Trust is bad, M'kay
They say too much of a good thing can be harmful, but is that the case with trust?
Like a lot of the stuff we value, trust can fall victim to positivity bias; the tendency people have to judge reality favourably.
“We need more trust!” they say. “We must earn back trust!” they say.
Issues with such narratives, including potential contributions to the system failures that lead to such perspectives (Davos anyone…?), will have to wait for another time. Today’s post is a concise offering, not an elaborate expose.
Back to it.
In 2015 Yip et al. summarised the body of literature on this topic suggesting that 'excessive trust' directly "enables unethical behaviour". Too much trust can lead to limited scrutiny, poor decision-making and unfavourable outcomes, for all parties to the trust relationship.
Using the trust states model from Sutcliffe et al., we can think of 'excessive trust' as 'passionate trust'. Passionate trust is a 'deep trust state' that limits the capacity one has to see the validity of alternative perspectives (wait a tick, that sounds awfully familiar…). Passionate distrust does the same. It's just the opposite end of the spectrum.
These more extreme states, along with the beliefs and behaviours they are driven by and help reinforce, could be likened to ideology. Trust extremes limit one's capacity for critical thought, deliberate reasoning and an openness to shifting perspective in the face of more new / better quality evidence.
Baroness O'Neill, a British philosopher who has long studied the phenomenology of trust (and has written an influential paper on Kant’s ‘Deontology’, just in case you’re interested), suggests it isn't more trust that we want. Rather, we should seek to create the conditions for more intelligent trust judgements. She suggests organisations or institutions first focus on being trustworthy, then give good, consistent evidence of their trustworthiness. The combination of these factors help create the conditions for others to place intelligent trust judgements in favour of those that are worthy of it. If this is the case, market dynamics should result in the most trustworthy organisations receiving the greatest benefits (including better financial returns and a safer downside risk profile).
This is sound advice, and something my work seeks to reinforce as frequently as possible.
Summary
Excessive trust (or distrust) limits our capacity for reason.
Organisations should focus on being trustworthy and giving good evidence of it. This supports various parties in making intelligent trust judgements about if, when and how to interact with said organisation.
When point 2 is the case, it’s likely that all parties to the trust judgement are positively incentivised to act in alignment to shared expectations and social preferences.