Intuition and Trustworthiness
Imagine you encounter a scenario requiring you to make a decision involving a high level of uncertainty about the outcome and, if it goes wrong, would leave you vulnerable to substantial consequences (financial or other).
Making a decision under those circumstances, and others involving lower potential risks and vulnerabilities, involves the process of assessing the trustworthiness of others.
Irrespective of the scenario, it’s likely you will automatically rely on your intuition to process your trustworthiness assessment and reach a decision – trust or don’t trust based on your assessment of trustworthiness, coupled with the level of uncertainty, potential vulnerability and your risk threshold.
This is a natural process, developed over millennia, to protect your interests when time is of the essence. Hopefully it leads to the right decision, but this isn’t a guaranteed outcome.
However, your intuitive judgment isn’t purely instinctive; it is significantly influenced by your personal disposition to trust. And your disposition is largely shaped by past experiences (particularly from early childhood). Whether we are naturally inclined to give others the benefit of the doubt or to approach them with caution, our disposition shapes how we perceive and interpret cues related to trustworthiness.
Let’s assume you are now part of a group of people at your company tasked with making a high-stakes decision involving significant uncertainty about the outcome and, if it goes wrong, would leave the company vulnerable to substantial consequences (financial or other).
Like the earlier scenario, your disposition to trust will likely be different to that of others. And to further complicate matters, your own disposition may have been forged in circumstances quite different to those you and your colleagues now face.
Can you rely on your disposition, perhaps formed in low-risk circumstances, when you are inclined to give others the benefit of the doubt? What about your colleagues?
The problem in business is that a collective decision is frequently required. That means it is entirely possible each decision-maker will reach a different conclusion about trustworthiness, perceived uncertainty and level of vulnerability based on their individual disposition which is expressed through their intuition.
This can lead to:
?As you can see, intuition and trustworthiness are deeply intertwined concepts that shape our daily interactions and decisions.
Our intuitive sense of whether someone is trustworthy often guides how we engage with them, influencing everything from personal relationships to professional collaborations and important business decisions.
That’s why understanding the impact of personal disposition on intuition and understanding the trust process more deeply is crucial. Those with a high disposition to trust might quickly form positive impressions, potentially overlooking warning signs, while individuals with a low disposition to trust may struggle to build meaningful connections due to excessive skepticism.
By examining how our inherent tendencies affect our intuitive judgments, we can learn to balance intuition with rational analysis, leading to more accurate and reliable assessments of trustworthiness, uncertainty and vulnerability.
This article provides a high-level exposition of:
Factors Shaping Disposition to Trust
There are several factors at play in the development of our disposition to trust.
1. Past Experiences:
Individuals with a history of positive interactions and relationships tend to develop a higher disposition to trust. Their intuition is more likely to give others the benefit of the doubt. Such experiences are formed from a very young age (from birth to age 5 generally) and are gradually built upon later in life.
Conversely, those who have faced betrayal or deceit may develop a lower disposition to trust, leading their intuition to be more skeptical and cautious.
Both can last a lifetime.
One can imagine a very young child experiencing relationship deprivation or harm will later in life carry these experiences to form a considerably lower disposition to trust than someone who has benefited from a more positive childhood created by loving parents and extended family.
2. Personality Traits:
Optimistic individuals generally have a higher disposition to trust, viewing others more favourably and trusting their intuition to make positive assessments.
On the other hand, cynical or pessimistic individuals are more likely to have a lower disposition to trust, which makes their intuition lean towards doubt and suspicion, thereby taking much longer to trust someone.
3. Cultural and Social Influences:
Cultures that emphasise community and collectivism often foster a higher disposition to trust, while those that prioritise individualism (found in many Western countries) may encourage a more cautious approach.
Similarly, supportive and cooperative social environments enhance the disposition to trust, positively influencing intuitive judgments.
Mechanisms of Influence on Trustworthiness Assessment
There are several mechanisms that influence our assessment of trustworthiness.
1. Perception and Interpretation of Cues:
Individuals with a high disposition to trust are more likely to interpret ambiguous cues positively. For example, a friendly gesture or a casual remark might be seen as sincere and trustworthy.
On the other hand, those with a low disposition to trust might interpret the same cues with suspicion, perceiving them as potentially manipulative or insincere.
2. Attention and Focus:
A high disposition to trust leads individuals to focus on positive behaviours and overlook minor inconsistencies, reinforcing their intuitive belief in the person's trustworthiness.
Alternatively, a low disposition to trust makes individuals more attuned to potential red flags, leading them to notice and give weight to minor discrepancies that might undermine trust.
3. Emotional Responses:
A trusting disposition often results in positive emotional responses to others' actions, which can enhance intuitive feelings of trustworthiness.
However, individuals with a lower disposition to trust might experience guarded or negative emotional responses, dampening their intuitive trust.
Here are some examples of how these mechanisms can play out.
1. Workplace Assessments:
A manager with a high disposition to trust might intuitively believe in a new employee's potential and integrity based on a few positive interactions, leading to supportive behaviour that can foster the employee's growth.
Another manager, with a lower disposition to trust, might be more guarded and skeptical, requiring extensive evidence before feeling comfortable with the employee’s trustworthiness.
2. Personal Relationships:
An individual with a trusting disposition might quickly form close bonds with new acquaintances, intuitively sensing their goodwill and authenticity.
Someone with a lower disposition to trust may take much longer to develop close relationships, relying more on observed consistency over time to build trust.
Balancing Intuition and Disposition to Trust
As noted earlier, personal intuition is deeply influenced by our disposition to trust when assessing someone's trustworthiness. This influence affects the perception and interpretation of cues, attention and focus, and emotional responses.
Recognising and balancing this influence can lead to more accurate and reliable intuitive assessments, and enhanced decision-making. Here are some ways to balance this influence.
1. Awareness and Reflection:
Understanding your disposition to trust can help you recognise how it influences your intuition. Reflecting on past experiences and outcomes can provide insights into whether intuitive judgments have been accurate.
Being aware of this influence allows you to balance your intuition with rational analysis, helping to mitigate the impact of an overly high or low disposition to trust.
2. Seeking Feedback:
Seeking feedback from trusted peers or mentors can provide an external perspective, helping to validate or challenge your intuitive assessments.
Engaging with individuals who have different dispositions to trust can offer a broader perspective and reduce the risk of biased intuitive judgments.
What Are the Pros and Cons of Using Intuition to Assess Trustworthiness?
Intuition can play an important role in judging someone's trustworthiness, especially when there is limited time or information to make a more thorough, rational assessment. Intuition is our ‘gut feeling’ (but it really comes from the brain) or instinct about a person or situation based on subtle cues and our subconscious processing of information.
In moderate to high-risk contexts where trusting the wrong person could lead to significant harm or negative consequences, relying on intuition has both pros and cons that need to be carefully considered.
Potential Pros of Using Intuition to Assess Trustworthiness:
1. Speed:
Intuition allows us to quickly size someone up and get an initial read on them without an extensive interaction or background check. In time-sensitive situations, going with our gut may be the only viable option. This is good in low uncertainty/vulnerability situations but not so much in higher stakes scenarios.
2. Subconscious pattern recognition:
Our brains are very good at subconsciously picking up on subtle verbal, non-verbal and behavioural cues and identifying patterns that may signal untrustworthy motives or character. Intuition taps into this ability. This assumes our brains have been trained for accurate pattern recognition.
3. Filling in gaps:
When we have limited concrete information about someone, intuition can help fill in the gaps by extrapolating based on the cues and impressions we do pick up on. It expands the data points we have to work with. Again, this assumes we’re able to accurately read cues and impressions.
4. Emotional attunement:
Intuition involves an emotional component e.g. feelings of unease versus comfort and safety with a person. This emotional radar can alert us to potential hidden threats or ill intent not obvious from surface-level data. This is where your brain stimulates emotional signals and creates ‘gut feel’.
Potential Cons and Limitations of Intuition When Assessing Trustworthiness:
1. Bias and prejudice:
Intuition is shaped by our past experiences, beliefs, and even prejudices and stereotypes. This can lead to unfairly judging someone as untrustworthy based on superficial characteristics like appearance, race, gender, age, etc.
2. Overconfidence:
We may put too much stock in our intuitive hunches and neglect to rationally examine concrete evidence. Intuition can make us unjustifiably certain of our snap judgments.
3. Manipulability:
Skilled deceivers are adept at giving off false signals and manipulating others' perceptions. Con artists and sociopaths often initially come across as charming and trustworthy. Intuition can be fooled by these masks.
4. Inconsistency:
Different people's intuitive assessments of the same individual can vary widely based on their own personalities, biases and instincts. Intuition is subjective and far less consistent than careful reasoning.
5. Lack of evidence:
At the end of the day, intuition is not proof or rational evidence of untrustworthiness. Accusing someone of being untrustworthy based solely on a gut feeling is often unjustified and unfair.
Here are some examples to illustrate these points.
Pros:
Getting an instinctive bad feeling about someone you just met who is asking to borrow a large sum of money, even though they are superficially friendly and give plausible reasons. Heeding that unease and saying no could avoid being scammed.
Cons:
Deciding not to hire an otherwise qualified job candidate because something about them doesn't "feel right," when that feeling likely stems from unconscious bias against their demographic background. The faulty intuition leads to an unfair and unethical outcome.
While intuition can be a useful tool for assessing trustworthiness in moderate to high stakes situations, especially when time is limited, it also has major limitations and downsides.
Intuition should be combined with rational evaluation of all available information whenever possible.
Gut feelings can point us in the right direction but should not be solely relied upon to make crucial trust decisions that could have major ramifications if we get it wrong.
Should the Reasons Behind Intuitive Judgements be Made Explicit?
Making the reasons behind intuitive judgments explicit can be a highly valuable process when it comes to important decisions. It allows us to critically examine the basis for our gut feelings and identify potential flaws or biases in our thinking. By articulating the reasons, we can better evaluate their validity and see if they hold up to scrutiny.
Benefits of Making Reasons Explicit:
1. Identifying bias:
When we unpack our intuitions, we may discover that they are anchored in unfair biases, stereotypes or prejudices. This allows us to reconsider and avoid acting on discriminatory hunches.
2. Finding logical flaws:
Explicitly stating our reasons helps reveal any logical inconsistencies, unreasonable assumptions, or cognitive distortions behind our intuitions. We can then address these issues.
3. Incorporating additional information:
The process of articulating reasons often leads us to seek out and integrate relevant facts and data we may have initially overlooked. This creates a more robust basis for decisions.
4. Enabling discussion:
Explicit reasons can be discussed and debated with others, opening our intuitions to outside input that may constructively change our perspective. Keeping reasons implicit precludes this.
5. Learning from mistakes:
If we do make the wrong choice, having clearly stated reasons helps us trace back where our intuitions led us astray so we can learn and improve our judgment in the future.
However, making reasons explicit is not a foolproof safeguard and we must be aware of some limits.
1. Rationalisation:
We may just invent plausible sounding reasons after the fact to justify what are actually emotionally-driven intuitions. The stated reasons may not be the real ones.
2. Incomplete information:
Even explicitly stated reasons are limited by the information we have to work with. Crucial facts may still be missing from our reasoning without us realising it.
3. Overcomplication:
For some simpler decisions, engaging in an extensive process of explicating reasons may be unnecessary and wasteful. The costs may outweigh the benefits.
4. Paralysis:
Taking apart every intuition can sometimes lead to overthinking, second-guessing and decision paralysis. We must know when to stop reasoning and act.
Making the reasons behind intuitions explicit is a highly beneficial practice for important decisions as it can reveal flaws, integrate relevant information, and enable learning. However, it is not an absolute guarantee against error and must be done judiciously.
We rely heavily on our natural intuition when assessing trustworthiness, and perceived uncertainty and vulnerability when making all sorts of decisions.
However, our intuition is heavily influenced by our unique disposition to trust (life experiences and personality traits) and this creates the distinct possibility of making incorrect decisions.
A combination of intuition and reasoned analysis, with reasons made appropriately explicit, is often optimal for the most crucial choices we face. But we must always remain aware that even our most thoughtful decisions are fundamentally uncertain and fallible.
Get in touch if you would like to know more about how to assess and demonstrate trustworthiness to make the right decisions and garner the support of your stakeholders.
Until next time.