The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More

213 Pages·2014·1.73 MB·English

by  David DeSteno

HUDSON STREET PRESS
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(USA) LLC, 2014
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Version_1
To my wife and daughters
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1. Fundamentals, Foibles, and Fixes: What Is Trust, Anyway?
Chapter 2. Built to Trust? How Our Biology Determines Whom We Trust and
Why
Chapter 3. In the Beginning: Learning to Trust and Trusting to Learn
Chapter 4. The Heart of the Matter: Trust in Romantic Relationships
Chapter 5. Power and Money: Trust Among the One Percent and Their
Wannabes
Chapter 6. Can I Trust You? Unlocking the Signals of Trustworthiness
Chapter 7. Cybertrust: The Risks and Rewards of Trusting Those You Virtually
Know
Chapter 8. Can You Trust Yourself? Why You May Not Know Yourself as Well
as You Think You Do
Chapter 9. Trust or Dust? In the End, It’s Usually One or the Other
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
PREFACE
C
an I trust you? This question—this set of four simple words—often occupies
our minds to a degree few other concerns can. It’s a question on which we exert
a lot of mental effort—often without our even knowing it—as its answers have
the potential to influence almost everything we do. Unlike many other puzzles
we confront, questions of trust don’t just involve attempting to grasp and analyze
a perplexing concept. They all share another characteristic: risk. So while it’s
true that we turn our attention to many complex problems throughout our lives,
finding the answers to most doesn’t usually involve navigating the treacherous
landscape of our own and others’ competing desires. When we’re young, asking
why the sky is blue or why pizza can’t be for dinner every night, though
sometimes seeming of equal cosmic importance, necessitates only the
transmission of facts to answer. Wondering what exactly a Higgs boson is or
whether anything out of the ordinary really happened at Roswell can, it’s true,
keep the gears of the mind whirring. For most of us, though, attempts to find
answers to these questions won’t keep us up at night. And while asking our
financial advisor for the eighth time how to calculate compound interest might
require stepping up our mental math, in and of itself, finding the answer is fairly
formulaic. Bring the word trust into the equation, however, and it suddenly
becomes a whole different story.
Trust implies a seeming unknowable—a bet of sorts, if you will. At its base
is a delicate problem centered on the balance between two dynamic and often
opposing desires—a desire for someone else to meet your needs and his desire to
meet his own. Whether a child can trust her parents’ answer to her question
about the color of the sky requires estimating not only their scientific bona fides,
but also their desire to appear smart even if they really don’t know the answer.
Whether she can trust them to make pizza for dinner, rather than simply ask why
she can’t have it every night, relies on divining her parents’ willingness to
uphold their promise to cook in the face of sudden needs to work late or to take
an extra trip to the grocery store to refill an empty pantry. Whether you can trust
scientists to tell you why searching for the Higgs or related subatomic particles
is worth the huge taxpayer expense, rather than ask them to simply provide a
definition for what the little particle is, means pitting everyone’s desire to
acquire knowledge that can lead to a better world against the scientists’ related
desires to pad their research budgets. The same logic even applies to trusting
yourself. Think about it. Whether you can trust that you’ll invest your next
paycheck for the long term as opposed to spending it immediately to purchase
the newest iPad is quite different from figuring out how much money you’ll have
in twenty years if you do choose to invest it. Whether we’re talking about
money, fidelity, social support, business dealings, or secret-keeping, trust isn’t
just about the facts. It’s about trying to predict what someone will do based on
competing interests and capabilities. In short, it’s about gambling on your ability
to read someone’s mind, even if that someone is your future self.
Like all gambles, though, assessing trustworthiness is an imperfect
endeavor; there’s always a chance you’re going to come up short. Sure, most of
us have theories about what signals whether people can be trusted. Do they
stumble over their words or avert their gaze? Do they seem too “smooth”? Did
they “come through” last time? The problem, of course, is that most of us have
also had the all-too-frequent experience of being surprised when our guesses
turned out to be wrong. We’re not alone, however; deception “experts” and
security professionals haven’t proved much better. Until very recently, there’s
been precious little evidence indicating that anyone can accurately determine if
someone else can be trusted, especially if they don’t know the individual well.
Scientists have spent decades looking for markers of trustworthiness in the
body, face, voice, penmanship, and the like, all to little avail. Forget what you
see on television; it’s all science fiction. If polygraphs were foolproof, we
wouldn’t need juries. After all, the list of famous criminals who were found
guilty based on polygraphs doesn’t include the likes of CIA-spy-turned-traitor
Aldrich Ames and “Green River Killer” Gary Ridgway, both of whom “passed”
this physiological test. Likewise, there wouldn’t be a long list of people who had
to endure false accusations based on failed polygraph tests—people like Bill
Wegerle of Wichita, Kansas, who was initially suspected of being the BTK killer.
Entertaining movies and television shows aside, the same criticisms apply to the
use of facial expressions. If a single smile or twitch could accurately predict who
could be trusted, all negotiations would occur under a spotlight with video
recordings. Science, put simply, doesn’t yet have all the answers to unlocking the
mysteries of trust. Still, finding the keys is of such importance that the business
community and the military spend millions of dollars a year trying to do just
that. In fact, current knowledge has been so limited that the Intelligence
Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)—one of the central research
units under the Director of National Intelligence—published a notice in 2009
specifically soliciting scientific proposals to develop new and more accurate
methods to gauge a target’s trustworthiness.
This state of affairs raises some questions, however: If the need to trust is so
central to humans, why is it so difficult to figure out who is worthy of it? Why
after millennia of evolutionary development and decades of scientific inquiry are
answers only beginning to emerge? To my mind, there are two good reasons.
The first, as I’ve hinted, is that unlike many forms of communication, issues of
trust are often characterized by a competition or battle. As we’ll see, it’s not
always an adaptive strategy to be an open book to others, or even to ourselves.
Consequently, trying to discern if someone can be trusted is fundamentally
different from trying to assess characteristics like mathematical ability. Aptitude
in math can be estimated from answers to specific types of problems. Unless the
person is a genius trying to pull the wool over your eyes, there shouldn’t be any
competing interests pushing her answers one way or another. As a result, her
answers should, on average, serve as accurate indicators of her true abilities and
be solid predictors of how she’ll perform in the future. With trust, neither of
these facts is necessarily true. As we’ll see throughout this book, deciding to be
trustworthy depends on the momentary balance between competing mental
forces pushing us in opposite directions, and being able to predict which of those
forces is going to prevail in any one instance is a complicated business.
The second reason why assessing trustworthiness remains something of an
enigma is that, to put it bluntly, we’ve been going about it in precisely the wrong
way. I don’t say this lightly, as many great minds have been focused on this topic
for decades. Yet it’s also the case that this intense focus has led to a tunnel vision
of sorts that often results in dead ends among the research community and
simplistic expectations among the public. Everyone is looking for the one golden
cue that predicts trustworthiness in all situations. Everyone assumes that
trustworthiness is a fairly stable trait. Everyone believes that they know when
and how issues of trust will affect them. The problem, though, is that they’re
mostly wrong; trust just doesn’t work the way most people think.
How do I know? I could say, “Trust me,” but that would defeat the whole
point. I’m a scientist, so my goal is to convince you based on findings—not on
opinions or testimonials. I should note that I haven’t spent my life as a trust
researcher, a security professional, or a science writer. To the contrary, I spend
my days running a lab focused on one primary theme: how and why emotional
states guide social and moral behavior. It’s been an endeavor characterized by
both great discoveries and never-ending questions. It’s one that has allowed my
research group to plumb the depths of the best and worst humanity has to offer.
Whether we’re uncovering the processes that give rise to dishonesty and
hypocrisy or shedding light on the wonders of compassion and virtue, the task at
hand always requires a lot of creativity and a willingness to go where the data
lead. It’s also a job that requires a bit of humility. The longer I do it, the more I
realize that the best way to answer perennially difficult questions is not to go it
alone, but rather to bring the best minds from many different fields together to
look at old problems in new ways. This is exactly the perspective that my group
brought to studying trust, and it’s one that has allowed us to approach the issue
with an entirely new perspective.
Why the interest in trust in the first place? Primarily because the more we
examined vacillations in emotions and moral behavior, the more we realized that
trust often played a central role. Whether it’s wondering if a partner might cheat,
needing to show that you recognize a responsibility to repay a debt, or desiring
to signal that your abilities are up to the challenge, issues of trust rear their head.
Jealousy and anger often stem from distrust of the loyalty of a partner. Showing
gratitude stands as an efficient way to let people know you realize you owe them
a favor. Quick flashes of pride can signal people that they can trust your
competence. In short, much of human social life, and the emotions that revolve
around it, invokes issues of trust in one way or another. Given this fact, my
research group turned its lens on the dual aspects of trust—both how it works
and whether and how people can accurately predict who is worthy of it. In so
doing, we began an in-depth and novel investigation that traipsed across many
traditionally separate fields of inquiry. In the end, what emerged are not only
new insights into how to detect the trustworthiness of others, but also an entirely
new way to think about how trust influences our lives, our success, and our
interactions with those around us.
Still, of all the things I learned, one of the most profound—and the one I
hope you’ll take from this book—is that trust isn’t only a concern that emerges at
big moments in our lives. It’s not relevant just to signing a contract, making a
large purchase, and exchanging wedding vows. Yes, these events certainly affect