The Psychology of Trust in Life, Learning, and Love

The Psychology of Trust in Life, Learning, and Love

“When you trust people to help you, they often do,” Amanda Palmer asserted in her beautiful meditation onthe art of asking without shame. But what does it really mean to “trust,” and perhaps more importantly, how can we live with the potential heartbreak that lurks in the gap between “often” and “always”? That’s precisely what psychologist David DeSteno, director of Northeastern University’s Social Emotions Lab, explores in The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More (public library).

DeSteno, who has previously studied the osmosis of good and evil in all of us and the psychology of compassion and resilience, argues that matters of trust occupy an enormous amount of our mental energies and influence, directly or indirectly, practically every aspect of our everyday lives. But trust is a wholly different animal from the majority of our mental concerns. DeSteno writes:

Unlike many other puzzles we confront, questions of trust don’t just involve attempting to grasp and analyze a perplexing concept. They all share another characteristic: risk. So while it’s true that we turn our attention to many complex problems throughout our lives, finding the answers to most doesn’t usually involve navigating the treacherous landscape of our own and others’ competing desires.

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Trust implies a seeming unknowable – a bet of sorts, if you will. At its base is a delicate problem centered on the balance between two dynamic and often opposing desires – a desire for someone else to meet your needs and his desire to meet his own.

But despite what pop culture may tell us, decades’ worth of attempts to decode the signals of trustworthiness – sought in everything from facial expression to voice to handwriting – have proven virtually useless, and the last five years of research have rendered previous assertions about certain nonverbal cues wrong. (No, a sideways glance doesn’t automatically indicate that the person is lying to you.) As DeSteno wryly observes, “If polygraphs were foolproof, we wouldn’t need juries.” He explains what makes measures of trust especially complicated:

Unlike many forms of communication, issues of trust are often characterized by a competition or battle…. It’s not always an adaptive strategy to be an open book to others, or even to ourselves. Consequently, trying to discern if someone can be trusted is fundamentally different from trying to assess characteristics like mathematical ability. … Deciding to be trustworthy depends on the momentary balance between competing mental forces pushing us in opposite directions, and being able to predict which of those forces is going to prevail in any one instance is a complicated business.

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Contrary to long-held doctrine, isolated gestures and expressions aren’t reliable indicators of what a person feels or intends to do. Two types of context – what I call configural and situational – are essential for correct interpretation. And they’ve been missing in most attempts to discover what trustworthiness and its opposite look like.

To figure out this multifaceted puzzle, DeSteno, whose lab studies how emotional states shape our social and moral behavior, took a cross-disciplinary approach, turning to the work of economists, computer scientists, security officers, physiologists and other psychologists, and enlisting the direct help of social psychologist David Pizarro and economist Robert Frank. With combined expertise spanning behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, nonverbal behavior, and emotional biases in decision making, they built, with equal parts rigor and humility, the richest framework for understanding trust that science has ever accomplished. Specifically, they focused on the two main components of trust – how it works and whether we’re able to predict who deserves it. DeSteno writes:

In the end, what emerged are not only new insights into how to detect the trustworthiness of others, but also an entirely new way to think about how trust influences our lives, our success, and our interactions with those around us. . . .

One of the most profound … is that trust isn’t only a concern that emerges at big moments in our lives. It’s not relevant just to signing a contract, making a large purchase, and exchanging wedding vows. … Whether we realize it or not, issues of trust permeate our days from the time we’re born to the time we die, and it’s often what’s below the surface of consciousness that can have the greatest influence on a life well lived. Our minds didn’t develop in a social vacuum. Humans evolved living in social groups, and that means the minds of our ancestors were sculpted by the challenges posed by living with others on whom they depended. Chief among those challenges was the need to solve dilemmas of trust correctly. And it’s precisely because of this fact that the human mind constantly tries to ascertain the trustworthiness of others while also weighing the need to be trustworthy itself. Your conscious experience may not correspond with this fact, but again that’s because much of the relevant computations are automatic and take place outside of awareness.

Indeed, trust shapes how we love and how we learn, why we succeed and why we falter, what we buy and what we leave behind. Perhaps most pivotally and uncomfortably, however, trust defines our relationship with ourselves – the quality of the inward gaze and the tangle of dignity, anxiety, uncertainty, and conviction with which we hold it. DeSteno illustrates the backdrop for his exploration:

Although it’s true that cooperation and vulnerability require two parties, no one ever said that the two parties had to be different people. To the contrary, the parties can be the same person at different times. Can the present you trust the future you not to cheat on your diet by bingeing on chocolate cake? Not to cheat on an exam? Not to cheat on your spouse? Not to go gambling again?…

Each of us is never just an observer trying to ascertain whether someone else is to be trusted; we’re also targets of observation ourselves. The same forces that determine whether someone else will be honest or loyal also impinge on our own minds. Assessing the trustworthiness of another and acting trustworthy ourselves, then, are simply two sides of the same coin. Understanding how to predict and control the flip of that coin is what this book is all about.

He begins at the beginning, with a definition of what trust actually is:

At the most basic level, the need to trust implies one fundamental fact: you’re vulnerable. The ability to satisfy your needs or obtain the outcomes you desire is not entirely under your control. . . .

The social lives of humans are characterized by a never-ending struggle between different types of desires – desires favoring selfish versus selfless goals, desires focused on immediate gratification versus long-term benefit, desires stemming from the conscious versus unconscious minds. Only an overriding threat or an amazing confluence of random factors – what we’d otherwise call pure luck – can result in an exact mirroring of two people’s needs and goals at all levels.

Trust, then, is simply a bet, and like all bets, it contains an element of risk.

But risk, as we know, is something we humans are profoundly uncomfortable with – risk is an amplified form of uncertainty which, vital to the creative process as it may be, is remarkably challenging to sit with and let be. Instead, we try desperately to protect our vulnerability by safeguarding against the potential losses implied by risk – so much so that decades of psychology studies have demonstrated that we’re incredibly risk-averse in our decision-making and have a strong bias for loss: we experience far greater distress over losing something than we do delight over gaining the same thing. Why, then, do we ever take risks? DeSteno explains:

The short answer is that we have to. The potential benefits from trusting others considerably outweigh the potential losses on average. The ever-increasing complexity and resources of human society – its technological advancement, interconnected social capital, and burgeoning economic resources – all depend on trust and cooperation. . . . More can be achieved by working together than by working alone. That’s why we trust – plain and simple. The need to increase resources – whether they be financial, physical, or social – often necessitates depending on others to cooperate.

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So, we trust at times; we really don’t have much of a choice. But once we leave the world of verifiability, we inevitably come across more selfish behavior and at the same time face greater difficulty in predicting who will show it. It’s not the case that honesty and loyalty will forever disappear without transparency. As we’ll see, a dynamic equilibrium between trustworthy and untrustworthy behavior will eventually result. Where that equilibrium settles, though, is flexible, and being able to predict it is what much of this book is about.

To safeguard ourselves against how this process might go awry, we try to calculate the trustworthiness of others and adjust our own behavior accordingly. The inner workings of those calculations are what psychologists have spent decades studying. When it comes to the trust strategy that works best in life, we tend to rely on the tit-for-tat (TFT) approach in making those assessments and adjustments – in exchanges requiring trust, we start out by being fair, then copy our partner’s actions and responses. But, DeSteno points out, there is one major flaw with this strategy: It doesn’t account for “noise” in the system, meaning those instances where our intentions and our actions disconnect – we breach trust without intending to do so and deceive others by mistake. DeSteno illustrates the problems such noise creates:

Consider the following: two well-intentioned people adopt the TFT strategy for deciding whether to be cooperative with each other. All goes well for a while, but then one of these unintended slights occurs. Person A believes that Person B “defected” on her (whether defection here means intentionally revealing a secret, skimming profits, not working hard enough, etc.), when in actuality Person B’s behavior was accidental (i.e., she didn’t intend to act in an untrustworthy manner). Assuming they both adhere to TFT, the death spiral begins. While tit-for-tat can recover from defections when used against many strategies, this isn’t the case when it’s used against itself. The result is that noise in the system can doom what otherwise appeared to be the superior strategy.

DeSteno points to the work of mathematicians Martin Nowak and Karl Sigmund, who have studied how such noise affects cooperative strategies. To their own surprise, the researchers found in a series of experience that tit-for-tat didn’t emerge as the ideal strategy. Instead, what dominated was a close cousin, which they called “generous tit-for-tat” (GTFT) – an approach somewhat more forgiving than TFT, in which people occasionally chose to cooperate even after their partner had defected. With this extra helping of forgiveness, they were able to overcome that system noise and continue to cooperate smoothly. The most striking finding, however, is that GTFT had a significant flaw – it resulted in a sort of habituation to defection, which over the long run provided fertile ground for exploitation by the dishonest. DeSteno explains the immutable human condition this reveals:

GTFT continued to dominate, the population as a whole became more and more trustworthy. Once everyone is a saint, no one expects to be cheated; everyone cooperates. As a result, the situation becomes ripe for the dishonest. It’s a con man’s paradise; everyone trusts by default. When a random mutation favoring defection again emerges, it’s initially unstoppable. The defectors propagate and gain dominance, pushing more cooperative strategies almost to extinction, only then to decline as the trusting and cooperative reemerge. The insight here is to realize that trust isn’t about finding the perfect single strategy – there isn’t one. It’s about realizing that selfishness and cooperation, disloyalty and trustworthiness, exist in an ever-changing equilibrium. It’s always been that way; it always will.

To bypass this conundrum, we often end up navigating problems of trust through reputation, a manifestation of what psychologists term indirect reciprocity, in which we learn and benefit from a peer’s experience. In an ideal world where accurate reputational information is always on hand, the tit-for-tat strategies that begin with fairness-first unconditional trust become less adaptive – if reputation tells us someone we’re meeting for the first time isn’t to be trusted, automatically trusting her unconditionally is a recipe for disaster.

This leads to a beneficial byproduct of reputation: it propagates trustworthy behavior in general, since everyone is suddenly faced with what economists call the shadow of the future – the notion that if you act dishonestly towards someone, word will spread and your negative reputation will precede you in moving forward, significantly damaging your social capital. It’s a risk all the more tangible amidst our age of networked information.

But the most profound findings about trust come from the domain of our greatest vulnerability: love. DeSteno explains what makes this context different from any other arena of trust:

Although it’s true that all types of adult relationships – friendships, business partnerships, team memberships – involve some level of joint dependence for success, their spheres of influence are usually fairly narrow, meaning that individual breaches of trust, though unwelcome, don’t necessarily make one feel universally vulnerable. But this statement comes with one big caveat: love. When it comes to romantic relationships, most adults can have their seeming self-sufficiency momentarily obliterated. It’s not that we become paralyzed or cognitively helpless. We can still reason, research, and analyze. We can still work, cook, and plan for retirement. What we can’t do, though, is turn off that burning desire to connect with a partner – to share, to merge, to depend on, to bare our souls to him or her.

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The losses, real and emotional, that accompany knowing the person you love has decided to leave you – or at least wants to leave you – can make almost any other loss seem trivial by comparison.

And yet, even though a romantic context complicates things, trust still functions in the same basic way – it’s about being sensitive to the future. With a romantic partner, we weigh not only the costs and benefits of the present, but also…