“Trust is like blood pressure,” says social observer Frank Sonnenberg. “It’s silent, vital to good health, and if abused it can be deadly.”
There’s no doubt that trust is the operating system of every relationship in our lives. In some instances, it can take years to earn and only a matter of seconds to lose.
Most of us likely think we understand trust. But do we really? Dr. Peter H. Kim, a research scientist at the University of Southern California, believes we have a lot to learn about trust. He’s the author of How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired.
Kim says people are more likely to forgive what they perceive as a blunder in competence than a lapse in integrity. Why is that?
“There are odd quirks in our mental basements that lead us to weigh matters of competence and integrity quite differently,” he says. “For matters of competence, we tend to weigh positive information much more heavily than negative information. So, if you are a baseball player who hits a home run, people are likely to consider you a home run hitter, even though you might strike out afterward. But for matters of integrity, this asymmetry is reversed. We tend to weigh negative information about integrity much more heavily than positive information about integrity. So, if you get caught embezzling from your company and you respond by saying, ‘But I didn’t embezzle yesterday…,’ that probably won’t work out so well.”
Kim says these asymmetries are important because many attempts to repair trust, such as apologies, are double-edged. “They convey both negative information about guilt and positive information about the likelihood of redemption,” he says. “That means that responses like apologies can be effective for competence-based violations because people will put less emphasis on the apology’s confirmation of guilt (negative information about competence) than that response’s signals of redemption (positive information about competence). But for integrity-based violations, that same apology can instead make things worse, because people will tend to focus on that apology’s confirmation of guilt (negative information about integrity) and discount its signals of redemption (positive information about integrity).”
Trust issues are seen in many of the news headlines these days. For example, what role has trust—or lack of it—played in people’s attitudes and behaviors related to Covid prevention and treatment?
Kim says fragile trust has played an enormous role. “When people don’t trust the health system or the government that promotes those preventative measures, they are simply less likely to adopt them,” he says. “We can see this in the attitudes of Black Americans who have been much less willing to get Covid vaccines, even though they were dying at twice the rate of white Americans from the Covid virus in the early stages of the pandemic, and despite substantial data supporting the efficacy of these vaccines. That mistrust is understandable given the broader history of racial injustices that have stoked concerns about how much the medical establishment, and other institutions, can be trusted.”
Kim says a noteworthy example can be found in the infamous Tuskegee experiment that began in 1932. “That experiment allowed Black participants to suffer from syphilis and syphilis-related complications for decades, even though penicillin became a viable treatment. But the sad fact is that this mistrust ultimately exacerbated the harm from those racial injustices, by resulting in far more Black Americans to die from the Covid virus in just a few months of that pandemic than from the almost forty-year duration of the Tuskegee experiment.”
In personal and professional relationships, most people seem to appreciate receiving an apology when trust is violated. But Kim’s research shows why some apologies come across as more convincing and genuine than others.
“The main way apologies can help repair trust is by conveying remorse,” he says. “However, we don’t weigh expressions of remorse the same way for all people. For example, my studies have found that we tend to consider those expressions far less authentic when they are conveyed by the powerful. This is because people tend to believe that those in positions of power tend to be better at managing their emotions and are thus more likely to express those emotions strategically. That is one of the reasons those who are guilty of a violation can have much more of an uphill battle in their efforts to convey remorse, and ultimately repair trust, when their power is high than low.”
When forming and reinforcing opinions, there’s a human tendency to seek out like-minded people. How has that tendency contributed to polarization and mistrust, and what can people do to broaden their perspectives by challenging their own assumptions?
“A well-established finding in the social sciences is that when you engage only with like-minded people, those shared opinions become more extreme,” Kim says. “That mechanism is being nurtured by the media, and it’s what drives the polarization we see in society. So, countering that problem certainly requires that we expose ourselves to different perspectives.”
But Kim adds another wrinkle: “Exposing ourselves to those different perspectives will do much less good if those perspectives aren’t coming from sources we care about and respect. If we don’t value those sources, it becomes too easy to dismiss or discount the different perspectives they might share. But if those different perspectives come from a close friend, loving family member, or news outlet we respect and admire, we work much harder to consider those different views, become more open to the merits of those perspectives, and become more willing to integrate those different viewpoints into our own.”
For individuals, what does Kim see as the primary benefits of understanding how trust works?
“Taking the time to understand how trust works means making fewer mistakes,” he says. “It gives you the tools to get better at building, maintaining, and repairing it. That’s essential, because the evidence makes clear that getting better at these things will make you better off. At work, with your boss, coworkers, clients, and customers. At home, with your family, friends, and neighbors. And in society, especially in the face of our increasingly polarized sociopolitical divides.”
The bottom line, Kim says, is that understanding how trust works makes people both happier and more successful, personally as well as professionally. “Plus, at an even broader level,” he says, “that understanding can affect the success of nations, since strong positive correlations have been found between a country’s level of trust and its prosperity.”
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