The Deadly Mistake of Confusing "Trust" and "Trustworthiness"
The Deadly Mistake of Confusing "Trust" and "Trustworthiness"
1,000 marbles in the Jar of Trust doesn't make the jar any stronger. Part 3 of an article series about trust in the workplace, in our personal lives, and in general.
In part 2 of this article series, we wrote about how trust and mistrust can be used, and often is used, like a mental light switch:
Some people are reductionist in their thinking, first lumping others into the “stranger” category, then mentally bifurcating them into “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy.” This mode of thinking is energy-efficient for our brains and tends to work for day-to-day situations. If you can convince yourself that someone is 100% trustworthy, you’ll feel comfort, cognitive ease, and camaraderie when you’re with that person (we’ll call these the “3 Cs” throughout this article series). This mode of thinking promotes creativity, psychological safety, and quality-of-life for families, teams, and organizations.
Reductionist thinking is useful. It increases morale, boosts creativity (more on that later), and it’s a fast-and-frugal mental framework that works 95% of the time. But for the remaining 5%:
[…] on the timescale of years and decades, reductionist thinking causes many problems. Implicit trust in another person or organization makes us vulnerable to the problem of induction (Thanksgiving turkey problem). Conversely, labeling someone as “untrustworthy” taints everything they say and do (Halo and Horn Effect). Our prejudice against that person, justified or not, may lead us to discard the value that they do provide; we risk conflating “untrustworthiness” with “worthlessness”. We might unfairly ostracize someone who has learned valuable lessons from a one-time mistake. Wouldn’t it be ironic to penalize someone who is less likely to repeat a mistake, while embracing an untarnished soul who is more likely to innocently commit that mistake in the future?1
Let’s try to think of trust as a spectrum, not a light switch.
The Marble Jar: A Mental Account of Trust
Imagine that a re-organization shuffles a new person into your team. He introduces himself as Kevin. Upon introduction, several things happen inside your head:
The lookout gremlin observes Kevin’s facial expression and posture, determines that he’s not an immediate threat, and sounds the all-clear.
The rolodex gremlin, being absent-minded and forgetful, struggles to commit Kevin’s name to memory.
The trust gremlin, swathed in the garb and mannerisms of a bank teller, opens up a new trust account2 in Kevin’s name by putting his name tag on a glass jar.
The trust gremlin will then deposit or withdraw marbles from Kevin’s jar depending on your interactions with him. When Kevin says he’ll circle back before 5pm, and you later receive an email from him with the promised information at 4:22pm, the trust gremlin adds a marble. But when Kevin sets up a meeting with you and doesn’t show up, the trust gremlin removes a marble from his jar. Later, when the team goes out to happy hour, Kevin apologizes and the two of you chat for an entire hour about a shared interest (+4 marbles). The next day, at a meeting with an important client, Kevin saunters in late and disheveled (-3 marbles).
Building Trust = Marble Deposits
The trust gremlin keeps a “bank account” (trust jar) for each person you know. As you build trust with someone, the gremlin adds marbles to that person’s jar. This generally happens when you have a positive interaction with someone, when they demonstrate their consistency and reliability, or when they act selflessly. The number of marbles added is generally proportional to the magnitude of the action:
Positive Interactions: A friendly greeting might earn one marble. A handwritten card acknowledging your birthday might result in a five-marble deposit.
Consistency and Reliability: Someone showing up on time might earn one marble. Someone completing a months-long, complex project on time and within budget will prompt the trust gremlin to drop several handfuls of marbles into their jar.
Selfless Acts: Someone who helps an old lady across the street might earn a couple of marbles. Someone who risks their life to rescue children from a burning orphanage would earn a massive marble deposit for their heroism.
Everyone’s trust gremlin is different. For example, a naïve gremlin will hand out marbles like candy for the smallest acts of kindness. A wary gremlin, slow to trust, would add fewer marbles for the same acts.
Losing Trust = Marble Withdrawals
Losing trust works exactly like gaining trust in reverse. It happens in response to negative interactions, unreliability, and selfish behavior. Some examples that would cause the gremlin to withdraw marbles from someone’s trust jar:
Interrupting you during a meeting
Missing an important deadline
Blaming someone else for their problems
Here, too, everyone’s trust gremlin is different. An easily offended gremlin will scoop out many marbles for minor slights, both real and imagined. A forgiving gremlin, willing to give the benefit of a doubt, withdraws fewer marbles, etc.
The Marble Jar is Fragile
There’s a reason we picked a glass jar for our analogy: it’s prone to breakage. When someone commits an atrocious act that goes beyond withdrawing marbles, the gremlin grabs the Gavel of Broken Trust and smashes the offender’s trust jar to bits.
Imagine you discover that the person who rescued all those kids from the burning orphanage had intentionally started the fire so they could play hero! The trust gremlin responds by smiting the arsonist’s jar with the Gavel of Broken Trust like Thor swinging the lightning-infused Mjölnir. The shattered jar unleashes a thunderous torrent of marbles as your trust in the false hero hemorrhages away.
A jar broken by the Gavel of Broken Trust cannot hold marbles. The person’s trust account is closed, and can no longer accept deposits until you choose forgiveness. The trust gremlin may repair broken jars, but forgiveness takes time. It involves collecting, reorienting, and reattaching all the fragments, preferably using the contrition of the offender as the glue.
Once again, everyone’s trust gremlin is different. A paranoid gremlin requires a lower threshold of offense before reaching for the Gavel of Broken Trust. An unforgiving gremlin might refuse to repair a shattered jar, even in cases where someone was falsely accused and exonerated.
The Marble Jar’s Applicability to Real Life Trust
The more marbles in someone’s jar, the more you’ll feel the 3 Cs – comfort, cognitive ease, and camaraderie – with that person. This is particularly important in white-collar workplaces, because it’s impossible to think deeply and creatively when someone is in fight-or-flight mode. Anyone who supervises knowledge workers (whose value is primarily in their brains rather than their hands) would benefit from cultivating the 3 Cs in their team; this means keeping everyone’s trust jars as full as possible.
The fragility of the marble jar is a metaphor for the fragility of trust itself. By extension, anything built on trust – relationships, reputations, the 3 Cs – are equally fragile. Think of the 20-year marriages that imploded because one partner had a 20-minute fling during a moment of weakness. Or a slip-up that sends a promising leader on a one-way trip to the Career Swamp. Or a callous message that creates a chilling effect, like inflicting frostbite on the team’s morale.
The fragile marble jar is closely related to the problem of induction (Thanksgiving turkey problem):
Anyone can betray your trust, at any time, for any reason.
This flies in the face of intuition. We tend to look at fuller jars and assume those jars are less likely to break, thereby conflating “more trust in this person” with “this person is more trustworthy.” The sad truth is that an empty jar can be broken just as easily as a full jar of marbles. Worse still: the fuller the jar, the more likely we are to forget that all jars are equally fragile.
Finally, even though this article focused mostly on your point of view, trust is a two-way street. Little trust gremlins live inside other people’s heads, and those gremlins are constantly depositing/withdrawing marbles based on your actions. If we extend the previous point, we can conclude that:
You can betray anyone, at any time, for any reason.
If you felt resistance when you read that, you’re not alone. We also have a high opinion of ourselves, and we honestly feel like we’re not the backstabby type. But then we remember that malicious intent is not a requirement to betray someone’s trust. We remind each other of all the times we thought we were behaving like good people should, only to find ourselves lost in the Desert of Good Intentions. And having acknowledged both the fragility of trust and our own fallibility, we’re no longer certain that we’re incapable of betrayal.
Are you?
Trust Jar Accounting and Social Currency
The single-jar metaphor is mostly philosophical. In the next article in this series, we’ll build on the concept by adding a second jar for mistrust. The two-jar system is more complex, but it’s also more useful for decision-making and preventing Thanksgiving turkey problems. We’re still working on returning to a regular posting schedule, so please subscribe to have it delivered to your inbox as soon as we publish!
Side note: in other articles, we present abstract leadership concepts as physical locations – the features of Leadership Land. That practice continues here by distilling the intangible concept of trust into physical marbles. We did this to subsume trust under the broader category of social currency, which is part of the mental framework we hinted at in the bottom of an earlier article. Once we start writing about that framework, we’ll return here.
It frustrates us to see this behavior in organizations. Denying a promotion to a promising candidate because of a one-time mistake is an insult to the lessons learned from that mistake. However, the candidate must be capable of learning from mistakes and must remain vigilant to prevent relapses. If that person repeats the mistake, it becomes a pattern – one that justifies spurning the candidate. Perhaps the best candidate is someone who only makes a mistake once and demonstrates a lengthy track record of preventing recurrences afterwards, with two caveats:
Even good decisions can turn out badly. Someone repeatedly making the same “mistake” might be making high-quality decisions while suffering from a string of bad luck.
The egregiousness of the one-time mistake might justify instant dismissal. For example, first-degree murder is difficult to classify as a “one-time mistake.”
For this article, we’re using “trust account” as a metaphor for a bank account where you can deposit/withdraw social currency. We’re not talking about the legal concept of a trust, where one party (custodian) receives assets from someone else (grantor), then holds the assets in trust for the benefit of a third party (beneficiary).