Trust: A Detailed Perspective
As we saw in the introductory instagram post, trust is a prediction of how people will behave and it involves a sense of confidence and security about a person or situation, or both. After understanding ‘how’ we trust, let us try to understand a few more aspects of this thing that binds societies and people together.
Trust: Complex process for complex interactions
As society becomes increasingly complex and resources become scarce, cooperation becomes a necessity. Cooperation requires trust. But trust is risky as it requires us to be vulnerable and open about our needs and outcomes. In fact, this vulnerability is something everyone grapples with since achieving goals alone is sometimes impossible (Popova, 2014).
Thus, matters of trust influence all areas of our life. Dr. David DeSteno says, "The heart of trust is vulnerability. There's something that you need to acquire or achieve, and you need help to do it, but by accepting that help, you make yourself vulnerable" (Weir, 2013).
This means that everyday cooperation and communication are fraught with risks and the possibilities of betrayal. Risk becomes a part and parcel of our choice to trust. Humans are generally risk averse and are biased to protect ourselves against loss. But, according to DeSteno, “the potential benefits from trusting others considerably outweigh the potential losses on average” (Weir, 2013).
In spite of the potential risks, trust helps simplify and reduce social complexity. It transforms “objective uncertainty into subjective certainty” (Bierhoff & Vornefeld, 2016).However, the issue of ‘whom’ to trust remains a dilemma.
Researchers have tried to understand how we decide whom to trust. While the instagram post explains one of the more complex theories with the help of illustrations here we will discuss the findings from some earlier research.
How do we trust others?
Oosterhof and Todorov (2008) studied how people make snap judgements about faces. They found that certain physical features like upturned mouth and wide eyes indicate trust whereas downturned mouth and eyebrows were found to indicate distrust. DeSteno (Association for Psychological Science, 2012) on the other hand found that the decision to trust or distrust someone in any situation is a complex process that involves automatic mental processing of four nonverbal cues:
leaning away,
crossing the arms,
touching the face, and
fidgeting with the hands.
which together showed untrustworthiness.
However, keep in mind that these are the results of a correlational study that was conducted in a laboratory, and they might not be applicable across situations and people. Furthermore, it is a point of contention since other findings suggest that these cues aren’t accurate.
We also use strategies in order to understand whom to trust. For example, Dr. DeSteno mentions that ‘tit-for-tat’ is the most basic strategy that people use while interacting with an unknown party (Popova, 2014). People begin by being fair and then copy the responses of the other party. But an issue with this is that, there can be instances where trust is unconsciously breached (because of misunderstandings, perhaps), this strategy begins to crumble.
Or consider the strategy of ‘generous tit for tat’ where even after one party has breached trust, there is space for forgiveness in order to keep the relationship going (Sachs, 2007). However, a flaw is that the other party can become ‘habituated’ to breaching trust and expecting forgiveness. Thagard’s model of trust, as explained in the instagram post, provides another perspective on how we trust. Trust is also based on reputation, which is discussed later.
How does trust work in relationships?
Trust also has a role to play in our relationship with ourselves.
Cooperation and vulnerability require two parties, but it is not necessary that they have to be two different people.
DeStenos says, “to the contrary, the parties can be the same person at different times.” The question then becomes, can the present you trust the future you to workout, not cheat, etc? (Popova, 2014)
Thus, trust in its essence finds its way into all kinds of relationships that we have, whether it be with other parties, or with ourselves.
What are the different types of trust?
Bierhoff and Vornefeld (2016) discuss three main types of trust:
Relational or specific trust - the expectation that the other person will cooperate including the perception of the others’ attitudes or personality traits. This means that people have mental representations and stereotypes about the cooperativeness and trustworthiness of another person in a particular context (Robbins, 2015).
Generalized trust - expectation of an individual or a group that the word, promise, verbal or written statement of another individual or group is reliable
System trust - having confidence in 'abstract systems,’ and institutions
Besides these, we also use “indirect reciprocity” i.e. we learn from a peer’s experience to decide whom to trust. This is trust based on reputation. If a person is clouded by a bad reputation then we are alert and more protective of our interests. This leads to another byproduct, i.e. shadow of the future, the fear of accruing damage to social capital by behaving in ways that lead to a negative reputation (Popova, 2014).
What about distrust?
Trust vs. Distrust: an eternal dilemma. Source for comic: Cynaide & Happiness at Explosm.net Creators, Rob DenBleyker, Kris Wilson, Dave McElfatrick. https://wanna-joke.com/no-apples-no-trust/
Distrust is, of course, the other side of the coin. Distrust is an integral part of social life because trusting the wrong person or group can cause irreparable harm. However it can also be helpful in certain situations.
Distrust has an impact on our cognition. It helps us think in unusual, novel and critical ways about situations (Weir, 2013). It helps us understand that things aren’t normal, and that we should proceed with caution (Thagard, 2018). This impact of distrust can be seen in an experiment conducted by Yaacov et al.( 2004).
In this experiment, the researchers first showed a set of faces to the participants in order to prime their minds with either trust or distrust. Photos of faces that are usually judged to be trustworthy (round eyes, wide smile) were presented with true statements and untrustworthy faces (narrow eyes) were presented with false statements in order to further reinforce the priming.
After this, participants were given a word association task. In this, they were presented with a stimulus word like ‘red’ and they had to respond with the first word that came to their minds such as ‘apple’. When primed for trust, participants made general word associations (dark - night) but priming for distrust made them think of more incongruent word associations (dark - light) i.e. they associated the stimulus with things that don’t usually go together. Their mental processing of the stimuli was ‘flipped.’
Along with this, the researchers stated that “participants primed with feelings of trust were more successful at solving routine math problems, while those primed with distrust were better at finding solutions to more out-of-the-box problems”.
Conclusion
Thus, through this post we understand that a lot of our mental energies and processes are used in understanding whom to trust or distrust. Even without realizing, we’re constantly trying to solve this dilemma because it is a fundamental aspect of our social life.
Any decision that we make, helps us navigate complex and ever changing social situations in a way that helps us achieve our goals and also avoid harm. We hope this post and the related Instagram post helped you understand the nuances of ‘trust’ better. Tell us in the comments which aspects of trust you unlearned after reading this!
KEY TERMS
Priming
in simple words, it is a process through which certain associations are evoked. For e.g. red - apple - fruit. Participants are exposed to a stimuli (in this case ‘red’) which influences their response to stimuli that are later presented (on seeing red, they might be able to provide a faster response to ‘apple’ than for ‘laptop’). It occurs because ‘red’ and ‘apple’ are closely associated in memory, and priming one of the stimuli also activates the others.
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References
Bierhoff, H.-W., & Vornefeld, B. (2016). The Social Psychology of Trust with Applications in the Internet. Analyse & Kritik, 26(1), 48-62. https://doi.org/10.1515/auk-2004-0103
Oosterhof, N. N., & Todorov, A. (2008). The functional basis of face evaluation. PNAS, 105(32), 11087-11092. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0805664105
Popova, M. (2014, 2 3). The Psychology of Trust in Work and Love. BrainPickings. https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/02/03/david-desteno-truth-about-trust/
Robbins, B. G. (2015). From the general to the specific: How social trust motivates relational trust. Social Science Research, 55, 16-30. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2015.09.004
Thagard, P. (2018, 10 9). What Is Trust? Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hot-thought/201810/what-is-trust
Weir, K. (2013, 12). Something's fishy. APA Monitor on Psychology. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/12/distrust
Yaacov, S., Ruth, M., & Eugene, B. (2004). Encoding Under Trust and Distrust: The Spontaneous Activation of Incongruent Cognitions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(5), 668 - 679. 10.1037/0022-3514.86.5.668
Deepika G
Deepika did her Masters in Psychology. She is now busy handling an existential crisis or figuring out what to say next. Also a passionate proponent of the “cats are just misunderstood” agenda.
