Why distrust can be good and transparency isn't the cure: Rachel Botsman on trust myths

Rachel Botsman on how trust stopped flowing upwards, the traits of trustworthiness and the benefits of distrust.

Once she’s latched onto a topic, Rachel Botsman digs endlessly. “I like very complex things that someone hasn’t simplified or that are misunderstood in some ways,” says the British author and academic. “I like unpacking them.” Studying the sharing economy, she came upon the notion of trust: How do complete strangers trust one another enough to share rides or the keys to their home? A decade later, Botsman has published a book on the topic, is teaching it to MBA students at the Sa?d Business School in Oxford and, this summer, is launching a podcast about it. Here’s our conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

Isabelle Roughol: There’s a popular narrative right now that trust is disappearing. Is it?

Rachel Botsman: This narrative that trust is in crisis, that we no longer trust the media or politicians, I think is incredibly dangerous and is actually fueling a lot of the divides, fears and extremism that we're seeing all over the world. It's far more complicated than that.

The way I think of trust is more like energy. Energy can't be destroyed, it continually changes form. What I believe is happening is that this trust for a long time in society, without really questioning it, flowed upwards to elites, to experts, to CEOS, to institutions... Technology changes that, so it’s starting to flow sideways. It's starting to become really messy through networks and platforms.

Part of what we're seeing in the world today is a trust shift, it's a power shift. It's not as simple as a trusting crisis, because when you talk about trusting crisis, it gives the idea that it's plummeting, that it's a deficit and that really isn't a true picture of what's going on.

What then makes a trustworthy person or organization?

There's a science behind this. There's sort of a left-hand side and a right-hand side. The left-hand side are your capability traits: How do you do something? That's made up of your competence — Do you have the skills and the knowledge to do what you say you're going to do? — and your reliability, which is that feeling that I can depend on you. It really comes down to time and your consistency of behaviors over time.

The other side of the equation is the why traits. It's your character traits, why you do something. And that really comes down to empathy. Do I feel like you genuinely care? Do I feel like you can take into consideration my perspective, even if it's different from yours? And then, what I think is the most important trait and the one where so many trust issues in the world lie today, is integrity. Integrity is not necessarily about being a good person. It all comes down to intentions and motives, and whether your intentions and motives are misaligned with mine.

I think the real trust crisis with Facebook is that people no longer believe their intentions. They no longer believe that their intentions are aligned with the best interests of users.

And what happens if you get it wrong? If you place your trust in the wrong person or the wrong institution?

People don't really care about trust until someone breaks it. And we've all had our trust broken. The way I can describe it best is like a virus. It overwhelms us and it becomes toxic really, really fast and quite irrational in some ways.

That's what I think is happening in the world today: it's really quite hard to describe why we don't trust the media or why we don't trust politicians because we've gone into this hot fiery state of distrust that just becomes more and more amplified, the more we talk about it.

Can we claw that back? Make that journey from distrust to trust again?

Once trust is lost, it's actually incredibly hard to regain. Some people think of trust more like a battery, right? When you meet someone, it's not that I distrust you, it's that you probably have medium trust. Neutral.

When that battery drops, there's a real difference between low trust, or ambivalence, and distrust. You actually want low trust of many things because you don't want to think about it too much. It's much easier to take a situation where you have low trust in something and then increase trust, versus complete distrust in something where you no longer have faith or confidence and you're trying to re-earn that trust back.

Can distrust ever be useful?

Distrust isn't always bad. Distrusting someone is actually helping you in some sense make good decisions. Distrust can lead to questioning and skepticism and be a really healthy thing. When it becomes blanket cynicism, that's when it's counterproductive because when it enters that state, all your energy is invested in protecting yourself. That's what the body does.

It's not a binary thing. There's actually certain situations where you want high trust and high distrust. In a boardroom, I don't want people to be so trusting that they're not questioning each other's decisions. So I think this is another sort of myth around trust, that they are separate states when in fact, I think they're always in coexistence.

Perhaps this is another myth, the idea that transparency can fix trust. Can it?

Transparency is fascinating, it's like “the cure.” Whether you're talking to regulators or even CEOs, it’s like, “If we make things transparent, it will fix all trust issues.” Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. If you need things to be transparent, you've given up on trust. More transparency doesn't create more trust. Transparency reduces the need for trust, because you know everything. 

The issue is this idea that secrecy is the enemy of trust. It's deception that is the real trust issue and transparency is not a cure for deception. The only way to treat deception is to get back to intentions and motives. I think we've gone really off the rails if we think, particularly around technology companies, that transparency's the answer. It's just not the cure. 

A shorter version of this interview is published in the August 2019 issue of Delta Sky magazine. #5MinutesWith