How do we know who to trust?
When we choose to trust, what limits do we place on that trust?
When that trust is broken, what do we do about it?
I've been thinking a lot lately about human interaction and the topic of trust is one that I keep coming back to. The human model for trust is really intriguing. I'm certainly not a professional in this area so bear with my amateur wanderings.
In the US, we trust strangers everyday with a variety of very important things. We trust public transportation operators to deliver us safely to our destination. We trust medical staff with our bodies and state of our health. We trust individuals to take care of our babies while we work. We trust educators to teach our children. We trust individuals we enter into relationships with on many levels. All these varying degrees of trust have different consequences on the line if the trust is betrayed. Most, if not all of them are life changing. Given that, how do you choose who to trust? How do you know you can trust them?
In some cases, we have constructed institutions to help with trust. Medical associations help us trust physicians and hospitals. The Food and Drug Administration helps us trust our food quality and drug safety. Things like the sexual offender registration help us navigate the tricky questions of who to trust or not trust in our neighborhoods. Why do we trust these institutions? What do we do when they break that trust? (/cough, financial sector; S&P, Moody's, /cough)
We seem to be having a trust-based crisis at the moment. I have some further thoughts about this, but I would really like to get your feedback on trust in general and how you approach it.
How do you give it, in what ways, to whom, and for how long?
Technorati Tags: trust, human interaction, individuals, children, relationships, consequences, life, medical, Moody, crisis, feedback, strangers, operators, educators, degrees, institutions, physicians, hospitals
I am afraid that trust is always a trial-and-error kind of process, no matter what kinds of safeguards we have set in place to guard us from those who might harm us. We always have to assume innocent until proven guilty, or we would never interact with anyone, right? We would never leave our child with a caregiver or enter into a romantic relationship or share a personal bit of information with a potential friend or enter our credit card information online. This is just the nature of living in community with others (which we all do): we have to trust in the basic goodwill of people we meet until we have a reason not to do so. This is why the theme of "I trusted you, and you violated me" comes up so often in break-up situations or even in the ending of professional relationships--we have to extend our trust fairly blindly to begin relationships, so we end relationships based on the violation of the trust that we extended. I don't see any other way of interating . . .
ReplyDeleteTrust is a topic of investigation that could arise at any time. But I don't think it's coincidence that you've undertaken this discourse now. Change -- as well as trust and/or its absence -- are in the air.
ReplyDeleteAs a nation and a culture, we're being taken down a decidedly non-traditional (for us), path. Our new presidential administration wants us to believe that re-distributing individual wealth to other individuals and institutions is a means to prosperous ends. We're full of hope. We want to trust. But we know better.
Look at simple business models. Even the mafia knows the only way to sustain prosperity is to to generate revenue, then re-invest it. Providing dis-incentives to ambition and entrepreneurialism by recycling cash from earners to non-earners, from the ambitious to the non-ambitious, from responsible decision-makers to the irresponsible is not a way to fix anything.
People in general can't trust and won't tolerate living under the fear of economic hardship and deprivation. That’s why the new President’s poll numbers are plummeting less than 100 days in. American people in particular will neither trust nor tolerate living in the absence of opportunity and incentive — or under European-style social programs. If they were intended to work here, the Europeans who came here to create an alternative wouldn’t have bothered. Like it or not, that’s our heritage.
I believe we want to trust our new president. But markets self-correct. Low-tax, high-incentive environments breed entrepreneurial creativity and business-building. New businesses create jobs and greater possibilities for wealth-generation. Wealth-generation breeds investment. Government and government money (taken from taxpayers) do none of those things. We don't trust them to.
As Americans, neither do we trust borrowing more foreign money than we’ll ever be able to repay to make the government (appear to be) more prosperous than the private sector. We don't trust rewarding irresponsibility at the expense of the responsible. We don't trust or understand how or why deliberately growing an inherently corrupt bureaucracy — government of any stripe — is an antidote to anything.
I don't think government and politics are the sole sources of your curiosity about trust. But I do think those topics are present enough in the collective consciousness to make them contributors to that curiosity.
hm. this is a hefty topic for a girl who's kid just woke her up at 4:30 and who decided flippantly to stay up, just to email and watch last week's Lost. :) (Thanks for the sweet comment at my place, btw.)
ReplyDeleteOn Trust:
I think I use my grandmother's model. Which seems to be trust everyone personally. She once had this random guy living in her basement with his son mooching off her. Yesterday I employed my grocery-bagger of three years (who now puts not just my bags in the car but also my children, while I just take a moment to breathe and notice the weather) in one of our home improvement projects. Am wondering if it was wise. Anyway, not sure about how Grandma feels about corporate trust, although she is Jon Stewart's biggest single fan in the country, so she's a smart cookie. Geez, this comment really sounds like 4:30 in the morning. I think I better get some coffee and leave this to more articulate folks. :)
I think Mark must be very lucky guy. Because sometimes, people simply have no choice whatsoever BUT to Trust. People trust that someone will come, help them rebuild a new house after Hurricane Katrina took everything. People have to trust that somehow, their kid will get the needed healthcare, regardless of their job loss & lack of health insurance. They trust that their neighborhood will be safe enough to walk home from the bus after the night-shift. They trust that someone will be kind enough to feed their kid a hot lunch, when there's no lunch money left. They trust that education will be available for the kids, even if they are sleeping in a homeless shelter. They trust that if they just try hard for one more day, then life might get better. You just never know who around you is being forced to trust in these very basic ways. If you've never been there yourself, well you're just lucky. That's all. Lucky.
ReplyDeleteGreat topic that captures the Zeitgeist quite well! Trust is broken in many ways in this country right now, with global ripple effect. I believe there always follows a period of anger, mourning, disorientation, disbelief, fear, etc. after any violation of trust. And I see that as where we are now. People have finally woken up to the fact there's a problem, and all the above emotion comes pouring out.
ReplyDeleteI believe our collective populous here in the U.S. had become so complacent over many years of a rising middle class, predictable economic growth and relative peace and stability on our soil, that most of us trusted our elected officials too much. And the elected officials trusted top business leaders and private enterprise too much. Most of us trusted the free market system too much. But as Greenspan admitted, people actually don't always act in their own long-term self-interest. Sometimes they allow short-term self-interest, greed, selfishness and myopia blind them to the long-term damage their actions may cause. Poor policy and lack of sensible regulation caused our financial meltdown. And members of both major political parties had a hand in creating those policies, and/or dismantling smart policies that had protected us for a while.
So I get that people need to explore, investigate, develop and test hypotheses to try and understand what happened. And for many, during that process they cannot help but get emotional, often angry, incite hysteria and attempt to assign blame. I don't like to get caught up in the drama of criticizing and demonizing individual people. It's an energy and time-waster. And once the majority of people get past their emotional reaction, then the rebuilding can begin in earnest.
I do think that we can conduct responsible "due diligence" in advance of extending trust. And I think that's the responsible behavior - especially when it comes to elected officials, business relationships, health, etc. Get some references, do some fact-checking. Then once you've done your research, all you can do is work to build a platform of mutual respect in each relationship, keep track of what that person or institution is doing, give feedback (good and bad) - and then hope for the best!