Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Components of Trust

I've been pondering the nature of trust lately, having been asked the question "How do we earn the trust of a prospective customer?" and having to reply "I'll have to think about that."   Earning trust is a critical skill for a marketer, and it's a component of the work I've been doing for over two decades - but I still have difficulty articulating what "trust."   I know what it is but have difficulty expressing it verbally.  And so, I've done some reading and some meditating on the topic, and have come to a four-factor model for trust that I sense is fairly accurate.


What is Trust?

Before going into the model, pause to ponder what the word "trust" means.   It's one of those words like "love" that is evasive because it means so many different things to different people, and even to the same person in the same context.   Dictionaries define it by way of synonyms, and seem to muddle the notion of trusting in things and in people, which are somewhat different.

Trust in things is easier to define: we have certain expectations about the properties of a thing, and are confident that those expectations will be proven true in practical application.  I trust a bridge will bear my weight, and so I am willing to walk across it.   When I reach the other side and the bridge has not collapsed, I find my trust to have been well-founded.

Trust in people is not that different, though we more often trust in the behavior of people rather than in their qualities.  I trust that a customer will pay a bill, so I am willing to extend him credit and give him possession of merchandise immediately on the expectation he will make payment later.  And when he does, my trust was well-founded.

This leads to a significant consideration: while we speak of trust in a general and abstract way, in practice we trust people to do specific things.   We can trust in people to do some things and not others.  We can trust people in certain situations and not in others.  And we can even trust in people to do bad things: I trust a salesman to lie to me if it means making a sale.

So asking whether I "trust" someone in general is difficult to answer.  My sense is it's a generalization: I trust in them to do specific things under specific conditions - so perhaps my sense of "trust" is whether they are generally reliable.   I have the sense I may call upon them to do a number of things under a number of conditions - and my expectation is that they will do most of them, so I can say in a general sense that they have my trust.   (But there will still be specific instances in which they do not.)


Predictability

The first of the four factors that create trust is predictability.   Considering the nature of trust, it seems the most important because trust is all about predicting a person's future behavior and having confidence that prediction is accurate.  An unpredictable person, even if they have many other virtues, cannot be trusted.

Predictability, however, speaks more to the accuracy of the observer's assessments.   It is obvious that trust in objects is based entirely on my own powers of perception and analysis:  it is not the bridge's fault for being unable to bear my weight, but my own fault for having believed that it would do so.

Unfortunately, that argument is the refuge of many untrustworthy people: when they fail you.  When you express shock at their betrayal, their defense is to suggest it was your fault for expecting that they would do something they had no intention of doing.  This is the danger of assumption - but while trust is sometimes assumptive, it is not always so when they led you to have those expectations.

It is mainly the reason for having those expectations that gives rise to the other factors in this model.   We may expect someone to do something because they explicitly stated that they would (honesty), because they have the capability to do something (competence), and because they have the right motivation to do so (concern).

The "and" is an ideal situation in which all three conditions are satisfied, but this is not always the case in reality.  We may trust someone to do something because they stated an intent, but fail to consider their competence or concern for doing so.   Such is the nature of things: in practice, we make decisions on incomplete or imperfect information.


Honesty

Honesty is a foundational characteristic for trusting in others: when they state an intent to do something, we assess whether they are being truthful.   This is often based on the plausibility of their statement and their history of being honest, and the latter carries more weight than the former but is less often known.

There is also a difference between "being truthful" and "telling the truth."  A truthful person presents information that is accurate to the best of their knowledge at the time.  In future we may discover them to have been wrong, or to have overlooked certain facts or potentials, but at the time they made the statement it was true to the best of their knowledge.

So while our trust in a person is based on the assumption that they are telling the truth, we recognize that people are not omniscient and clairvoyant.   And we are to some degree willing to maintain trust when a truthful person has said something that turned out not to be true - it was still their intent to be truthful.

It should also be considered that trust pertains to the future, and the "truth" about the future is different to the truth about the past, as the latter is based on known facts and the former on predictions that may be inaccurate. A person may promise to meet us at 8:00 and arrive at 8:15, or not at all, and later state that "my car broke down," suggesting his commitment was contingent on the prediction his vehicle would be in working order.   And provided that reason is true, we will continue to trust them in future, though we are less inclined to trust people who routinely fail to keep commitments even if there is a valid reason.

Dishonesty is much easier to define: it is the statement of something known to be false.   In rare instances, it may happen to be true, but the person who made the statement believed it to be false even as they were making the statement.   While failure to be honest may result from unexpected or external factors, being dishonest is always failure of character.  Hence, dishonest people cannot be trusted.


Competence

Competence speaks to a myriad of qualities of a person that render them capable of doing something.   This, too, is an assessment and a prediction on our part or on theirs that we expect will hold true, but cannot strictly guarantee for lack of omniscience and clairvoyance.

When dealing with things, our assessment of their "competence" is clearly a matter of our own analysis intrinsic of their qualities.    A bridge does not claim to be able to bear weight (though the person who built it might make such a claim), we merely assume it to be capable of doing so (because that's what we suppose it is meant to do) - or at best we inspect it and make a judgment call about its capabilities.

Some of this carries over to the assessment of the competence of people: we consider what we have observed and make assumptions about their capabilities, often without asking them.  There are even instances in which we do ask, but ignore what they say in favor of our own analysis.  And where our analysis is flawed, they prove incapable (not merely unwilling) to do what was predicted.   Where we refuse to accept the blame for faulty analysis, we may label them untrustworthy - but the facts do not support that conclusion.

Competence can also be a factor that undermines honesty.   People are not particularly good at assessing their own competence.  They are absolutely confident that they have capabilities they do not, and will make statements about what they will do, and only discover when they attempt to do them that they are incapable.   We tend to be somewhat forgiving of this, but it depends on the scale or frequency of their inflated sense of ability.

People also can underestimate rather than overestimate their competence, which leads us to disregard what they say about themselves and rely on our own assumption that they are capable of doing something that they claim not to be.   When they fail, the fault is clearly the result of our own analysis of their capabilities.

We also form a general impression of competence, and suffer from the fallacy of the "halo effect" that leads us to assume that a person who is competent at some things is competent of many others, or who has proven effective in one situation will prove effective in any situation.

So as with honesty, our impression of competence is an amalgam of their statements and our analysis both of the person's general level of competence and their competence at a specific task.


Concern

Concern is a consideration of the motives of a person to perform an act.   That is to say they may be capable of doing something, but uninterested (or reluctant) to actually do it because there is no benefit or reward for undertaking the effort to do it.

A person can be trusted to do what is in his own self-interest, though in saying so we are supposing that the outcome of his action has a benefit to him, and the benefit he will derive is perceived (by him) to be worth the effort to undertake the action necessary to achieve it.

However, the kind of trust we seek of others is not because they are concerned with their own interests, but with ours.   It is with some sense of irony that in disparaging a person for being self-interested, we are expressing our own selfishness because we want him to do something that serves our own self-interest.

But in a social sense, we want others to do things for our benefit, and seek to have trust that they will - which is to say that they are concerned with our needs, to a degree that will motivate them to undertake an action that will benefit us (or refrain from an action that will harm us).

The philosophical argument over self-interest versus altruism can get rather convoluted - but in terms of the present discussion, we trust in people because they are concerned about the consequences of their action (to self or others) and as a result have sufficient motivation to undertake the action, hence we predict that they will do it - and if those predictions prove true, then we feel the person is trustworthy.

And of course, there remains the question of whether that assessment is based on our own logic, or some indication given us by the other party that would indicate their concerns.   The more we assume, the less we can rightly blame an individual for being untrustworthy.   And our assessment is done in both the aggregate sense and the specific sense of a given act.

One last quality of concern bears mentioning: concerns can change more readily than capabilities or knowledge.   A person may have great interest in achieving a goal in one moment, but lose interest the very next - whether the outcome is no longer appealing, or a better opportunity has arisen, that will cause them to change their behavior from the predicted course.


Trusting and Being Trusted

The qualities of trust have thus far been considered from the perspective of a person who puts their trust in another:  if we feel confident in our prediction of their behavior because they are honest, competent, and concerned then we place trust in that individual.  The assessment is based on the extent of our knowledge and our ability to analyze it.

When the situation is reversed, and we want someone else to trust in our behaviors, the way we go about doing so is to provide them with information that will support a positive assessment of ourselves by the very same factors.   How do we cause others to form the impression that we are trustworthy?

  • Predictability - We must convince them that their beliefs about what we will do in future will be fulfilled by the actions we take
  • Honesty - We must convince them that what we say is true, or at least true to the best of our knowledge, so they may expect us to do as we say
  • Competence - We must convince them that we have the ability to do the things they expect
  • Concern - We must convince them that we are interested in achieving the outcome of an action, whether for our benefit or theirs (mainly theirs)

I would say "it's as simple as that" but none of this is particularly simple, and given that this meditation has gone on for a while, I am going to avoid crossing over from "what must be done" to "how it can be done."  The latter is also important, but requires a great deal more consideration.

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