The Other Day #4 - The Currency of Trust

The other day I was working in front of the large bay window in our living room that looks out over our front yard and was perplexed when I saw my neighbor’s son walking down our street, picking up gumballs. Not the multicolored orbs of sugar and food coloring that have kept many a dentist in business for the last 100 years. No, these gumballs are brown and covered with fishhook-shaped barbs that grab onto anything they contact with the tenacity of a four-year old experiencing her first lollipop. They are the seedpods that the American sweetgum tree produces by the thousands every year and that have been the bane of existence for homeowners all over my local township for nearly 50 years.

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In fact, when we bought our house, thirteen years ago, the husband in the couple we purchased it from pulled me aside as we were getting the tour and said, as he kicked at a small pile of these seedpods, “I want you to have this house. It’s a wonderful neighborhood for your kids to grow up. It’s been very good to us, but these damn things will drive you crazy. Trust me.” If I’d only known how true those words were.

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“Trust” is a word you hear all the time if you work in marketing. It’s the rare creative brief that doesn’t list Trust as one of the desired attributes for the brand. I’ve done a good deal of work for healthcare and financial services clients and the concept of being trusted by their customers is paramount. Makes sense. When you are asking people to let you care for their health or their money, trust is the ultimate goal. It’s the result of demonstrating expertise, empathy, commitment and transparency.

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How does one go about becoming trusted? Do you earn it? Establish it? Win it? Build it? Is it circumstantial? Situational? Once you have it, how do you lose it? Can you regain it and when you do is it a different kind of trust than the first time you had it? Is it weaker? Stronger?

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Most psychologists agree that trust developed as an evolutionary behavior. It evolved over time to help the species survive. Humans are born with a predisposition to make social connections. Newborns are helpless and entirely dependent on others to survive and within one hour of birth begin making eye contact, and within just a few hours begin mimicking their caretaker’s expressions. This is called mirroring. Both of these behaviors are deeply connected to communicating trust.

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There is also plenty of evidence that people maintain high levels of trust as they mature. It feels good. It’s comforting. It feels safe. It is, for many, the default state. Sometimes all that’s needed to develop trust is a handshake or a pat on the back. Touch is one of the most effective ways to communicate trust. Of course, some people are more suspicious than others, often based on having misplaced their trust and suffering the consequences. However, even those who are more wary are continuously looking for reasons to trust. We want to trust. It makes us feel secure and safe.

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We often look to third parties to help us decide if someone is worthy of our trust. I trust you, so I can trust them if you trust them. Advertisers rely on this frequently, engaging in an activity referred to as “borrowing brand equity.” If we align ourselves with a brand that our target customers already have an affinity for, we anticipate that some of that good feeling will spill over. Think of the last time someone you trust said, “I want to introduce you to my good friend...”

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So, if we are born with an innate tendency to trust others, as a part of a successful survival strategy, and we acknowledge that it is desirable to be in trusting relationships, why so much effort around creating trust? Why do we assume trust doesn’t exist and needs to be created? What if we initiated contact presuming that trust was there and focused our efforts on validating the decision to trust or, even better, rewarding friends, colleagues, customers, even strangers, for trusting us from the get-go? What would this look like? Would they mirror our behavior?

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As it turns out, my neighbor wasn’t collecting gumballs for his own benefit. He was doing it because he loves my dog, Bailey. Whenever she sees him during our morning walks, she makes a beeline for him, like those TikTok videos of people being reacquainted with some wild animal they saved five years earlier. He had seen the discomfort they caused her when trying to navigate our street, like a minefield of loose Legos strewn across a hardwood floor. Bailey tends to be a little skittish around most people but for some reason, she has always seemed to have unconditional trust in him, and he wanted to repay her.