How Do You Build Trust If You Don't Know What "Trust" Means?
How Do You Build Trust If You Don't Know What "Trust" Means?
When was the last time you sat down to think about what "trust" means? Part 2 of an article series about trust in the workplace, in our personal lives, and in general.
Leadership books and training materials frequently cover topics related to “building and maintaining trust,” but have you heard anyone define what “trust” is? Most adults pick up an intuitive understanding of what it is, but we haven’t heard any of our leaders, coaches, or authors try to define it in words. Not once.1
Trust is so important to leadership and management that we will spend several articles exploring its many facets and the dark corners in between. We initiated this article series on Thanksgiving Day 2022 with the story of a Thanksgiving turkey’s misplaced trust in its human “benefactors.” Our second stop is to examine our fundamental beliefs about what “trust” is by first defining what it isn’t.
Defining Trust By What It Is Not
There’s an old, apocryphal story about the Renaissance artist Michelangelo:
The Pope asked Michelangelo about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David. Michelangelo answered: “It’s simple. I remove everything that is not David.”
Instead of defining trust additively, like a painter putting brushstrokes on a blank canvas, let’s define it subtractively, like a sculptor removing extraneous material from a block of marble. This is via negativa (“negative way”) in action.
What is Mistrust?
Let’s describe what trust is not, starting with the words mistrust and distrust. The subtle differences in usage between the two words isn’t relevant to shaping our definition of “trust,” so we’ll lump the two together as mistrust.
We recognize mistrust as a sense of apprehension that arises when we encounter a stranger/rival, or when we sense an ulterior motive. This feeling of discomfort comes in many flavors, going from less → more intense:
Skepticism/incertitude/uncertainty → wariness/doubt/misgiving/suspicion → fear/anxiety
Notably, this feeling of unease is absent when we meet a dear friend for lunch, when we buy a product with a long track record of excellence, and when a puppy flops on our lap to invite belly-scratches. Indeed, the etymology of “trust” hearkens back to the Old Norse traust (“confidence”) and is closely related to the words trøst, troost, and trost (meaning “comfort” in Danish, Dutch, and German, respectively).
How mistrust looks in practice:
A prenuptial agreement, which would be absent if the newlyweds fully trusted each other.
47 pages of fine print in the contract, which would be absent if the two parties to the agreement trusted each other.
Tracking software (i.e. corporate spyware) loaded onto your work laptop, which would be absent if the organization trusted you to work diligently and not steal company equipment.
A jealous partner or helicopter parent tracking the location of a partner’s/child’s phone for reasons other than safety/phone theft.
This partially explains why trust is so hard to define. A feeling of discomfort (mistrust) is easier to detect than the feeling of comfort (trust). This asymmetry arises because being comfortable is closer to feeling nothing at all than being uncomfortable. Likewise, the presence of behaviors, demonstrating mistrust, is more obvious than the absence of those same behaviors, implying trust…or naïvety. Speaking of which, that’s a great segue into our next trainwreck of thought…
How are Trust and Naïvety Related?
An experienced and a naïve person may behave the same way when they trust someone, but for completely different reasons. The experienced person may have detected an absence of red flags, or has mentally weighed the risks vs. rewards, and decided to take a leap of faith anyway. A naïve person is simply unaware of red flags and risks.
Can You Trust or Mistrust Something That Lacks Free Will?
The concept of trusting/mistrusting another human being (or an organization comprising human beings) comes naturally to most people. But what about:
Trusting your dog to behave? Is putting a leash on your dog an indication of mistrust?
Trusting your phone to not watch/listen to you during your private conversations and intimate moments? Are you “mistrusting” your phone by covering its cameras, muffling its microphone, and stuffing it inside a Faraday cage locked inside the trunk of your car parked deep underground in a nuclear fallout shelter?
Trusting the law of gravity to continue functioning the next time your cat callously swats a delicate object off your desk? If you imagine an alternate universe where the laws of physics are different, are you “mistrusting” gravity to be ubiquitous and constant?
We receive mixed responses when we pose these thought experiments to people. If you get bored at your next holiday party and spring these philosophical questions on unsuspecting human subjects, please report your results in the comments!
Most people conclude that we “trust” things with more agency (other people), but hold “expectations” of things with less agency (laws of physics). The distinction is highly subjective and more of a semantic issue than a functional one. We can salvage one useful tidbit from this cognitive dead end: trust and mistrust are closely related to our expectations.
Is Trust/Mistrust a Binary State?
It can be.
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.
But 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 future2?
To counter these problems we need to break out of the black-and-white mode of thinking and think of trust/mistrust as a spectrum, not a light switch. We’ll return to this later in the article series.
Is Trust/Mistrust a Constant State?
You may trust someone today, but can you trust them in the future?
You may feel full of motivation and promise when you make your New Year’s Resolution to lose 15 pounds (~7 kilos), but can you trust your future self in six months to uphold that promise?
Earlier, we brought up examples of the prenup agreement and the 47 pages of fine print in a contract. Most people interpret this as:
“I trust you enough to marry/do business with you, but I’m going to protect myself against lurking/hidden issues.”
We have a second interpretation that co-exists with the first:
“I trust you enough to marry/do business with you today, but I’m going to protect my future self from your future self in case that ever changes.
We’ll go deeper into this point later in the article series.
The Best Definition of “Trust” We’ve Found So Far
Trust is the willingness to give someone the power to harm you, and hoping they won’t.
This definition pulls in risk, vulnerability, and expectations, while still being loose enough to allow for naïvety3, spectral (non-binary) thinking, and the problem of induction (the Thanksgiving turkey problem). It's also short and sticky; we first heard it years ago and no other definition has surpassed it since. That said, we are constantly refining our thought processes. If you have a better definition of trust, please share it in the comments.
Let’s recap some key points.
Mistrust is more obvious than trust because:
Mistrust is associated with a feeling of discomfort (overt) while trust is associated with a feeling of comfort (subtle).
Mistrust often results in actions taken to protect oneself, while trust results in an absence of such actions.
Naïvety makes people simultaneously prone to trusting blindly while being blind to their blindness.
All trust and mistrust comes with an implicit expectation, but not all expectations involve trust or mistrust.
Binary thinking can simplify day-to-day decisions and promote the 3 Cs (comfort, cognitive ease, camaraderie), but it makes us vulnerable to errors in the long term.
Just as we trust and mistrust differently from our younger, less-experienced selves, our future selves may trust and mistrust differently from our present selves.
In the realm of Leadership Land, trust is like an invisible substance that suffuses everything. It’s in the soil – a leader must rely on others to get things done, and a strong team must be built on a solid foundation of trust. It’s in the Fog of Uncertainty – the Thanksgiving turkey’s problem of induction is ever-present when we trust someone, and they always appear most trustworthy just before the rude awakening. It’s in the Straits of Conflicting Interests – employers and employees often have divergent goals, but each side must trust the other for both sides to benefit.
This has been a dense, meandering article. The next few in the series will be less philosophical and more practical.
This doesn’t mean we simply ran off to reinvent the wheel. We did a lot of research for this article.
The dictionary definitions of “trust” are sterilized of all connotations. The scientific literature on trust makes things unnecessarily complicated by presenting multiple types of trust, backed up by questionable research (our behaviors change when we’re stuck inside a brightly-lit research facility, with strangers in white lab coats recording our every move on their clipboards. Just as importantly: many psychological and social science experiments are difficult or impossible to reproduce, greatly weakening the credibility of their findings).
Most of the definitions of “trust” that we could find were as unsatisfying as eating raw radishes to quell a craving for cheesecake.
Readers with scientific/statistical training may recognize Type I/Type II errors here:
Betrayal by a “trustworthy” person is a false positive.
Discarding something valuable from an “untrustworthy” person is a false negative.
You can unwittingly give someone the power to harm you, and still hope that everything turns out okay.