Aphorisms show how important trust is in everyday life, and convey the common wisdom on the subject:
· “Good fences make good neighbors;”
· “Trust in the Lord, but keep your powder dry.”
Infinisri reminds me that trust is usually considered in terms of bilateral relations. We have a whole set of concepts related to trust:
· Trustworthy: how worthy of trust is a person or organization;
· Trustful: how much a person or organization trusts others;
· The act of trusting: the trust is involved in a specific transaction.
These terms suggest a relationship between two parties to a transaction – each characterized by trustworthiness and by trustfulness, engaged in an act of trust. “Trust your neighbors, but lock your doors at night” is a phrase that suggests the difference between trustfulness and ones acts of trusting.
But there are other terms that I understand less well:
· Trusting: How is this adjective different than “trustful”?
· Trusty (As in one’s trusty sliderule): how is this word different than “trustworthy”?
As I recall, one of Jared Diamond’s points in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel, was that the Spanish had an advantage over the indigenous peoples of the New World in the 16th century in that the Europeans had writing, and therefore books that allowed a greatly increased knowledge and understanding of the variety of human experience. I suggest that the Spanish thus knew better than to trust the Incas and Aztecs, and knew better how to betray the native peoples, as well as knowing better how to exploit the mistrust among tribes.
I suppose there are other trust relationships. In the aftermath of Katrina, we are all impressed by how misplaced was our trust in institutions that were to protect Americans in the case of disaster, and indeed how misplaced was the trust of the people on the Gulf coast in the predictability of nature (based on their limited past experience).
Infinisri wrote me (in an email):
One of the most pleasant and yet stressful experiences of a westerner traveling abroad is the easy trust that strangers place in the traveler.
He sees the trust of natives in the travelers as building reciprocal trust by the travelers. But I have also worried about what to me seems an excess of trust displayed by those in developing nations towards westerners.
When I was in the Peace Corps, a fellow volunteer encouraged all the people in a neighborhood to make bricks of clay and cement by a technique then popular in appropriate technology circles. These building blocks were then to be used in constructing new houses. The project became a media favorite and mountains of bricks were created; the U.S. Ambassador gave a televised lecture on self reliance with a mud brick on his desk as a prop.
Unfortunately, the government made the judgment that mud brick houses, even with cement included in the bricks, would not long endure the rainy seasons in the region, and refused to loan the money to build the houses. The people – who had invested what little money they had on cement and a considerable amount of time and money in making bricks (all based on the advice of the well-meaning but naive PC volunteer) – were left to watch their unused bricks weather into mountains of mud.
Why did the neighborhood people trust a young foreigner so much as to invest in his uninformed scheme? Why did he trust those who sold the idea of the bricks? Indeed, why did the Ambassador trust a technologically and developmentally naive Peace Corps volunteer? And why did the government entrust the embassy to so credulous an Ambassador? I still don’t know, but I think the neighbors giving their trust so easily was a mistake!
Infinisri mentions e-Bay. I think it is an interesting case of a new economic institution carefully constructed to build trusting among its clients. The participants in every transaction on e-Bay are asked to provide feedback on the transaction. I generally will not trade with someone on e-Bay if that person does not have a record of an adequate number of feedback comments, and does not have more than 99 percent positive comments. But my trust in e-Bay transactions is also helped by guarantees provided by PayPal, and by my knowledge that e-Bay acts against crooks trying to use its services, and that there are legal protections against fraud. E-Bay has obviously become very successful, gaining the trust of millions of users. So too has Amazon.com through similar approaches.
Infinisri, in his email, brings culture into the picture, suggesting that some cultures encourage more trustfulness in their members than do others. I thank him for this insight, and I think it is true. (This goes back to the aphorisms which help inclucate cultural values. In Spanish there is a saying that translates, “don’t take a cat for a rabbit” which is I suppose a surrogate for “caveat emptor”)
Of course, different cultures involve different institutions with different effects on trust. Traditional cultures, in which people often lived together in the same small communities for their entire lives, could depend on accumulated experience between and among members to establish estimates of trustworthiness among members. Indeed, the sanctions naturally imposed on community members who were not trusted by others were powerful incentives to keep the trust.
On the other hand, the United States is a nation of immigrants, and our urban neighborhoods are often places in which residence is transient; people don’t know each other much less build bodies of knowledge about trustworthiness based on large numbers of transactions. Formal systems to insure trustworthiness become much more important.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I have also noted that too often in developing countries, while people trust too much in the expertise of foreigners, they trust too little in the expertise of their fellow citizens. I have been surprised at how important foreign certification of technological knowledge is seen as a prerequisite for trust from a person’s own neighbors and fellow citizens and professionals.
So too, I have noted that excessive mistrust among neighbors in traditional cultures exists, and how trustworthy American neighbors can be in our litigious culture of transients.
Infinisri brings to my attention the idea of “surrogates” for trust. Surrogates allow us to interact with others as if we trusted them. Thus we give money to the bank teller, whom we have never before met, as if we trusted him/her. In this example, I suppose we think we give money to the bank (an organization) rather than to the teller. But we trust that the bank has developed organizational processes to safeguard the money, and the legal system has institutionalized mechanisms to protect the transaction even in the event of malfeasance on the part of the teller or failure of the bank’s systems. Infinisri at least has convinced me to read Douglass North who deals with these issues.
I wonder about the idea of training business executives how to create a culture of trust in their organizations, and how to encourage others to enter into transactions with those organizations in a trusting manner. Would it not be better simply to provide training in ethics, and to encourage people to act ethically? I recognize that ethical behavior can have instrumental value, but I would rather ethical behavior be promoted for its intrinsic value. I worry about executives willing to behave unethically if it appears profitable to do so!
I suppose I should end this posting appropriately:
Caveat lector!
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