The Truth About Trust

The Truth About Trust: How it Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More (Hudson Street Press/Penguin Group, NY, 2014) by David DeSteno and reviewed by Steve Gladis.

1.????Overview: David DeSteno’s six rules of trust are founded in experimentation: 1) Trust is risky but necessary. We need to use trust every day and rely on our instincts. 2) Trust permeates our lives. Trust is about integrity and competence, at work, with friends and at home. 3) Consider motives, not just reputation. One’s motivations in the instant are a more reliable predictor of trustworthiness than the reputation of the past. 4) Pay attention to clusters of nonverbals. Using the cues of crossed arms, leaning away, and touching the face and hands—in constellation—can reliably predict untrustworthiness. 5) Appreciate the benefits of illusion. Best to err on the side of trusting your loved ones—though not always accurate, it preserves long-term relationships. 6) Cultivate trust from the bottom up. Most of us rely on top-down “willpower” to resist untrustworthy behavior. We also need to learn to read nonverbals—trust from the bottom up.

2.????How Honest Are We? In an experiment, subjects were asked to flip a coin and make a choice. Heads: You get an easy assignment; tails you get a much tougher assignment. Subjects were surveyed before the experiment about staying true to flipping a coin and being honest about it—100% agreed. However, 90% lied about the results when left alone. Many did not flip it at all, and some kept flipping until they got the results they wanted!

3.????The Basics: Trust is about competing interests between you and another and being able to predict what someone (even you) will do in the future. We need to trust to achieve more together than we ever could alone—we prosper when we collaborate.?Being trustworthy isn’t etched in stone; rather it’s subject to timing, risks, and circumstances—often invisible to us. Trust is both situational and temporal—tradeoffs between now and the future. The question is, will someone cheat you in the moment for immediate gain or remain trustworthy for long-term gain? We even do this with ourselves—believing that we will be better in the future than in the present (I’ll start my diet on Monday). Self-regulation stands at the center of trust. Two factors of trust are integrity and competence.

4.????The Biology of Trust: “In the end, biology all comes down to protecting and providing resources for people on your own team.” We give off the drug oxytocin when we trust, and we trust more when we give it off. Understanding the polyvagal theory helps. The vagus nerve controls the heart and other organs. Calm, deep breathing can add vagal tone, slow down the heart, and give off oxytocin, and it causes trust to soar.?More primitive connections to our threat center can turn our minds into distrustful reptiles, which run either to avoid being eaten or to eat the threat! Caution: Oxytocin can help your in-group (family and friends) but act as a threat to out-groups. Keep in mind that “biology is about optimization, not virtue.”

5.????Money, Power, and Trust: More money can make us feel like we don’t need others; thus, we become less trustworthy because we don’t have to worry about future relationships with such people. Power’s the same. Not needing people can make you look at them as expendable. Power is a drug that can make you a better liar because it holds sway over people. But it can backfire—ask any politician who has strayed from trust. Also, avoid focusing on money; it makes us selfish.?

6.????To Trust or Not to Trust: We detect deception at about a 54% level—a bit better than flipping a coin. Despite previous research to the contrary, there’s no “golden cue” to detect deception—not smirks, shifty eyes, or sneers—especially in isolation. However, context does matter—configured and situational context. Configural context means that we have to see an array of gestures to properly interpret veracity. The situational context deals with circumstances or with people expressing the gesture. For example, a smile by someone similar to us (gender, race, class) will be considered support, whereas a similar smile by someone in a different social category may not be.

7.????The Truth Telling Trust Experiment: Researchers set out to find baseline gestures that signaled trust. Subjects played a “trust” game with other people and a sophisticated robot. Analyzing the videos, researchers discovered four (4) cues that, when in a constellation (together), determined if someone was untrustworthy: 1) Crossed Arms; 2) Leaning Away; 3) Face Touching; and 4) Hand Touching. Crossed arms and leaning away means “I don’t like you.” Face and hand touching means “I’m thinking about how to screw you over!” When people saw clusters of these nonverbals in their partners, they tended to predict distrust well.

8.????Testing for Competence: Since trust is about honesty and competence, the authors also tested for competency.?Findings: 1) The expressions for pride and status cued well for competence. 2) Such gestures as expanded posture, head tilted upwards, arms open and raised and decreased gazing at others demonstrated competency, just as pride did. 3) Pride can push people to get better. 4) Hubris—undeserved pride—gets rejected.