Whom (or who!) do you trust?
I’ve been thinking about trust lately. It’s one of those squishy things, like “identity”, that we all know about and think we understand, but is in fact fiendishly difficult to pin down.
Trust is foundational to human society. A romantic relationship requires mutual trust. A venture capital investment requires mutual trust. Citizens need to trust their municipal/state/federal governments. Customers need to trust banks. Employees need to trust their bosses (and vice versa). You need to trust the car in the next lane will stay in that lane. And so on in virtually every single thing we do.
In my professional and personal circles, I see a rapidly growing absence of trust. Ask yourself: whom do you trust? Your mom? Your spouse? Your boss? Your co-worker? Your government? The health authorities? The barista at Starbucks? Silicon Valley Bank? Nobody?
Trust is declining
A report from Pew Research tells us that Americans have declining trust in each other and their government. They think their fellow citizens have become “lazy, greedy and dishonest” (!). And this distrust makes it much harder to solve problems, especially large problems (including the great issue of our time, climate).
There is, as always, more data about this than one might think, and the two great eras of declining trust can be shown below:
As you can see, the worst periods are in the Nixon and Bush II presidencies. Nixon’s criminal acts during and after Watergate doomed his presidency. But I would argue Bush II was far, far worse. Many terrible consequences followed the unwarranted invasion of Iraq — but we may look back and conclude that the most heinous of George W. Bush’s crimes was to push national trust into a ditch.
So what?
But I digress, as I usually do when I think about Bush II. Back to my main thread which is: trust is a declining quality in modern life — and this is really not good news. Without a certain level of trust, much of what binds our society begins to fray and fall apart.
Is that really true? Fine, we all distrust each other. So effing what? I am sorry to tell you this: the consequences are absolutely dire, and there is plenty of data to support the point.
Covid death rates are negatively correlated with trust as you can see here and here and here. It will not surprise you at all to learn that people living in lower-trust countries die sooner, as you can see here and here. And in another not-a-surprise-at-all observation, people who trust less suffer from deeper mental health issues, as you can see here and here.
An explanation involving tech
I view this decline in trust as something that may be inherent to what I call the “networked episteme.”
Our globe-spanning many-to-many speed-of-light communication networks have allowed for an explosion in opinions and interpretations that are instantaneously available to everyone and amplified in all directions. And since almost everything can be contested by anyone from anywhere, it is inevitable that almost nothing can be relied upon.
I wrote this in my second essay about the networked episteme: “Consider a typical consumer in New York City. They might wake up in the morning to an alarm set on an Alexa. They check Slack, then order a coffee on the Starbucks app. They call an Uber to get to work, and on the way there, use Apple News to get up to speed on world events. At work, they use Microsoft Office and Dropbox, Gmail and Zoom. They adjust the temperature in their apartment from the office using their Nest thermostat. They find a place for happy hour using Yelp. When they get home, they have groceries delivered using Instacart and wind down with Netflix.”
Reliance on tech platforms has made it so that we don’t need to rely on people, or at least our reliance on other people is less visible to us. I think this gives us some license to believe that what we do doesn’t affect others and that what they do doesn’t affect us. We place all our trust in tech and are not only relieved of the challenge of deciding who is trustworthy, but also of the social pressure to behave in a trustworthy manner.
Increasingly, our social interactions are filtered to only what algorithms find most engaging (often the outrageous); our functional needs can be met without the inconvenience/inefficiency/messiness of personal exchange; and there’s more information available than ever before about corruption/greed/wrongdoing in our institutions without real opportunities for recourse.
It’s a recipe for a lack of trust!
Do something!
I try, after a rant such as this one, to be constructive. This is not straightforward. It is unlikely that any of us is going to rocket out of bed tomorrow morning and say “hey! I’m going to trust more today!”
Having said that… perhaps the answer lies not so much in whom you should trust, and perhaps more in rendering yourself more trustworthy. In this we actually have agency.
I am going to leave it there 😀.
Under the 'do something' I would lean more into government action - if technology is eroding trust, government should control their ability to do so. It is striking that social networks and news aggregators and search engines have no responsibility for the accuracy, veracity and outcomes related to the information they share - that is new. Essentially they provide free information, they get eyeballs, and they monetize advertising - this is what newspapers and radio and TV did but these were all tightly regulated for accuracy and responsible reporting (both by government and by the potential for private liable cases) ... we should force Meta, Alphabet, TikTok and others to live to the same standard.
Great topic—thank you for writing .
I like this challenge a lot.
Especially because I think we can still make significant progress to improve our “trust economy” with readily available tools.
Information begets trust insofar as it’s gathered, shared and displayed appropriately. For example, we have a lot more data and information on a given brand of baby food than is ever made available to a buyer online. The internet has of course been happy to facilitate easy and fast transactions nonetheless, without very much “information-rigor”. Marketing claims could get ALL the way around the world before the truth could get its pants on!
Ecommerce has conveniently decentralized a version of truth at the cost of now-familiar pitfalls. Democratized online reviews and social media are not critically mature enough to fight the winds of sales growth with scientific truth.
Hope: We can do something about this. The good news is that if the right information is available in the right places and in a digestible manner, we can expect people to act accordingly (right?).
A hypothesis? Brands can succeed over competitors AND do right by sharing more information, *in the right ways*, about their products.
Brands arent people, but they aren’t far off. They are conduits of trust.