A welcome message, during the General Election maelstrom: the more you trust others, the better you get at it, and the more it’s generated
In our discussions and interventions during this UK General Election period, the question of how vital the presence of trust is in the functioning of society constantly comes up.
At the moment, in this adversarial system, the point is to tear your opponents’ trustworthiness to shreds. Archives of past statements are scoured for the fatal inconsistency and broken promise. Swirling around all the Prime Ministerial contenders are toxic clouds of accusations of mistrust. It’s a poor, exhausting show.
It might be useful to zoom back a little and see how trust is generally functioning in our society (and others). The usual place to go for this information is the Edelman Trust Barometer - the comms agency’s annual global survey of trust levels, primarily measured by our attitudes to NGOs, business, government and media.
In the 2019 survey (PDF here), as you’ll see in the graphics below, there is a persistent “trust gap” between what Edelman calls the “well-informed” (16% of total global population, aged 25-64, college-educated, in top 25% of household income per age group in each market, and report significant media consumption and engagement in public policy and business news)…And the “general population” (the remaining 84% of the population).
As these are global overall figures, you’d have to drill down into territories and particular markets. But what is striking is the consistent trust gap between the actively informed and passively informed - the former simply trust institutions more than the latter.
You could make a simple power/class judgement on this - that those who already have power, articulacy and fluency in any social system, benefitting from its orderly function, will naturally give that system more credibility.
Yet what might even further reinforce this asymmetry is the possibility that actually trusting more, as a rule, means you learn more about the people and conditions around you. Over time, you become better at the discriminating and subtle skills of trusting itself.
This insight comes from a recent Aeon article, where the French evolutionist Hugo Mercier reports on the work of the late Japanese social scientist Toshio Yamagishi. Extract below:
When you trust someone, you end up figuring out whether your trust was justified or not. An acquaintance asks if he can crash at your place for a few days. If you accept, you will find out whether or not he’s a good guest. A colleague advises you to adopt a new software application. If you follow her advice, you will find out whether the new software works better than the one you were used to.
By contrast, when you don’t trust someone, more often than not you never find out whether you should have trusted them. If you don’t invite your acquaintance over, you won’t know whether he would have made a good guest or not. If you don’t follow your colleague’s advice, you won’t know if the new software application is in fact superior, and thus whether your colleague gives good advice in this domain.
This informational asymmetry means that we learn more by trusting than by not trusting. Moreover, when we trust, we learn not only about specific individuals, we learn more generally about the type of situations in which we should or shouldn’t trust. We get better at trusting.
Yamagishi and his colleagues demonstrated the learning advantages of being trusting. Their experiments were similar to trust games, but the participants could interact with each other before making the decision to transfer money (or not) to the other. The most trusting participants were better at figuring out who would be trustworthy, or to whom they should transfer money.
We find the same pattern in other domains. People who trust the media more are more knowledgeable about politics and the news. The more people trust science, the more scientifically literate they are. Even if this evidence remains correlational, it makes sense that people who trust more should get better at figuring out whom to trust. In trust as in everything else, practice makes perfect.
Yamagishi’s insight provides us with a reason to be trusting. But then, the puzzle only deepens: if trusting provides such learning opportunities, we should trust too much, rather than not enough.
Ironically, the very reason why we should trust more – the fact that we gain more information from trusting than from not trusting – might make us inclined to trust less.
When our trust is disappointed – when we trust someone we shouldn’t have – the costs are salient, and our reaction ranges from annoyance all the way to fury and despair. The benefit – what we’ve learnt from our mistake – is easy to overlook.
By contrast, the costs of not trusting someone we could have trusted are, as a rule, all but invisible. We don’t know about the friendship we could have struck (if we’d let that acquaintance crash at our place). We don’t realise how useful some advice would have been (had we used our colleague’s tip about the new software application).
We don’t trust enough because the costs of mistaken trust are all too obvious, while the (learning) benefits of mistaken trust, as well as the costs of mistaken mistrust, are largely hidden. We should consider these hidden costs and benefits: think of what we learn by trusting, the people whom we can befriend, the knowledge that we can gain.
Giving people a chance isn’t only the moral thing to do. It’s also the smart thing to do.
More here. The conclusion to draw here, for us, is obvious. We need to widen the conditions under which trust is essentially possible - which is a set of public institutions fully serving the widest public good. And then, to push things even further, we should preach the positive benefits of a trusting attitude.
This clicks with Common Cause’s findings, reported here years ago, which showed that UK populations’ generally regarded themselves as much more compassionate than they regarded the wider population. CC’s solution was more information about the absurdity of this gap, and how we should assume much more compassion is present in those we deal with (which a competitive, market-dominated society undercuts).
Add “trustingness” to that list.