Episode 18: Who Do You Trust? Part I: Interpersonal Trust

Over the next three episodes (she only meant to do two episodes on the topic but it turned out she needed three!), April explains the connection between trust and critical thinking. In Part I, she discusses the importance of interpersonal trust, why it's so necessary, what can go wrong when we trust, and ways to avoid putting our trust in the wrong people. And she uses both "who do you trust (because it just seems right)" and "whom do you trust (because it's probably grammatically correct)" in the episode. Hey, she's not an English teacher, okay?

Episode 18 Show Notes

Dr. Paul Thagard's definition of trust:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hot-thought/201810/what-is-trust

An explanation of semantic pointers:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332837961_The_Semantic_Pointer_Theory_of_Emotion_Integrating_Physiology_Appraisal_and_Construction

I'm going to guess that about 80% of the posts here are legit (so take what you read with a grain of salt). Anyway, if even half of them are true, it's still a tragedy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/

Just a few of Bernie Madoff's more famous victims:
https://www.biography.com/news/bernie-madoff-famous-victims

Research that shows we trust people who think like we do, and distrust those who don't:
https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-mere-liking-effect-why-you-trust-people-who-are-like-you

We also think the people who look like us are more trustworthy:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131107094406.htm#:~:text=When%20a%20person%20is%20deemed,according%20to%20a%20new%20study.&text=FULL%20STORY-,When%20a%20person%20is%20deemed%20trustworthy%2C%20we%20perceive%20that%20person's,study%20published%20in%20Psychological%20Science

Marsh and Brigg's research on trust and forgiveness:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-84800-356-9_2

Author, consultant, and business founder Charles Green gives some advice about determining whom to trust:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/trustedadvisor/2012/01/03/how-can-you-know-whom-to-trust/?sh=1decb7ca141e

Psychologist Melanie Greenburg also has some good advice about trusting people:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mindful-self-express/201411/5-ways-decide-who-you-can-trust

Transcript

Episode 18: Who do you trust? Part I—Interpersonal Trust 

Hi everyone. Over the next two episodes I’m going to discuss a topic that has major implications for almost every decision we make throughout our lives. That topic is trust. What is the connection between trust and critical thinking? Well, we don’t necessarily come to conclusions and make decisions based solely on our own thoughts, opinions, and ideals. We take into consideration what people around us are saying, what we hear and see out in the world, and throw that into the mix of what’s already going on in our head to make determinations about what is right and what we should do. Our level of trust in the people around us, along with how much we trust particular institutions, has a lot to do with how much trust we put in what they are telling us. Today our focus is on trust in the people with whom we interact regularly; in the next episode I’ll expand that to discuss trust in institutions, like academia, government and the media. So, let’s get to it, shall we?

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What exactly is trust? Merriam Webster says it is the “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” When you trust someone, you are confident that what they tell you is true, that you can count on them, that when they say they will do something, they will deliver on that promise. Philosopher Paul Thagard says that trust is a central part of all human relationships. He’s right. I mean, think about the bond between a newborn baby and their caregiver. Babies are absolutely dependent on others for quite a long time, but they learn fairly quickly that when they cry another human being will come and take care of them. They put their trust in that other human, and that is the beginning of bonding and love. Dr Thagard proposes that “trust is a brain process that binds our representations of self, others, situations, and emotions into a special pattern of neural firing called a semantic pointer.” According to this theory, which I’ll link to in the show notes, semantic pointers make our higher-level cognitive functions (such as organizing, evaluating, and adapting) possible. Trust, then, is a critical neural pattern; he puts it in the same category as an emotion like love, although others might disagree and refer to it more as an attitude, like optimism (which I discussed in episode 17). Trust is still a bit of a mystery to scholars, but they all agree that it is central to our ability to form bonds like friendship and love. From a larger perspective, without trust, societies would never have been able to form. And once trust is established it needs to be maintained; when mistrust enters the picture, if it’s about something that is critical to the continuation of a relationship or to the effective management of an entity, it can lead to the destruction of friendships, marriages and even countries. 

But since this episode focuses on interpersonal trust, let’s step back from that bigger picture for a moment. When I ask my interpersonal communication students if there is someone they would trust no matter what, the majority of them say they would trust a parent, usually their mom. That’s not surprising considering that their mother is probably the first person they bonded with, and that trust can remain in place for an entire lifetime. I always wonder, though, whether they actually WOULD trust everything and anything their mother says and does. For example, what if their heretofore level-headed mom suddenly spouted off about some crazy conspiracy theory that this person was certain had no basis in fact? Would they immediately change their mind and believe her, simply because their mother said so, and she’s never steered them wrong before? Some of them might; others might argue and try to convince their parent, or agree to disagree, but how would that affect their overall level of trust in their parent? Well, what it may do is show them that although their mother is generally trustworthy in most respects, they may not be able to trust that she can distinguish between what is real and what isn’t, at least in this particular situation. And if this erroneous belief the mom has isn’t critical to the effective functioning of the relationship, it probably won’t do much to shake the student’s general trust level in their mom. On the other hand, if the person starts to see that the mother seems to have put HER trust in some other person or entity that is now giving her erroneous information, and that trust has caused her to believe and do things that she previously wouldn’t have, that is definitely cause for concern and the person may sadly decide that they need to lower the overall level of trust they have in their mother. You want to read some tragic examples of this, head on over to the qanon casualties board on reddit. While I’m fairly sure not all of the stories there are genuine, the majority are. It’s pretty sad to see the price that families pay when one of its members puts their trust in something that leads them straight down the rabbit hole.

Now you might think that would never happen to you because you know who to trust, but lots of people have discovered that their trust in someone was misplaced. Take the victims of the recently deceased Bernie Madoff. For most of his life he seemed to be the epitome of a trustworthy financial genius. The owner of Madoff Investment Securities, he actually served as the chairman of NASDAQ for three years. Many people, from Hollywood movie stars and moguls to other businessmen to just regular people who were looking for a good retirement income, trusted Bernie specifically with their money because his company consistently paid out very good annual returns, and at one point his firm handled 5% of all the trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange. That all changed one day in December of 2008 when his sons uncovered the fact that Madoff’s business was actually a giant Ponzi scheme. They turned him in to the authorities, who determined that he had lost somewhere between 50 and 80 billion dollars of his investor’s money. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to 150 years in prison, where he died in April of 2021. Many people were financially ruined by Madoff, and they couldn’t believe that such a seemingly great guy was in fact a horrible guy who did not deserve their trust.

The people who lost money due to Madoff may have trusted him because he seemed to be just like them. Researchers at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw discovered that feelings of similarity towards another person can lead to trusting that person. In one of their studies they had subjects give their impressions of people after reading descriptions of their political and social viewpoints. They asked them how much they liked each of them, and found that the more similar the person’s views, the more the test subjects said they liked them. Then the researchers would ask the test subjects things like “If this person found a wallet filled with documents and money, how likely would they be to try to find the owner, or would they just keep it?” The results were very clear—the subjects judged people trustworthy if they were similar to them; the more similar, the more trustworthy they were deemed to be. The researchers termed this “the mere liking effect.” Other studies have shown that we also trust people who resemble us physically more than those who don’t. So the more we see that someone is similar to us, the more we like and trust them. One of the major groups that Madoff preyed upon were Orthodox Jews, and he was a member of that community. He also swindled other businessmen like him, and those businesspeople introduced him to their friends, who also gave him their money.  We would like to think we make moral judgments about the trustworthiness of another person objectively, but it’s obvious that we really don’t. And an unscrupulous person, like Bernie Madoff, can use this to their advantage.

According to researchers Stephen Marsh and Pamela Briggs, who study things like trust and forgiveness:

·      trust inherently comes with the risk of betrayal—when it comes to our interactions with people, if we could be totally certain of them, we wouldn’t need to trust them

·      To quote Marsh and Briggs: “Trust gives us little more than a soft relationship with another entity. If that entity values the relationship, understands the meaning and culture of trust, and is trustworthy, we’re likely ok to trust. If any of those pre-requisites fail, we might well be in trouble.” When they put it that way, it sounds like very few people could actually be worthy of our trust. 

So is it foolish to trust? Many people with trust issues might think so. But frankly, as I said before, we NEED to be able to trust each other. Not everybody, and not all the time. Maybe we should think of trust as a continuum—you might have different levels of trust with the same person for different aspects of the relationship. You might trust your friend to be there to pick you up after work like he said he would, but you might NOT trust him to keep a secret you thought about telling him last week and decided against it because you know he can’t keep his mouth shut. Especially after he’s had a few drinks. And I’ll bet we all know someone like that.

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Ok, so let’s get to the part where I give you some good advice about who to trust. Except that I can’t really tell you for sure, there’s always going to be the possibility that your trust in someone might lead to your being taken advantage of, or lied to, or otherwise treated badly. So what can you do to lessen the possibility of being deceived?

Charles Green, author of “The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook,” says that there are no guarantees, and the only way to never trust the wrong person is to never trust any person. But since you want to be able to trust, he says there are four “virtues” we can look for in people that will give us a clue about their level of trustworthiness:

·      First, their credibility—do you perceive them generally to be truthful? Do they seem to be fairly transparent when they talk? When you ask them a question, do they answer in ways you can understand? I’m not generally a big fan of gut instinct because it’s wrong about half the time, but if your gut says, um wait a minute, you should definitely factor that in.

·      Second, their reliability—does this person have a track record with you that lets you know you can depend on them to do what they say they’ll do? If not, do they have a track record with others that you can verify? So, friends that you already trust, or references you can check? One of Ronald Reagan’s signature phrases when dealing with the Soviets during nuclear arms treaty negotiations was actually an old Russian proverb, “Trust, but verify.” That certainly applies here. 

·      Third, their intimacy—do they listen to you in a way that makes you feel heard? Are they being open with you, and is their interaction two-way?

·      And Forth, their Other-orientation—do they seem to be interested in other people? Or are their conversations mostly about themselves? When you ask questions, do you feel your questions are being heard and answered in a way that makes it obvious they care about what you think?

But over all that, Green says that the magic ingredient of trust is reciprocity. Most humans are wired to respond positively to people who place trust in them. So your willingness to trust someone may actually cause them to be more trustworthy. Could someone just be a really good con man who checks all these boxes but is ultimately untrustworthy? Yes. But depending on the situation, like if you’re hiring someone, it’s a risk you may decide to take.

Psychologist Melanie Greenberg says that we tend to decide far too quickly whom we can trust. When I say quickly, I mean in 3/100ths of a second. I’m fairly certain that a lot of our biases play out in those moments and the conclusion we reach may not be anywhere near accurate. What should we do to avoid this? She says you should use what is called your “wise mind” to integrate your logical thinking and your emotional awareness to determine if someone can be trusted. Cognitive and behavioral therapists define the “wise mind” as “the place where the reasonable mind (where you approach something intellectually) and the emotional mind (in which your feelings are more prominent ) overlap with each other.” So how can we put our “wise mind” to use when determining trustworthiness? Greenberg says that stepping back and taking time to think is far better than just jumping in head first, so don’t be fooled by your first impulse on whether someone can be trusted. Of course, if you feel an “instant connection to someone,” you can and should factor that in, but don’t make that your only evidence of trustworthiness. Look and listen; is this person trying to push themselves on you? Are they moving too fast to try to establish a relationship with you? Can you tell what they are really all about? Again, there’s no guarantee, but at least you’ve done your homework.

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In the end, we NEED to trust to make our relationships as well as our societies work. Will we be deceived, and realize our trust was misplaced? Sometimes the answer is going to be yes. It’s called life. We can recognize that the people we love and care about are mostly trustworthy, and understand that there are some aspects of their character that we maybe don’t trust quite as much. How we handle that obviously depends on what it is, and whether it makes the relationship ineffective or is something we can work with. We also need to realize how much of what we think and do is a result of our trust in what others have told us. The friends and acquaintances of Bernie Madoff talked THEIR friends into investing their money with him because they trusted Bernie, and the friends of his friends did it because they trusted those friends. So trust in a person can have far-reaching implications, and those results could be good, or not so good. It’s up to us to do our best in determining who we should trust, and I hope you use the information I’ve given you in this episode to help you think it through.