The irony of trust

There is common hearsay nowadays that trust is on the decline. For some, it might be notional and driven by individual-based perceptions, but for others, it is based on personal experiences and their unique reasons. Trust is a powerful and multifaceted concept and needs to be differentiated appropriately. However, some perceived factors known for its decline can be:

- Proliferation of information via umpteen social media sources

- Political polarization where the sentiment of “us versus them” is on the surge

- Scandals and corruption that have undermined public trust

Onora O’Neill, a renowned philosopher has captured a completely different outlook on trust. Rather than highlighting the reasons for trust decline, she talks about why we think trust has declined.

Ironically as a society, the trust quotient in various institutions hasn’t changed in the last few decades. Journalists, politicians, govt servants back then and even today score below par on the trust element whereas doctors, nurses, and defense personnel continue to shine on that radar. Now that being said if the trust index hasn’t changed, where is the red flag? Are we really assessing trust correctly or is it just a prejudice?

Simply put by O’Neill, an important question to accompany trust is, “Trust to do what”? A teacher cannot be trusted with driving skills, a talkative person cannot be trusted with keeping secrets and the list goes on. Ironically, we get this logic right and understand how trust is differentiated, yet we take it purely at face value and not on these rationales. So, it is fair to assume that diminishing trust is either a misnomer or based on irrational parameters.

The second prejudice is “we should learn to trust more”. Instead, the objective should be to identify trustworthiness in people. For example, you cannot blindly trust a competent professional to help you upskill in your career. On the contrary, a competent friend is trustworthy to help you grow in your career. In simpler words, the ability to place trust in the trustworthy and not in the untrustworthy is a more practical and adaptive approach.

The third and final prejudice is “we need to rebuild trust”. Trust cannot be rebuilt by others, everyone has to individually take accountability for their own trustworthiness. And this is done through a combination of two things :

- Empathy – People perceive there’s nothing “in it” for them so before solving your own problem, it is paramount to give a solution for their issues. That is how you build and rebuild trust

- Authenticity – A cliched answer to this is “be you”. While we are conditioned to follow a guaranteed template of success at every step, it is extremely beneficial to be different, and to be you. When you don’t hold back who you are, you are likely to be trusted more

To summarize, letting your guard down and making yourself more open, and vulnerable will go a long way in helping people build confidence in what you say and ultimately, trust you. So in the end, it's really not about trust but giving enough to the world to show that you are trustworthy in order to win back some or even a major portion of trust.

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