# 133: Trust
Story behind the Passage
Sometimes I think about trust a lot. Obviously, other people do that as well, especially because of the impact of the virus on people’s overall life situation. Yesterday, they ran an entire talk show on the topic. It was on one of the more intellectual TV stations. They had an interdisciplinary panel of scholars who had all worked on trust in their fields. But I was tired and the talk quickly turned into scholarly bullshit. So, I turned it off. I am allowed to say this — I am a scholar (by training) as well. Actually, I did like one of the people there a lot. It is such a pity that some women scholars often seem to be so much in defense mode that they miss the chance to pass on a valuable message to the audience.
Anyway, I think about trust because of the people I get to meet. Of course, we live in a networked age and meeting people (online) means expanding your network. I have always been a huge fan of networking — based on my personal definition of the concept. If I were to provide that now, I could talk for hours. But wait a minute: I actually gave a definition of this just a while ago when doing a workshop for graduate students. Actually, I was fairly pleased to come up with this concise definition. Let me give it to you here:
“Networking is the life activity of building up, maintaining, and deepening meaningful relationships with people that add value to your personal/professional growth and well-being.”
So, how is this related to my reflection on trust? Actually, the two are virtually intertwined but I do think it is possible to talk about trust in its own way. Trust is a huge issue — it is probably the most important thing that you learn as a baby. If you do not learn to trust in early childhood — for whatever reason — then it will affect your entire life, I guess. But I will not get into psychology now because I have no idea about it. Still, I want to mention some thoughts about trust as it matters to my life right now. In business, everything is about trust and that is actually a very comforting thing to know, I think.
My Learnings
“A situation in a game with *asymmetric information where an agent is expected by other agent(s) to behave in a particular way or to perform a particular action.” I am choosing this sentence from the passage because it exactly describes the way I think and feel about trust. It is usually the case that one party knows more about something or someone at a given point in time. Is it not so funny how ‘rational’ this beautiful economic language of game theory describes this? Even though I am getting deeper into game theory because I am increasingly seeing value in it, my personal solution for dealing with the potential dilemma of trust completely runs counter to rational choice theory: I simply trust my gut feeling — at least, when it comes to people.
Well, actually, this might not be entirely true because I do research on people before and after I talk to them. But I would not say that this kind of research determines my decision on wheter or not to trust. Rather, it functions as additional evidence. Furthermore, I doubt that trust is a rational decision altogether; at least not in single cases. What you can decide consciously, however, is to generally be open and willing to trust. If this were not possible, i.e., to make a decision about this, you would never be able to change in case you are struggling with trust issues as a consequence of disappointment or even abuse. Personal change, like most things in life, is a decision that you can and maybe want to make. That does not mean that all changes in life are a consequence of personal decisions, of course.
So, what I am saying is that you can learn to trust, even if it is hard. But if you do that, you also give yourself the permission of letting your gut feeling intervene in case something does not feel right. The interesting part about the definition for me is, however, that trust is immediately related to behavior. This totally makes sense because behavior is the only thing you can actually see in others — you cannot look into people’s heads. And actions, of course, are also the things that have the power of destroying trust.
In general, I am quite happy about my trust learning curve. I think, I went from not trusting anybody when I was younger to trusting almost everybody — at least, everybody I consciously connect with. As far as I see it, there is something like a trust muscle that gets bigger and bigger in doing some unconscious preselection of people. So, you hardly end up even talking to people that, for whatever reason, are not trustworthy in your eyes. If this still happens and you do trust and something does not work out the way you would have expected or wanted it, then it will also help your trust muscle grow because of the learnings you derive.
If you follow this logic, there can hardly be too much trust, right? But that does not sound true either. There are always people who get exploited because they trust the wrong people. Exactly these examples become the horror stories that make other people not trust at all. Maybe that tells me that my definition of trust still leaves a back door. I mean, when I say “trust,” I usually do not put money or my health at risk. If I did, would that mean I trust more? It seems, this is getting really complicated, almost like in the talk show from yesterday. Maybe I should just trust that life will bring the right people and things to me, even if I stop thinking so much about everything!?
Reflection Questions
1) Does the rational choice paradigm, i.e., the belief that decision-making equals a game, help you make important decisions?
2) What was your most important lesson in life when it comes to trust?
3) How does it make you feel when others signal you that they do not trust you? Do you do anything to convince them of the opposite?