Is Trust Harder These Days?
Some years ago, I was invited to give a talk at a global bank in Italy, about trust. As ‘an expert’ they said. I remember the moment the email pinged in. I was propped up in bed with my laptop, and instinctively looked up at the ceiling, where a brown stain was spreading after a leak during a recent torrential storm. I had been anxiously glancing at it for weeks now, monitoring the spread of its frilly brown edges, imagining rotting beams and collapsing plaster. I had googled the names of roofers, read online reviews, asked neighbours for recommendations. But at the last minute, I kept balking.
What was stopping me?
Trust.
Each time I imagined employing a roofer to fix the leak, I saw myself being taken for a ride. I knew nothing about roofs and leaks, and being unable to climb up to see the damage for myself, felt unable to reassure myself that any tradesperson was telling me the truth. They might quote two hundred pounds to fix the leak. They might quote tens of thousands and insist on a new roof. I was paralysed, given the leap of trust I had to make. And the stain kept growing.
So me, an ‘expert on trust’? I didn’t think so.
And if I was honest, I didn’t only worry about being ripped off by tradespeople. Entering my banking password on my laptop, I felt terrified. Giving out my phone number? No. Sometimes I even wondered if I fully trusted the people I was closest to, my friends, even my spouse. It didn’t seem to come instinctively to me, as perhaps it ought to.
Trust didn’t feel all soft-focus and pillowy.
Trust felt like a risk.
Creator: George Jackman for Queensland Newspapers Pty Ltd. Location: Ascot, Brisbane, Queensland. Date: Undated View this image at the State Library of Queensland: http://hdl.handle.net/10462/deriv/119892
It is common to state that we live in an age of mistrust, surrounded by deepfakes, algorithm-chasing content, and increasingly tenuous social ties and political polarisation. It’s little wonder that, according to the World Happiness Report, there has been a huge decline in trust in recent years, not only in how we view governments and banks, but also our fellow citizens, neighbours and even friends.
In such a situation, it is more critical than ever to understand what trust is and how we build it. And one place to start is by turning the idea that trust is supposed to feel good on its head. The philosopher Onora O’Neill, who gave the 2002 BBC Reith lectures on ‘A Question of Trust’ wrote that talk of a ‘crisis in trust’ can sometimes express an ‘unrealistic hankering after a world in which safety and compliance are total and breaches of trust are totally eliminated’, a world where trusting each other is uncomplicated and easy. And that, my friend, is not our world.
Once, we lived in relatively small, interdependent communities, where it was easier to rely on others to act honestly. In the mid 1990s, the Swedish economist Axel Leijonhufvud gave a glimpse into what this kind of community might have looked like. He studied the life of a man Bodo, a peasant living in a rural parish in 10th century France. Mapping all the items Bodo touched or consumed in a year – from the bed he slept in to the food he ate - Leijonhufvud proposed that nearly all of them were created by people known directly to Bodo, or at least remembered by him if they had died. The costs of lying or cheating in a small, densely interwoven community like Bodo’s would have been high, since failing to keep up your end of the bargain might leave you ostracised or worse. Sometimes these kinds of communities are called ‘high-trust’ . Though actually, it is more accurate to call them ‘low-trust’, because trust – at least in the way we understand it today – was hardly required at all.
Trust is what we need when there are no assurances or safety nets. Trust is all that’s left when the guarantees run out.
Maybe if I lived in a community like Bodo’s, it would have been psychologically simpler to employ someone to fix my roof. But I don’t. (And let’s be clear: with high levels of suspiciousness towards outsiders and deep-rooted misogyny, I’m relieved not to!). In Europe, ideas about trust began to change in the eighteenth century, as cities grew and became more international. The German historian Ute Frevert argues that in the nineteenth century, the definition of the word ‘trust’ changed. Earlier encyclopaedias and dictionaries had primarily defined ‘trust’ as something you put in God, akin to ‘faith’. But by the early twentieth century, the leading definition of trust was not religious but secular. Trust was what you put in other people. This change grew out of a moment when cities rapidly expanded, and travel became easier. You might more regularly find yourself cooperating with strangers who made promises and then vanished, or else collaborating with people on the other end of a long manufacturing chain who you had never met in person. Out of this nervous, fragmented world, trust took on its modern form. In a world too complex for us to be able to rely on deep accumulated knowledge of one another, we needed to learn the skill of trust. Without trust, wrote the sociologist Georg Simmel in 1908, we would be incapable of achieving very much at all. Our worlds would grow smaller (and our leaks bigger!).
Trust is paradoxical, because though we tend to think of it as a positive phenomenon, it is also highly connected with vulnerability and uncertainty – which can be very painful and which we often want to avoid. The fact is, living at all requires a huge degree of trust. Most of the ways we trust are invisible to us. Without trust, we could not leave our front doors in the morning, or walk down the street. We tap in on the bus, trusting our bank card will not be cloned, or go to work trusting our job will not have been given to someone else. It is only when the ways we trust are exposed to us – usually because of some struggle or breach – that we start to recognise trust for what it is: an agonising, perilous leap of faith. In the words of the philosophers Robert C. Solomon and Fernando Flores, trust is walking out into a ‘kind of clearing’ where mutual cooperation becomes possible. But walking out into clearings does mean leaving behind the cover of the trees and bushes. It feels exposing, and like you might become a target. After all, it is meaningless to say we trust someone unless there is a real risk of losing something very precious to us – our money, someone we love, our life.
I think that it is important to pay attention to this emotional part of trust, and to remember that it is supposed to be difficult when we are struggling with it. When we are younger, we are sometimes taught that if we had only paid enough attention to all the evidence, we would know whether it was ‘sensible’ to trust someone. Sometimes we berate ourselves after trust has been breached for missing ‘the signs’ or being foolish. In each case, we are leaning into the idea that the risk of trust can be minimised, if only we did enough calculations and paid close enough attention. It’s no wonder many of us think this way. Since the 1950s, behaviourist psychological models have emphasized the idea that trust is a cognitive position, something we arrive at through weighing up various kinds of evidence. The more evidence we have, the more rational trusting is supposed to be.
But trust is not only a mental calculation based on available evidence. The behaviourist model bypasses the subtle and very slow processes through which we develop trust. As Solomon and Flores put it, trust isn’t an ‘atmosphere’ you find yourself in, it is something you ‘build’. And the question of how to build trust is paramount in our lives today, where we fear we might be losing the skill.
Granted, what I am about to say doesn’t have much to do with trusting governments or banks. But it IS important for how we build trust with our neighbours, our friends, and our diverse communities.
During my research for my new book, BAD FRIEND, I learnt a lot about the role of trust in our friendships. Along with scouring historical archives, letters and diaries, I also interviewed a great number of women about their friendships. The word ‘trust’ came up again and again. For some, trust meant being able to share secrets without fearing that they might become gossip. For others, it meant believing that your friend had your best interests at heart and would listen without judging or undermining you. For many, trusting a friend simply meant believing they would show up when they said they would. (It is a revelation to know how easily friendships are lost by flakiness – a lesson I learnt the hard way in my thirties).
Their stories taught me that building trust is a slow and careful process. These women described not making a rational assessment of their potential friend’s trustworthiness, but instead engaging in a series of encounters over years, in which they carefully edged into that clearing together and learnt, haltingly, to dance together. A team of sociologists studying trust cultures in East Asia argue that, in contrast to European and US behaviourist models of trust, Koreans tend to see trust as emerging out of acts of care and generosity. By showing a caring mind or caring intention – whether through giving small physical gifts, or gifts of help, noticing or support – people developed a sensation of togetherness or ‘woori’, the feeling that they were no longer acting as individuals but as a ‘we’.
Most of the people I interviewed about how they built bonds with neighbours and people in their local community, turning strangers into friends, talked about precisely this process of exchanging small acts of care – texting to check in, dropping round food when someone was ill, making time to ask how they were. I wrote in BAD FRIEND that the gifts can be tiny or large, but what really mattered was reciprocity, and a sense of a mutual and fair exchange.
‘These might be small exchanges of gifts or gestures, or acts of attention, thoughtfulness or practical help. And they may, in turn, lead to enormous exchanges: the offer to keep a child, or provide a safe home to stay in. These acts accrue. They are reciprocated. And we are attentive to them. Paying attention to what we give and what we receive and not counted for much in the grand male-authored philosophical histories of friendship I knew.
But it is exactly what makes our trysts’
So nowadays, when I want to make a connection with someone, I think: What can I offer them? What gifts, however small, can I give? It always surprises me how quickly connection and trust follows. And you know what? It ultimately worked with the roofer too.
BAD FRIEND is published TOMORROW in America!
It’s had some lovely reviews so far, and I’d be thrilled if you wanted to buy a copy here, or from your local independent bookstore.
‘A moving and incisive analysis of an oft-discussed subject’—Publishers Weekly
"So valuable…A blueprint for how to sustain friendships that are flawed, and sometimes painful – but more meaningful because they are real."—The Guardian
‘A generous and timely book’ — The Observer
‘A wonderful, tender, joyous book, I urge you to read it’ —Suzannah Lipscomb, author of Six Lives
‘Bad Friend fizzes with women navigating, testing and redefining this most powerful and complex bond’ —Katherine Angel, author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
‘I loved it’ —Amy Key, author of Arrangements in Blue
‘Brilliant, brave, clever, funny and tender…A hymn to friendship; not friendship in its idealised form, but in its messy imperfections, its compromises and uncertainties and in the strength it takes from being forged in difficulty’ —Daisy Hay, author of Dinner with Joseph Johnson
