Trust: The Scaling of Intimacy

When describing the context of the Social Age, I have often called it an evolution of our sociology, more so than a matter purely of technology. Technology is the visible change, but the thing that it changes is what interests me most – and the thing that it changes is us! Through our radical connectivity and rebalancing structures of power, through the proliferation of our communities, and the scaling of trust.

That last one surprises people, because we often talk about trust as if it is eroding (in systems and structures) and absent (in politics). In fact, it seems more likely that the location and nature of trust is what is shifting. Out of the physical and into the virtual, from the local to the global, from an emotive to a partly quantified structure.

My own thinking on Trust has evolved, partly as an outcome of the Landscape of Trust research work, and partly from my broader exploration of the Social Context of our Organisations. Certainly we use the word to describe a range of features, not a single ‘thing’, and perhaps the biggest shift is to understand that Trust is experienced predominantly as a series of systems, judgements, and things.

The ‘Systems’ of trust are both social (our tribal and familial structures), and formal (certain national, organisational, team and community structures). Our ‘Judgements’ of trust are in our gut response to ‘others’, be it at the individual or scaled social level (e.g. me and you, or Democrats vs Republicans). And the ‘Things’ of trust? These are things like seatbelts, medicines, certain digital systems and spaces, places, and events (offices, courts, ibuprofen, uniforms, parks, and electrical insulation).

When considering the evolution of Trust in the context of the Social Age, it is not the neurological foundations of trust that have changed – these are not evolutionary timescales – but rather the social and cultural context of it. The rise of ‘celebrity’ is an example of this: the way we ‘believe’ in people we have never met, form what is essentially a tribal relationship with them, and invest our trust and find a sense of belonging within their communities. The ways we are connected to our music idols, sports heroes, and social activists, at global scale, is best understood as an emergent mode of social connection that was perhaps historically reserved for our relationships with gods and emperors.

Our intimate relationships of identity and belonging now include a scaled feature of heroic, idolised, revered, and believed icons. People with whom we have a ‘relationship’ despite having never met them.