character - the honesty and sincerity of the other party.
Capability - the competence and capacity to fulfil the entrusted role.
Consistency - the track record of variability in character and capability.
Commonality - the alignment of objectives, incentives, worldviews or values.
Character, Capability and Consistency collectively form the Reputation of the other party. Whereas, Commonality influences our belief as to whether the other party will act in our best interests.
Where the consequences are low, we may not need to consider the other four factors (E.g. when buying low-value goods online or commodity goods at the supermarket). In choosing a financial adviser, however, we will likely put more effort into assessing their reputation and if our objectives are aligned.
These factors - the Five C's - apply in building Personal Trust within interpersonal relationships and supporting Social Trust at a system level through our social institutions.
I will wrap up this piece here but stay tuned for the follow-up.
The next part will explore the history of trust and, as our communities grew, the solutions humanity developed that embed the Five C's of Trust into the fabric of today's society. From there, we will take the lessons from history combined with current trends, new technologies and a touch of imagination to explore possible alternate futures for trust.
1. Whether this is a human, organisation, nation, or a system such as the market.
3. Whether or not these strangers are part of a group we identify with, such as a culture, religion, community or interest group, or profession.
4. Whilst the construction of this framework is my own, the dimensions are inspired from a broad range of papers on trust.
References:
BARBALET, J. 2019. The Experience of Trust Its Content and Basis. In: SASAKI, M. (ed.) Trust in Contemporary Society. Brill.
MEWES, J., FAIRBROTHER, M., GIORDANO, G. N., WU, C. & WILKES, R. 2021. Experiences matter: A longitudinal study of individual-level sources of declining social trust in the United States. Social Science Research, 95, 102537.
KUIPERS, B. 2022. Trust and Cooperation. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 9.
PUTNAM, R. D. 1995. Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy, 6, 65-78.
DELHEY, J. & NEWTON, K. 2003. Who Trusts? The Origins of Social Trust in Seven Societies. European Societies, 5, 93-137.
FRIEDMAN, T. L. 2007. The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first century, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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