The problem with trust surveys

There's a catastrophic lack of trust and society is fucked. I've not read through the last 25 years of the Edelman Trust Barometer but I'm guessing each year's headline is a variation on this theme.

History, however, tells society isn't fucked. The least trustworthy businesses – like Facebook, the perennial poster child for untrustworthiness – have continued to thrive, in-it-for-themselves governments still function, sometimes well, and those of us who skip the annual flu jab probably do so more out of laziness than mistrust in vaccines. Society works it seems, trust or no trust.

How we reconcile this apparent contradiction is complex. The literature of many years tells us trust does matter. And my experience as a strategist supports this: for companies and brands, being considered trustworthy lowers uncertainty and makes doing business simpler and cheaper. Being distrusted carries equal and opposite penalties.

Problems with measurement

The problem is both with our understanding of the importance of trust and how we measure it. The long-standing practice has been to use attitudinal surveys to assess the extent of trust in brands and companies, sometimes grouped with related concepts such as "consideration" (willingness to consider engaging with an entity) and "advocacy" (willingness to recommend the entity to others) and presented as one facet of reputation or brand.

The output of these polls, based on responses to questions like ‘how much do you trust company A?’, is a generalised view of trust – an overarching perception of trustworthiness in a thing or person. In contrast, in the real world – when we’re not completing surveys – we place trust in a differentiated way, taking into account the specific role or function of the company or brand. The usefulness of generalised trust scores is thin – good for headlines but of little value in helping us understand whether an entity is trusted for what it needs be trusted for.

This approach to measuring trust has many more flaws, chief among them is the failure apply a true understanding of the concept of trust to how we measure it. A universally accepted definition of trust may not exist, but for the purpose of this post, we’ll use this one: "[trust is] a psychological state involving the willingness to accept vulnerability based on positive expectations of another’s intentions or behaviour”. In simple, when we choose to trust we take a calculated risk based on positive expectations of another’s behaviour and intent, usually based on past experiences. Simply asking respondents to a survey the extent to which they find a company trustworthy captures only their opinion in a no-stakes scenario nor the calculated risk they would show in real-world.

The final flaw ignores a simple truth about how people complete surveys. If asked ‘how much do you trust company A?’ few of us will reflect deeply about our experiences of the company, if indeed we’ve had any, but instead – at best! – respond based on an overall impression. Probably because of this trust data looks very similar to data on favourability – how much we like or dislike an entity.

Trust, of course, is not the same as liking. Trust involves a more deliberate calculation about the person or thing’s reliability, integrity and competence. And the deliberate nature of trust makes it tied to specific situations and contexts.

In some areas, we might trust wholeheartedly and others not at all. What matters is what we trust for. Professor Onora O’Neill illustrated this eloquently in a much watched TED talk given over a decade ago – we might, she said, “trust a certain elementary school teacher to teach the reception class to read, but in no way to drive the school minibus”.

The same is true of companies and brands and helps us to understand the apparent contradiction of a company like Facebook performing ever more impressively despite being deeply distrusted (according to the surveys). Facebook’s revenues grew by 30% in 2018, the period covering the Cambridge Analytica scandal, arguably the company’s biggest reputation challenge, and only a doomcaster would think the culling of fact checkers or abandonment of corporate DEI policies will harm the company’s future financials. Even if users are aware of Facebook’s recent actions – only a tiny, tiny percentage of the population will will be! – it’s not something that is likely to cause them to stop using the platform. An absence of trust in some situations is not a disadvantage.

When trust is important and when it’s not

If we took trust surveys literally, the conclusion reached might be to invest in being more trusted in all situations. But not all trust is equal, and investment in earning it should be guided by a clear understanding of its value in different situations. A blanket approach to earning trust in every situation, without clear understanding of its importance, will mean unnecessary and costly inefficiencies.

For the teacher what matters is being trusted to teach, for Facebook (probably) the usability of the platform. Being trusted to drive a minibus, unless core to the job, or being trusted for the accuracy of content is possibly of little value.

A starting point for building the investment case for earning trust is to distinguish between trust that is necessary and trust that is advantageous. Basil Towers terms these types of trust ‘foundational’ and ‘competitive’.

Foundational trust underpins a business’s license to operate and, without it, a company might cease to exist. For example, a bank that was not trusted to keep its customers’ money secure would likely experience a withdrawl of deposits and a loss of liquidity, which in turn might lead to its collapse. There is, however, a ceiling on investment in foundational trust because, beyond a certain threshold, additional resources targeted at reinforcing this type of trust will yield diminishing returns. Foundational trust, such as the belief that a bank will keep customers' money secure, is a baseline expectation and once this baseline is met – when customers are convinced that their money is safe – further efforts to appear more secure than competitors are likely to add only marginal value.

Competitive trust, by comparison, goes beyond the baseline and represents a company’s ability to exceed stakeholders’ expectations in ways that differentiate it from competitors. Unlike foundational trust, competitive trust empowers companies to unlock sustainable competitive advantages – commanding preferential pricing for example, positioning themselves not just as competent and reliable, but as preferred and indispensable.

Final thoughts

Edelman’s Trust Barometer is a simple tool and probably not designed to inform trust building strategies. It is however frequently cited as evidence that trust in institutions is at is nadir and, even if the language is more tempered, society is fucked. The former might be true – a generous view compared to Professor Onora O’Neill who calls trust surveys “very bad guides to the level of trust that actually exists” – but the conclusions reached by many of its readers – “urgent action need to repair trust” – are wildly off the mark and, frankly, a little dumb.

[If interested, I'm very happy to share a list of the best literature - or, rather, my favourite - on the subject of trust. Lots of excellent books and articles worth taking time to read.]