March 24, 2025 • 42 mins
Do you trust your government? Do you trust your neighbors or the strangers you meet on the street? Do you trust the media? Or your teachers? Who we trust is changing. And trust in our institutions and our fellow citizens is in steep decline. That's according to the World Happiness Report. Who we trust can have a huge impact on our behavior and our happiness.
So what's behind the dramatic changes in how we trust? And can we learn to trust in a smarter way? We ask advice from Rachel Botsman, the Trust Fellow at Oxford University's Saïd Business School and author of How to Trust and Be Trusted.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Welcome to the second of our two part series
focused on the twenty twenty five World Happiness Report. In
the last episode, we talked about the decline of shared meals,
but in this episode we'll turn to a chapter that
focuses on a different decline. In it, the French economists
jan Algin Current Blank and Claudia Senic look at the
(00:38):
changes in social trust, particularly the decreases in trust that
so many of us have observed post pandemic. The economists
find that there's been a huge reduction in social trust globally,
and they argue that these changes in trust have led
not just to a big hit on our collective happiness,
but also to increases in what they call anti system thinking,
with people rejecting traditional political parties and turning to populism.
(01:00):
I wanted to understand how to make sense of these
findings and the implications they're having for well being worldwide.
So to help me out, I decided to turn to
one of my feet for experts on the science of trust.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Hi everyone, my name is Rachel Batsman. I've been studying
trust well for over fifteen years now. The latest book
is called How to Trust and Be Trusted? Intentionally a
two way title, because that's how trust works. We trust
other people and then we want others to trust us
as well. And you can get it on audible or
Spotify or pushkin FM. People tell me that it's really
(01:34):
changed the way they trust others and others trust them,
and that was the reason for making it.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
And so as a trust expert, I'm curious your reaction
to the fact that there's an entire chapter of the
World Happiness Report devoted to trust. I mean, is that
something you think is long over too? Is that something
you were surprised by.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I'm surprised it's taken so long to make that connection,
if I'm honest, because I mean, I've always struggled with
the word happiness, but satisfaction and joy is very much
tied to social trust. So not just the people we
have in our lives, but how much we can trust
ourselves to take risks and explore new things, how much
we can take risks and new relationships, how much confidence
(02:12):
we can place in systems and society. So yeah, there's
a very strong correlation there. So it's it's not a surprise,
but surprise it took so long.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
I mean, when you read the report. Was there anything
particular that you've found especially straightly, I.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Found it very alarming. Looking at the it's not even
a decline, It like falls off the cliff in interpersonal trust.
So that's the trust in families, friends, co workers, people
close to us, the Marcus twenty twenty. So you think, hmm,
that's the pandemic, but there's no recovery from it. I
(02:45):
could understand if it was social trust, like trust and
strangers and other people, but the fact that there's no
repair in that close circle. And for me, this ties
into what I think is a huge societal problem that's
not getting enough attention. And it's not just loneliness. It's
that people are spending more time alone and at home
(03:07):
than ever before. Yes, a worry about loneliness as an epidemic,
but I feel the rise of the anti social society.
Our ability to be with other people, even people close
to us, and want to go out and connect with people.
That was what I found the most alarming in the report.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Let's just start by defining trust. You've had a kind
of curious definition of it, one that I haven't seen.
This idea of this confident relationship with the unknown. What
do you mean there.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, it's so a confident relationship with the unknown describes
the need or the existence for trust. So if you
know the outcome of something, or if you know how
something's going to turn out, or there's very little risk
in a situation, you don't actually need a lot of trust.
It's in those situations where there is a really high
unknown or there is a lot of uncertainty where you
(03:56):
need the most trust. And that's why there's such a
strong tie between trust and uncertainty, which is the flip
of how many people think about trust. So I ask
many people to define trust, and the answers you get
back are typically around stability and expectations, things like reliability,
(04:19):
which I find really interesting that we're so wired on
that sort of solid side of the spectrum and that's
what we attached trust to, versus trust is needed in
those unknown situations.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
It's also needed across all kinds of different contexts, and
I think this is something you've so nicely pointed out
in your work. Give me an example of the different
domains in which we see trust and where trust seems
to matter.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
One of the things that really frustrates me is when
you hear these very generalized ways of talking about trust. Oh,
trust is in a state of total decline. That's the
media headline, and it's really not helpful. It's not helpful
for our own states, it's not helpful for society or
any system. Because I think of trust in different circles.
So I'll give you a couple because they might ring true.
The first is sort of more academic. You can think
(05:01):
of institutional trust, So that's trust you place in institutions,
the legal system, healthcare, education, government, whatever it might be.
That's trust. An institutions, that's trust, and an entity. Then
you have what we call interpersonal trust. This is the
trust that really impacts us day in day out. It's
our family, it's our friends, it's our close circle, our coworkers,
(05:22):
and those bonds are really really important. They're the ones
I'm actually most worried about. And then more broadly, we
have social trust, and that is the trust that we
can place in strangers, that people we don't know, our
belief in things like integrity and moral good. So they're
the sort of three academic ways of framing trust. Another
way of framing trust is to think of trust in
(05:44):
yourself trust in others. And then the trust they placed
in you. So that's more of like concentric circle approach,
and trust issues can arise in any three of those circles.
So some people find it very difficult to trust themselves,
but can trust others easily. Others find that people naturally
(06:04):
trust them for some reason, but they don't necessarily trust
other people. So I find those circles really interesting to
think about.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
They seem to be so important for happiness, but also
really dynamic, right, you know, if you don't trust yourself,
then what's that going to lead other people to think
of you? And things like that? I mean, it must
be really complicated to kind of get at some of
these dynamics.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
And constantly evolving. So trust is not like this fixed asset.
I don't like it when people talk about banking trust,
you know, like it's a reservoir. They change with age,
they change with experience, they change with environment, and most importantly,
they change with context. Trust is so so contextual, and
this is the part that we often miss.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And so it seems like trust in all these different
dimensions is super important for our happiness. But it seems
like there's also two problems that we could have with trust, right,
One is the idea of being too trusting and then
you know, you kind of get let down by the
people around you, maybe even by yourself.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
The second is this idea of being not trusting enough, right,
kind of not realizing that other people actually have your
back end. The uncertainty is not as scary as you think.
And so I wanted to go through each of these
in turn, maybe starting with this idea of being too trusting,
and partly because my understanding is that this is one
of the reasons you get interested in trust in the
first place. Share with me this story of what happened
in your childhood where folks in your world were maybe
(07:14):
too trusting. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
I don't think people often think of it as a problem,
but it is. And the interesting thing there is actually
a high correlation between people who are very trusting and
that consider themselves emotionally intelligent and intuitive. And the reason
why is you are told that you are very good
at reading people, that you can pick up on signals.
So if you're someone that says, all, I have very
strong intuition about people, and that's something I felt from
(07:39):
a really young age. And the story of telling the book,
I guess everyone has an origin story, and mine is
around a nanny that turned out to be a drug
dealer that used our famili's car, a Volvo nonetheless a
get away car, and an armed robbery.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Oh my god. Yeah, it's like a very like true
crime trust origin story.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
The thing that's crazy about the story is that she
lived with us for a year. It wasn't like she
moved in and she did this in eight weeks. And
she was this incredible nanny. Like my memories of her
were that she played with us, she was very attentive,
she was a really good cook, she was very peaceful.
But she had a complete other life that my parents
(08:23):
discovered over time.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
So I'm sure that looking back, there must have been
some red flags about this nanny that you maybe sort
of questioned the extent to which she would have trusted her.
As you look back, what are some red flags in
this situation that you've kind of generalized to other situations
which we might wonder whether we're trusting somebody to us.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I think there's the red flags as a child, But
now my parents have told the story, they realized that
when they hired her, they're both entrepreneurs and they were
in a very intense time of building their companies and
traveling a lot, So making trust decisions when you're under
pressure is high stakes. Trust decisions like who to leave
your children with often leads to bad decision making because
(09:02):
you want to believe that person. So that's the first lesson, and.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
That one I have to say is like so important, right,
I feel like there's so many situa in which just
like the convenience of being able to trust somebody, just
like you're like, I can't even question this right now
because I just like have to make this work, So
I'm just going to assume everything's going to be fine.
You could totally see how that plays out in so
many different domains.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Most hires at work right, like, it's just left too late,
and convenience no pun intended, often trumps trust, so will
often give our trust away if it is convenient. That
is a real life lesson. The second thing is I
think the way when I asked them, like, because there
was no email, there was no video calling, there was
no social networks at the time, you know, why did
(09:43):
you believe this person? And they said it was things
like she had a Scottish accent, and she said that
she even came to work wearing a Salvation Army uniform
because she said she really liked helping people and that
she played the piano and the tambourine. So it's all
these stereotypes of who is trustworthy. Accents are a really
big influence on that. So that's been a life lesson
(10:06):
in when I'm meeting someone, what signals am I tuning into?
And so many signals really play to our biases, so
we will look for people that are familiar or fit
that kind of stereotype. So that's number two. Number three
is listened to your children because I knew they were
(10:28):
being lied to and I notice things going missing around
the house. I noticed on Wednesdays we'd go to this
strange flat and there was this strange man, and there
was something that just didn't add up. And I would
say to Mom, these people come round and they talk
about strange things, and I would get told off not
(10:49):
to make things up. So trust children because they are
really observant and they often don't have an agenda in
the same way that adults do. So I'd listened to
that feedback more.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
It also seems like you just need to perspective, take
a little bit, like get a really outside perspective, a
bit of a distance perspective. Sometimes you can be that
can be your child. But I bet sometimes that can
just be like another person who might not be in
the tight situation you are might not have noticed like
the same things that you're noticing about how cool this
person is in this salvation army you know, you know,
uniform they're wearing and so on. It seems like we
(11:22):
often get into trouble when we trust our gut and
don't take outside input when it comes to trust. Does
the research bear that out totally?
Speaker 2 (11:29):
I mean, they say trust has two enemies, bad character
and poor information, And it's when we either don't slow
down to get enough information or as you say, Laurie,
like we don't get a different perspective. And I'm sure
one of mom's friends, like when she said that she
just found all this money under a tree in a park,
like the money tree, that someone would have said, I
(11:50):
think those exist.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
That sounds sketchy, It sounds a little sketchy. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
So let's walk through the things that really maybe are
good indicators of trust, like these sort of so called
traits of trustworthiness. As you talk about them, can you
break these down for us.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yes, so, and I'm gonna say I think some of
them need updating. So this is based on social science
that now has been tracking traits for forty years, and
these traits are changing, which I think is really interesting.
The capability side, so you have imagined your parts. You
have capability, which is really about what you do, and
then you have character, which is why you do things,
but really importantly how you do things. So how would
(12:27):
you describe, Laurie what you do.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I would say that I'm a podcaster. I'm a teacher,
you know, I try to be really there for my students.
I try to use evidence in a really capable way,
Like I have lots of things that make me capable,
but also maybe I'm like a warm person, right, I
want to take care of my students and help my
listeners and so on.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
So they you're talking about capability and character. So the capability,
if you imagine, is your competence. So you have the skills,
you have the expertise, you have the knowledge, you have
the resources, you have YEO, as an institution, you have
all these things that allow you to do what you
say you're going to do. So you're really credible on
those things, but maybe there's some other things. I don't know.
(13:06):
What's something you completely can't do?
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Terrible have I god so many things. Driving I can't
drive by that. Biking, biking, I'm really bad by I
don't know how to bike. Most physical things are very clumsy,
fall lot, skiing not great.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Yeah, that actually makes you more trustworthy because you can
be honest about things that you do and then you're
really comfortable with saying don't ever get in a car
with me or don't ride with me. So that's your confidence.
What you're talking about with you with your students, wanting
to be there for them consistently. I'd imagine that you're
this person that likes them to know that they can
depend on you. That's the reliability trait, and that is
really really important when it comes to trust. So you
(13:44):
know those like really inconsistent people that are high energy
and they show up sometimes and then they completely disappear.
There's no follow through. So that's it's on the capability side.
And then on the character side, we have empathy, which
you spoke about. I prefer the word compassion. You know,
empathy doesn't really talk about the action side, the follow through.
(14:04):
And then The last trait, which I think is the
most important trait, is integrity. And that's all about your
interest being aligned with the best interests of other people.
So you the professor, your interests are aligned with the
interest the students, You the host. The audience feels that
this is self serving, that you are there to be
generous and to care about them and their learning. So
(14:26):
that's what we talk about when we talk about trustworthiness.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
And I imagine that in these different domains of trust
the importance of say, capability, this kind of combination of
competence and reliability versus character, this combination of compassionate integrity
that might go up and down depending on what you need,
right Like, I might not need a surgeon filled with
a lot of character. I just really want him to
be very competent and capable. But a best friend, I right, really,
(14:51):
you know, I don't necessarily care that my best friend
does it her job, but I really want her to
be really empathic when it comes to, you know, helping
me with my problems and so on.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
It's a really important comes back to context, and it's
such an important point because I don't know if you've heard.
Actually my dad said it the other day he's having
some dot to his hip and he's I really don't
feel like the surgeon cares. I was like, yeah, but
he's a great surgeon, right, Like he's going to fix
the hit. And I think that has become an expectation
on sort of a feeling led society, is that sometimes
(15:21):
we can place too much emphasis on compassion and empathy
and that person can seem incredibly kind but not capable.
So this is why I think this alchemy of traits
and thinking about the particular situation is it's almost like
a compass for making really good decisions about people.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
And so if you're a person who's maybe meeting a
new surgeon for the first time, or a new business
partner or a new love interest, and you really want
to kind of make sure you're trusting appropriately, what are
some strategies you'd use to do that well.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
I think the business situation is probably the easiest, and
it's also where most people go wrong, because most people
start with the competence piece. If you think about most
job interviews or promotional interviews like so tell me what
you've done, tell me about your experience, Like they are
the easiest things to get from a resume or a
reference to check, and the number of interviews that don't
get to the why and the how. The how is
(16:14):
really interesting, like how people approach things, how they break
down problems, how they are in difficult conversations. So I
would like focus questions around that. The second thing that
I would do is really try to understand someone's interests, intentions,
and motives, not like why do you want the job?
(16:36):
But where are they really coming from? And again asking
yourself this question of does that align with the role,
does that align with the organization, Because it's when you
have that misalignment in a professional or a personal context
that trust issues can arise. So you can even think
of a bit uncomfortable saying this, but like in dating situations,
like if someone really doesn't want children and the other
(16:57):
person wants children, right, there's a misalignment there. If someone
doesn't want a long term relationship, if someone doesn't want
a monogamous relationship, someone doesn't want to live with you,
it's that misalignment that really is the problem. Now, you're
not going to get there on the first date, you'll
probably scarce someone away, but over time, if you feel
like there's trust issues emerging, there's probably some unsaid conversation
(17:20):
around I want this one thing and you want this
other thing, and we're both too scared to say it.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
And then how do we overcome the kind of biases
that we talked about earlier. Is there anything we can
do to kind of get that perspective maybe not fall
for a familiarity and some of the other biases we
talked about.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
It's so hard. I mean, if someone can come up
with the solution around that, then tell me. But I
think it. I mean, it's really obvious advice. It's becoming
aware of what those biases are for you. What does
familiarity look like? What are the signals? And that's different
for different people. So some people are very influenced by
looks and appearance. Other people are really influenced by cultural
(18:00):
background and accents. Other people are really influenced by education.
Away of sort of tuning into this is when you
meet people for the first time, where do you sort
of focus. Do you notice what someone's wearing, do you
notice what they're saying? Where does the conversation orientate itself
as well? Like, these are really powerful signals as to
(18:21):
what is important to you. That maybe where your biases
are rooted.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
You've also suggested doing something that we talk about a
lot on the Happiness Lab, which is like, take a pause,
take a breath. How can take what you've called the
trust pause be helpful here?
Speaker 2 (18:35):
So a trust pause it's something I invented for myself.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
All researchers research, right.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
I tend to move quickly, do things quickly, think quickly,
speak quickly, and I just realized there were certain situations
where slowing down and really asking myself, you know, was
this person, this piece of information, this situation, this partnership,
did they actually deserve my trust? And it's really placing
(19:06):
value on your trust that you have trust to give
and you don't have to give it to everyone. I
found that to be quite empowering because in certain situations
you go, you know what, I'm gonna just hold back
a little bit. Or it's not like a self protection mechanism.
It's just saying I don't think I want to give
(19:27):
you my trust at this particular moment. And you can
think about that even in the context of online information, right,
like when you just share something without reading it that
would benefit from a trust pause.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
So far, we've talked about cases where we trust a
little bit too much or a little bit too early.
But when we get back from the break, we're going
to discuss the other problem when it comes to trusted happiness,
trusting too little. The happiness lab will be right back.
(20:02):
Rachel Batsman, author of How To Trust and Be Trusted,
is an expert on the science of trust. But I
was curious how she thinks about the opposite, what is distrust.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Oh, So the first thing I'd say is there's a
difference between low trust and distrust, and that's really important
to understand. So low trust can just be you don't
have enough information, like you're new to a situation or
a relationship. It's not necessarily a bad thing. And also
this is why I hate a lot of poles and surveys.
If you try to live your whole life in a
(20:34):
high trust state, it'll be pretty exhausting, right, Like, there's
certain things that just don't require a high degree of trust.
So that's the first thing I would say. Distrust it's
very difficult to define. I have not yet come up
or seen a definition that I really like. But the
way I think of distrust is more through the lens
of behaviors. So I find it helpful to think of
(20:57):
these three d's. So when someone is distrusting, you tend
to see this spectrum play out where you see a
defensiveness set in. And that defensiveness is because you have
made yourself vulnerable or you've placed something of value and
in some ways you feel that it's being exploited or
it's not being taken care of, and so the first
(21:19):
instinct is to be quite defensive about that. Now, the
thing about that stage of distrust is you can still
fix the situation because the person cares. The second phase
is disengagement. Disengagement is when you start to pour back.
So you might have experienced this at work where you're like,
I'm not really sure I trust this personalised situation or
(21:40):
this boss, so I'm just going to pull back. I'm
not sure I'm going to really show up or really care.
And then the last phase, which is incredibly dangerous and
I think it's how we talk about distrust in society today,
is disenchantment. And disenchantment means you have turned against that person,
that organization, that system, and you're in a downward spiral
(22:00):
because your only motive is to bring that thing down.
You have become anti you are pushing against. And the
reason why this is so dangerous is because it can
become all consuming for yourself, for others, and very very toxic.
So you see this in sports scenes where someone turns
against the coach. You see it in workplaces where they
(22:23):
want everyone to leave. We see it wider in society,
where you want to turn against a party. That's how
I tend to think of distrust is moving through these
three phases.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
And you mentioned sort of society, especially politics. It seems
like this idea of disenchantment is running rampant. At least
that's what we hear a lot from the news. But
I know this is an idea that you've pushed back
against a little bit that, like the kind of the
freefall of trust might not be as bad as we think.
Explain why that's the case.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, I mean, I find it really difficult to listen
to news for so many reasons. But it's often because
everything is described in free fall, including trust. So you'll
see these graphs where it's just like this downward line
and from about twenty twenty, it's like falling off a
(23:08):
clip that's across the spectrum. Actually, the institutional the social
and the interpersonal trust. To me, that is problematic because
the way I think of trust is more like energy
that it's not getting destroyed, it's changing form. And so
what might look like low trust or distrust to you
is just someone trusting differently. And once you see this,
(23:31):
it explains so many things, and it's stopped so much judgment.
So it doesn't even have to be between political parties.
You see it within generations where people will say, well
that gen Z or jen Alfa they just don't trust anymore.
That is not true. Their trust is sideways, like they
trust their peers and friends and influencers because that's where
they get their information. They don't trust upwards. So thinking
(23:54):
of flows of trust versus amounts of trust can be
really helpful in understanding dynamics in relationships and then bigger
paradise shifts happening.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
It seems like one of those bigger paradigm shifts is
kind of the trust that we have that in some sense,
for lack of better word, is kind of distributed, right,
You mentioned kind of gen Z and gen Alpha trusting,
influencers trusting what they read on social media. Is that
a cultural shift that you're seeing in this trust research too.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yes, it's huge. So what we see is like if
you imagine like an evolution of trust. We had institutional trusts,
so everything was very top down and hierarchical and centralized
and defined by fixed boundaries. So we used to get
a newspaper, we turn on the TV that's institutional trust,
(24:40):
and technology inherently blew that up and distributed it through
networks and marketplaces and platforms and now through artificial intelligence.
So the easiest way to understand this is imagine a
trust that for decades flowed upwards and now it's distributed sideways.
And this has so much influence over so many things
(25:01):
because who we believe is trustworthy, who influences our opinions
and beliefs, what we decide to act on in the
context of health, politics, education, life decisions, wellness. This is
all moving sideways, and sometimes the people sharing that information
are not the most trustworthy. I mean, just if it
(25:23):
actually you see this in the happiness face that you know,
it really bothers me. Like when I see influencers online,
they're usually alone, Like do you know what I mean?
Like they wake up alone, they meditate, their their coffee,
they stretch they run alone, right, they work alone, just
really bothers me that that's the image of happiness.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
And I think we're falling prey to a lot of
the biases that you talked about earlier about trusting too much, right,
Like many of these influencers have, you know, this beautiful
home that they go into, and they tend to be
really beautiful, right, Like we're falling for these tropes of
like familiarity and maybe some of the things we like
and a halo effect, that's a fact where we kind
of like people who have other good things happening to them.
(26:04):
Like it is true that like we're putting putting our trust,
this distributed trust winds up maybe following pray to as
many of those same biases as you just talked about
in the interpersonal trust domain earlier.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah, and it's in sound bites and fragments, some very
carefully curated images and I know all this stuff. And
I started running last year and I fell down this
rabbit hole so hard, and then I realized no one
looks like that when they run, right, Because I'd be like,
why am I so much pain and sweaty and disgusting?
(26:34):
And they're all like you know, here's weighing and stuff,
and because they're making money off me, and you've just
made me think of something I hadn't thought of. But
if you think about the trust you play in influencers,
like just a scrolling behavior, it's a one way thing, right,
it doesn't flow back to you, And so much of
healthy trust is reciprocation. So I do something for you,
(26:58):
which then creates the space for you to do something
for me. And those loops are what form trust, These
one way forms of trust. Let's not call them shallow trust,
but these one way form so trust. They're breaking those loops,
those possibilities for reciprocation, and that's damaging the social glue,
which i'd imagine is impacting our happiness and satisfaction. I'd
(27:19):
be interested if the research correlates to that.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
So that's kind of the over trust we put in
these distributed networks, you know, to these influencers and things
like that. And that's, as you mentioned, happening alongside a
real kind of emergence of distrust for institutions, whether that's
you know, governments or academic institutions like the one I'm
at and so on. And this was the kind of
thing that the World Happiness Report was really looking at. Right,
The chapter of the World Happiness Report that's on trust
(27:44):
is trying to look at this puzzle about why there's
been so many kind of voting behaviors that have shifted
kind of more anti institutional right for candidates that maybe
want smaller government or kind of want to do away
with government, you know, kind of candidates that really represent
these sort of views that are kind of anti establishment.
Walk me through some of the things that this chapter
found and how trust was really important for some of
(28:06):
these changes in voting behavior.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
The report is really interesting. I don't agree with all
of the framing. Sort of at the highest level. It's
basically saying the far left have high trust and higher
life satisfaction and the far right have low trust and
lower life satisfaction. That's like top level, which is a
problematic framing for me. And one of the reasons why
(28:29):
is they're saying that when you're in a low trust date,
you tend to be anti You invest your energy in
pushing it against things, the status guo, you want to
break down the system, and when you are high trust,
you are four so you're more progressive. Where the report
gets really interesting is when you dig further down. So
(28:50):
what I found interesting is that if you stick with
this far left, in this far right dichotomy, the far
right had higher distrust in strangers, but much higher trust
in their private circles, close knit family, friends, work, colleagues,
really high bonds of social trust. And then on the
left hand side there are actually signs of lower interpersonal trust,
(29:15):
higher signs of learniness and disengagement. And that I think
is really interesting. Essentially, what the report is saying is
that the social fabric is damaged for both.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Sides, yeah, and damaged and damaged in different ways. That
might lead to the fact that it's very hard to
see across the aisle right because people are thinking about
trust in different ways across different sides of the political spectrum,
which is maybe what's leading to a disconnect in what
people want governments to be doing over time exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
And so this idea of high trust and low trust,
that's the problem because both sads hype high trust, but
in different things. It's not that they lack trust, they
just trust differently. And this is what we see is
that when you take trust away from one area of
our lives, it creates a vacuum, and that vacuum has
to be filled with something, and that could be different beliefs,
(30:06):
it could be conspiracy theories, but you have to feel
that for But I think holding on to this idea
that the social fabric is damaged and that the root
causes of that that are driving trust issues and problems
with happiness are insecurity and loneliness on both sides. It's
those two things that are merging together to really cause
(30:27):
this sort of reconfiguration over trust.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
So is there any hope that our tattered social fabric
can be repaired? And if so, how can we go
about creating a future where we trust each other and
our institutions. We'll look at that when the Happiness Lab
returns in a moment. In her audiobook How to Trust
(30:49):
and Be Trusted, Rachel Batsman has lots of great suggestions
for increasing trust in our lives. One interesting concept is
what she calls a trust leap.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
So, a trust leap is whenever you take a risk
to do something new or to do something differently. Now,
when you talk about trust lease, people often think about
big things in a self driving car or buying bitcoin
that involves like a new technology and that is a
trust leap, that is how we change behavior. But trust
sleeps can also be relatively small in our lives. So
(31:22):
it can be choosing to put your hand up at
work to do something completely differently. It can be choosing
to speak up in a meeting. And one of the
problems I've actually seen around trust leaps is that first
of all, people focus on the outcome, so they focus
on where they want the leap to go, and they
imagine these leaps being really really big versus small, consistent
(31:45):
ways of doing something new or doing something differently and
seeing where that takes us. So that is the concept
of trust leaps.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
So I'm guessing I know the answer to this, but
what are some of the things that prevent people from
making these trust leaves. It seems like part of it
maybe is a bias to assume the trust leap is
going to go badly in some forum.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
It's interesting to say badly, because we often don't even
get that far. Because if you imagine a trust leap
involved going from the known and the safe and the familiar,
and that's, as you know, Laurie, where we all love
to be, like, that's where we're wired to be, and
it involves like going to the unknown, because that's when
we discover new things. Most of us, it's so hard
(32:26):
to move from that place that is safe and familiar
that we never even really take the first leap. So
it's not that we are assessing risk. We're not thinking
about all these bad things could happen. It's often just
the getting started and breaking the leap down that is
the problem.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I love this idea because it's really about like recognizing
that getting out of your comfort zone, which we so
many of us struggle with, is in some ways a
trust leap, right. It's like embracing that unknown and kind
of trusting yourself that it's going to be fine no
matter how it turns out, even if it doesn't go
perfectly as planned.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, and I think you know you said you don't
like being on a bike. I hate being on a bike.
It fills me with dread. I don't like skiing on
the edges of things because I don't like ledges right.
So often where we find it hard to take trust
leaps is associated with risks. So there are some risks,
like physical risks that are really hard for me to take,
like when I swim in the ocean, my husband's Australian
(33:20):
and we go to Australia. I'm so afraid of the sharks.
But no sharks in a common three centimeters of order, right.
But those trust leaps are really really hard, but creative
trust leaps are really easy for me to take. It's
a very different type of risk, and so understanding that
again can be and it's something I talk about in
the book because I really believe it can help you
(33:43):
understand where you're stuck and where you like things to
be comfortable and where you really find it hard to
stretch yourself. Is usually to do with different types of risk,
financial risk, emotional risk, physical risk, creative risk. They all
have a very different makeup in our lives.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
You've also argued that we'd be helped in terms of
finding more trust by trying to sort out our trust barriers.
What do you mean by trust barriers and what are
some ways that we can understand them?
Speaker 2 (34:08):
So the trust is, as you can tell, I like
my metaphors, it is the thing that gets in the way,
you know, like the number of people who say I
can't move like they've never lived in a different country,
or they can't move jobs, or in some ways they
can't get off of a relationship, they can't take up
a new hobby. They are describing well being stuck. That
(34:29):
they are in some way paralyzed, and that is because
there is some kind of barrier in the way. Now,
that trust barrier. It might be a very practical thing
like money, financial security, but it can also be things
like companionship just really frightened to do it alone. Not
to go on about running, but I wouldn't been able
to run if I didn't find a friend, because I
(34:51):
wouldn't run around the parks in the dark, and I'd
be really scared of what was going to happen if
I got lost. That's a trust barrier, and in companies
these barriers get bigger. It's actually a really useful framework
if you're launching a new product or service because often
what you think is the trust barrier is very different
from what the cust some that thinks is the trust barrier.
So understanding what that perception is around risk, whether it's
(35:15):
real or perceived, can be really helpful for launching a
new product or service as well.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
And imagine there are lots of trust barriers that come
up in the domain of politics, which is what the
World Happiness Report is about what are some examples of
trust barriers that come up in that domain.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
I'm not really sure where to begin, but a trust barrier,
actually it's a funny thing, but it can be like
nothing's going to change. So it can result in apathy,
like I'm just not going to vote, I'm going to abstain.
So believing that there is no way things are going
to change direction or system's going to change. Financial insecurity,
(35:51):
that is a massive trust barrier. Not believing there's going
to be any kind of redistribution of wealth or that
my life is going to get better. Trust barriers can
be much closer to home. You're probably seeing in the
research the number of people and it's a real worry
that they're never going to own a home, they're never
going to be able to retire, and so it can
actually paralyze people from even getting started, even though that
(36:12):
life stage might be forty to fifty years away. So
these are real trust barriers that are impacting people's happiness
and immediate decisions.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
And so what are some questions we can ask ourselves
to overcome these trust barriers. I mean, some of the
ones you're talking about are structural right, they don't have
enough money for a home. These things might be harder,
but some of the trust barriers, like well I can't
do it by myself, they might be easier to overcome
if we consult our fears of it. So what are
some questions we can ask ourselves to overcome these trust barriers.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It's a good question where did it come from? Was
it something I developed or was it something that I
was told as a child. Is a really big one.
So if you grew up in a family that always
like be careful, don't go that far, or get down
from there. A lot of it starts really young, Laurie,
and that's not surprising because our relationship to risk and
(37:00):
trust it's really formed around the age of four. The
second thing I would ask is, again, how much of
this is real and how much of this is perception?
So how much of this is rooted in facts and
data versus my own fits? That would be the second,
and then the third is not necessarily getting rid of
(37:23):
the barrier, but lowering the leap. You know, I feel
so lucky to teach at Oxford, but then I have
friends who are like, I'd love my child to go there,
and You're like, that is a very ambitious leap for
many children, Like, why don't we just lower that leap
a little bit? And if it ends up like that, great.
It's not about not being ambitious and wanting achievement. I
(37:44):
just think so much pressure comes in life because we
make these leaps way too high.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
And I think that that happens in politics too, right.
I think both because of the misinformation you talked about, right,
you know my information accurate? Have I gotten the right facts?
But also because we make the barriers to entries so high, right.
I think when we envision maybe talking to somebody from
across the aisle, we picture really extreme on the other
side of the aisle, right, you know, because that's you know,
(38:11):
what we see in our distributed trust networks, that's what
the influencers attacking us about. Are there ways that we
can maybe overcome these trust barriers in those domains too?
Speaker 2 (38:20):
I think it's it's a really important point because the
way it's sort of pictured it often is taking on
the system or taking on the other side. And I
would start by just having a conversation that makes you uncomfortable,
being comfortable with the discomfort of a difficult situation is
the starting place. So I have a lot of friends
that have very difficult and different views on the war
(38:42):
in Gaza. And you know, at my children's school, they're
banned from talking about wars or politics because I quote,
it brings up big feelings. And I have a real
objection to that, because what are we teaching our children
that they can't deal with that discomfort, that they can't
have a difficult conversation, that they can't hold that space
with another human being that maybe has a different belief
(39:04):
or viewpoint from them. So you know, you can start
with your own friends and your family and people that
you know at the end and just they're going to
hug and tell you that they still love you, right
and knowing that nothing changes in that relationship. There's so
much we can learn just from being with that discomfort
and that heat and learning that everything is okay.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
And then on the other side of that discomfort, if
you push through, it might be a trusting relationship that
you're going to value tremendously and it's going to make
you much happier.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah, or like not to go to my children, but
like this did happen in their school where they had
quite a difficult conversation around the Holocaust where some children
you know now don't believe the Holocaust has happened now
they're nine and ten. That's not coming from them, that's
come from somewhere. And the fact that the history teacher
then backed them up and gave this very factor assembly.
(39:51):
They were like, wow, there's someone who cares right, and
there's information that we can trust. And he explained where
he got this information from. Now, regardless of what your
side you're on, that assembly would have impacted both sets
of children, the non believers and the children that this
was really important that this chapter in history was members.
So I feel like those moments, particularly with children, it's
(40:13):
really like, I can trust this person, I can trust
this situation. It's really important to teach.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
So as we think back to the World Happiness Report
and the importance it's placed on trust, and how trust
might be going down institutionally, how lack of trust is
kind of affecting our politics, and so much any last
advice for how people on both sides can become a
little bit more trusting.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
I think too much of the conversation is around institutional trust.
These are systems that ninety nine percent of us cannot fix.
They are too big, they're too far out of reach, right,
So I would say, focus on local trust doesn't even
have to be your family and friends. Focus on things
going on in your community, in your neighborhood, in your street,
(40:56):
and really getting involved in something like that. It can
do so much for your social ties. It can do
so much for the glue and make you feel in
some way back in control because you can impact the
people around you. So that would be my advice is
just stop looking outward and upward so much at these
big problems and letting them consume so much energy. And
(41:18):
it's not about withdrawal. If I'm not saying that, I'm
not saying like, be at home more alone. We don't
need more of that. It's about local ties and community
ties and connections that you could in some way put
into action Tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
I hope you've enjoyed my conversation with Rachel and that
you've learned a bit more about what you can do
to trust and be trusted more effectively. If you want
to hear more, be sure to check out Rachel's fabulous
new audiobook, How to Trust and Be Trusted, available everywhere
you get your Audio Books. That's a wrap on our
special series on the World Happiness Report. But not to
worry because the Happiness Lab will be back next week.
(41:54):
I'll be chatting with my friend, the happiness expert, Gretchen
Rubin about her secrets to adulthood. So I hope you'll
returned soon for the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Larry
Santos
Pushkin. Welcome to the second of our two part series
focused on the twenty twenty five World Happiness Report. In
the last episode, we talked about the decline of shared meals,
but in this episode we'll turn to a chapter that
focuses on a different decline. In it, the French economists
jan Algin Current Blank and Claudia Senic look at the
(00:38):
changes in social trust, particularly the decreases in trust that
so many of us have observed post pandemic. The economists
find that there's been a huge reduction in social trust globally,
and they argue that these changes in trust have led
not just to a big hit on our collective happiness,
but also to increases in what they call anti system thinking,
with people rejecting traditional political parties and turning to populism.
(01:00):
I wanted to understand how to make sense of these
findings and the implications they're having for well being worldwide.
So to help me out, I decided to turn to
one of my feet for experts on the science of trust.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Hi everyone, my name is Rachel Batsman. I've been studying
trust well for over fifteen years now. The latest book
is called How to Trust and Be Trusted? Intentionally a
two way title, because that's how trust works. We trust
other people and then we want others to trust us
as well. And you can get it on audible or
Spotify or pushkin FM. People tell me that it's really
(01:34):
changed the way they trust others and others trust them,
and that was the reason for making it.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
And so as a trust expert, I'm curious your reaction
to the fact that there's an entire chapter of the
World Happiness Report devoted to trust. I mean, is that
something you think is long over too? Is that something
you were surprised by.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I'm surprised it's taken so long to make that connection,
if I'm honest, because I mean, I've always struggled with
the word happiness, but satisfaction and joy is very much
tied to social trust. So not just the people we
have in our lives, but how much we can trust
ourselves to take risks and explore new things, how much
we can take risks and new relationships, how much confidence
(02:12):
we can place in systems and society. So yeah, there's
a very strong correlation there. So it's it's not a surprise,
but surprise it took so long.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
I mean, when you read the report. Was there anything
particular that you've found especially straightly, I.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Found it very alarming. Looking at the it's not even
a decline, It like falls off the cliff in interpersonal trust.
So that's the trust in families, friends, co workers, people
close to us, the Marcus twenty twenty. So you think, hmm,
that's the pandemic, but there's no recovery from it. I
(02:45):
could understand if it was social trust, like trust and
strangers and other people, but the fact that there's no
repair in that close circle. And for me, this ties
into what I think is a huge societal problem that's
not getting enough attention. And it's not just loneliness. It's
that people are spending more time alone and at home
(03:07):
than ever before. Yes, a worry about loneliness as an epidemic,
but I feel the rise of the anti social society.
Our ability to be with other people, even people close
to us, and want to go out and connect with people.
That was what I found the most alarming in the report.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Let's just start by defining trust. You've had a kind
of curious definition of it, one that I haven't seen.
This idea of this confident relationship with the unknown. What
do you mean there.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, it's so a confident relationship with the unknown describes
the need or the existence for trust. So if you
know the outcome of something, or if you know how
something's going to turn out, or there's very little risk
in a situation, you don't actually need a lot of trust.
It's in those situations where there is a really high
unknown or there is a lot of uncertainty where you
(03:56):
need the most trust. And that's why there's such a
strong tie between trust and uncertainty, which is the flip
of how many people think about trust. So I ask
many people to define trust, and the answers you get
back are typically around stability and expectations, things like reliability,
(04:19):
which I find really interesting that we're so wired on
that sort of solid side of the spectrum and that's
what we attached trust to, versus trust is needed in
those unknown situations.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
It's also needed across all kinds of different contexts, and
I think this is something you've so nicely pointed out
in your work. Give me an example of the different
domains in which we see trust and where trust seems
to matter.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
One of the things that really frustrates me is when
you hear these very generalized ways of talking about trust. Oh,
trust is in a state of total decline. That's the
media headline, and it's really not helpful. It's not helpful
for our own states, it's not helpful for society or
any system. Because I think of trust in different circles.
So I'll give you a couple because they might ring true.
The first is sort of more academic. You can think
(05:01):
of institutional trust, So that's trust you place in institutions,
the legal system, healthcare, education, government, whatever it might be.
That's trust. An institutions, that's trust, and an entity. Then
you have what we call interpersonal trust. This is the
trust that really impacts us day in day out. It's
our family, it's our friends, it's our close circle, our coworkers,
(05:22):
and those bonds are really really important. They're the ones
I'm actually most worried about. And then more broadly, we
have social trust, and that is the trust that we
can place in strangers, that people we don't know, our
belief in things like integrity and moral good. So they're
the sort of three academic ways of framing trust. Another
way of framing trust is to think of trust in
(05:44):
yourself trust in others. And then the trust they placed
in you. So that's more of like concentric circle approach,
and trust issues can arise in any three of those circles.
So some people find it very difficult to trust themselves,
but can trust others easily. Others find that people naturally
(06:04):
trust them for some reason, but they don't necessarily trust
other people. So I find those circles really interesting to
think about.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
They seem to be so important for happiness, but also
really dynamic, right, you know, if you don't trust yourself,
then what's that going to lead other people to think
of you? And things like that? I mean, it must
be really complicated to kind of get at some of
these dynamics.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
And constantly evolving. So trust is not like this fixed asset.
I don't like it when people talk about banking trust,
you know, like it's a reservoir. They change with age,
they change with experience, they change with environment, and most importantly,
they change with context. Trust is so so contextual, and
this is the part that we often miss.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And so it seems like trust in all these different
dimensions is super important for our happiness. But it seems
like there's also two problems that we could have with trust, right,
One is the idea of being too trusting and then
you know, you kind of get let down by the
people around you, maybe even by yourself.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
The second is this idea of being not trusting enough, right,
kind of not realizing that other people actually have your
back end. The uncertainty is not as scary as you think.
And so I wanted to go through each of these
in turn, maybe starting with this idea of being too trusting,
and partly because my understanding is that this is one
of the reasons you get interested in trust in the
first place. Share with me this story of what happened
in your childhood where folks in your world were maybe
(07:14):
too trusting. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
I don't think people often think of it as a problem,
but it is. And the interesting thing there is actually
a high correlation between people who are very trusting and
that consider themselves emotionally intelligent and intuitive. And the reason
why is you are told that you are very good
at reading people, that you can pick up on signals.
So if you're someone that says, all, I have very
strong intuition about people, and that's something I felt from
(07:39):
a really young age. And the story of telling the book,
I guess everyone has an origin story, and mine is
around a nanny that turned out to be a drug
dealer that used our famili's car, a Volvo nonetheless a
get away car, and an armed robbery.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Oh my god. Yeah, it's like a very like true
crime trust origin story.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
The thing that's crazy about the story is that she
lived with us for a year. It wasn't like she
moved in and she did this in eight weeks. And
she was this incredible nanny. Like my memories of her
were that she played with us, she was very attentive,
she was a really good cook, she was very peaceful.
But she had a complete other life that my parents
(08:23):
discovered over time.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
So I'm sure that looking back, there must have been
some red flags about this nanny that you maybe sort
of questioned the extent to which she would have trusted her.
As you look back, what are some red flags in
this situation that you've kind of generalized to other situations
which we might wonder whether we're trusting somebody to us.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I think there's the red flags as a child, But
now my parents have told the story, they realized that
when they hired her, they're both entrepreneurs and they were
in a very intense time of building their companies and
traveling a lot, So making trust decisions when you're under
pressure is high stakes. Trust decisions like who to leave
your children with often leads to bad decision making because
(09:02):
you want to believe that person. So that's the first lesson, and.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
That one I have to say is like so important, right,
I feel like there's so many situa in which just
like the convenience of being able to trust somebody, just
like you're like, I can't even question this right now
because I just like have to make this work, So
I'm just going to assume everything's going to be fine.
You could totally see how that plays out in so
many different domains.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Most hires at work right, like, it's just left too late,
and convenience no pun intended, often trumps trust, so will
often give our trust away if it is convenient. That
is a real life lesson. The second thing is I
think the way when I asked them, like, because there
was no email, there was no video calling, there was
no social networks at the time, you know, why did
(09:43):
you believe this person? And they said it was things
like she had a Scottish accent, and she said that
she even came to work wearing a Salvation Army uniform
because she said she really liked helping people and that
she played the piano and the tambourine. So it's all
these stereotypes of who is trustworthy. Accents are a really
big influence on that. So that's been a life lesson
(10:06):
in when I'm meeting someone, what signals am I tuning into?
And so many signals really play to our biases, so
we will look for people that are familiar or fit
that kind of stereotype. So that's number two. Number three
is listened to your children because I knew they were
(10:28):
being lied to and I notice things going missing around
the house. I noticed on Wednesdays we'd go to this
strange flat and there was this strange man, and there
was something that just didn't add up. And I would
say to Mom, these people come round and they talk
about strange things, and I would get told off not
(10:49):
to make things up. So trust children because they are
really observant and they often don't have an agenda in
the same way that adults do. So I'd listened to
that feedback more.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
It also seems like you just need to perspective, take
a little bit, like get a really outside perspective, a
bit of a distance perspective. Sometimes you can be that
can be your child. But I bet sometimes that can
just be like another person who might not be in
the tight situation you are might not have noticed like
the same things that you're noticing about how cool this
person is in this salvation army you know, you know,
uniform they're wearing and so on. It seems like we
(11:22):
often get into trouble when we trust our gut and
don't take outside input when it comes to trust. Does
the research bear that out totally?
Speaker 2 (11:29):
I mean, they say trust has two enemies, bad character
and poor information, And it's when we either don't slow
down to get enough information or as you say, Laurie,
like we don't get a different perspective. And I'm sure
one of mom's friends, like when she said that she
just found all this money under a tree in a park,
like the money tree, that someone would have said, I
(11:50):
think those exist.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
That sounds sketchy, It sounds a little sketchy. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
So let's walk through the things that really maybe are
good indicators of trust, like these sort of so called
traits of trustworthiness. As you talk about them, can you
break these down for us.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yes, so, and I'm gonna say I think some of
them need updating. So this is based on social science
that now has been tracking traits for forty years, and
these traits are changing, which I think is really interesting.
The capability side, so you have imagined your parts. You
have capability, which is really about what you do, and
then you have character, which is why you do things,
but really importantly how you do things. So how would
(12:27):
you describe, Laurie what you do.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I would say that I'm a podcaster. I'm a teacher,
you know, I try to be really there for my students.
I try to use evidence in a really capable way,
Like I have lots of things that make me capable,
but also maybe I'm like a warm person, right, I
want to take care of my students and help my
listeners and so on.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
So they you're talking about capability and character. So the capability,
if you imagine, is your competence. So you have the skills,
you have the expertise, you have the knowledge, you have
the resources, you have YEO, as an institution, you have
all these things that allow you to do what you
say you're going to do. So you're really credible on
those things, but maybe there's some other things. I don't know.
(13:06):
What's something you completely can't do?
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Terrible have I god so many things. Driving I can't
drive by that. Biking, biking, I'm really bad by I
don't know how to bike. Most physical things are very clumsy,
fall lot, skiing not great.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Yeah, that actually makes you more trustworthy because you can
be honest about things that you do and then you're
really comfortable with saying don't ever get in a car
with me or don't ride with me. So that's your confidence.
What you're talking about with you with your students, wanting
to be there for them consistently. I'd imagine that you're
this person that likes them to know that they can
depend on you. That's the reliability trait, and that is
really really important when it comes to trust. So you
(13:44):
know those like really inconsistent people that are high energy
and they show up sometimes and then they completely disappear.
There's no follow through. So that's it's on the capability side.
And then on the character side, we have empathy, which
you spoke about. I prefer the word compassion. You know,
empathy doesn't really talk about the action side, the follow through.
(14:04):
And then The last trait, which I think is the
most important trait, is integrity. And that's all about your
interest being aligned with the best interests of other people.
So you the professor, your interests are aligned with the
interest the students, You the host. The audience feels that
this is self serving, that you are there to be
generous and to care about them and their learning. So
(14:26):
that's what we talk about when we talk about trustworthiness.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
And I imagine that in these different domains of trust
the importance of say, capability, this kind of combination of
competence and reliability versus character, this combination of compassionate integrity
that might go up and down depending on what you need,
right Like, I might not need a surgeon filled with
a lot of character. I just really want him to
be very competent and capable. But a best friend, I right, really,
(14:51):
you know, I don't necessarily care that my best friend
does it her job, but I really want her to
be really empathic when it comes to, you know, helping
me with my problems and so on.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
It's a really important comes back to context, and it's
such an important point because I don't know if you've heard.
Actually my dad said it the other day he's having
some dot to his hip and he's I really don't
feel like the surgeon cares. I was like, yeah, but
he's a great surgeon, right, Like he's going to fix
the hit. And I think that has become an expectation
on sort of a feeling led society, is that sometimes
(15:21):
we can place too much emphasis on compassion and empathy
and that person can seem incredibly kind but not capable.
So this is why I think this alchemy of traits
and thinking about the particular situation is it's almost like
a compass for making really good decisions about people.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
And so if you're a person who's maybe meeting a
new surgeon for the first time, or a new business
partner or a new love interest, and you really want
to kind of make sure you're trusting appropriately, what are
some strategies you'd use to do that well.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
I think the business situation is probably the easiest, and
it's also where most people go wrong, because most people
start with the competence piece. If you think about most
job interviews or promotional interviews like so tell me what
you've done, tell me about your experience, Like they are
the easiest things to get from a resume or a
reference to check, and the number of interviews that don't
get to the why and the how. The how is
(16:14):
really interesting, like how people approach things, how they break
down problems, how they are in difficult conversations. So I
would like focus questions around that. The second thing that
I would do is really try to understand someone's interests, intentions,
and motives, not like why do you want the job?
(16:36):
But where are they really coming from? And again asking
yourself this question of does that align with the role,
does that align with the organization, Because it's when you
have that misalignment in a professional or a personal context
that trust issues can arise. So you can even think
of a bit uncomfortable saying this, but like in dating situations,
like if someone really doesn't want children and the other
(16:57):
person wants children, right, there's a misalignment there. If someone
doesn't want a long term relationship, if someone doesn't want
a monogamous relationship, someone doesn't want to live with you,
it's that misalignment that really is the problem. Now, you're
not going to get there on the first date, you'll
probably scarce someone away, but over time, if you feel
like there's trust issues emerging, there's probably some unsaid conversation
(17:20):
around I want this one thing and you want this
other thing, and we're both too scared to say it.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
And then how do we overcome the kind of biases
that we talked about earlier. Is there anything we can
do to kind of get that perspective maybe not fall
for a familiarity and some of the other biases we
talked about.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
It's so hard. I mean, if someone can come up
with the solution around that, then tell me. But I
think it. I mean, it's really obvious advice. It's becoming
aware of what those biases are for you. What does
familiarity look like? What are the signals? And that's different
for different people. So some people are very influenced by
looks and appearance. Other people are really influenced by cultural
(18:00):
background and accents. Other people are really influenced by education.
Away of sort of tuning into this is when you
meet people for the first time, where do you sort
of focus. Do you notice what someone's wearing, do you
notice what they're saying? Where does the conversation orientate itself
as well? Like, these are really powerful signals as to
(18:21):
what is important to you. That maybe where your biases
are rooted.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
You've also suggested doing something that we talk about a
lot on the Happiness Lab, which is like, take a pause,
take a breath. How can take what you've called the
trust pause be helpful here?
Speaker 2 (18:35):
So a trust pause it's something I invented for myself.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
All researchers research, right.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
I tend to move quickly, do things quickly, think quickly,
speak quickly, and I just realized there were certain situations
where slowing down and really asking myself, you know, was
this person, this piece of information, this situation, this partnership,
did they actually deserve my trust? And it's really placing
(19:06):
value on your trust that you have trust to give
and you don't have to give it to everyone. I
found that to be quite empowering because in certain situations
you go, you know what, I'm gonna just hold back
a little bit. Or it's not like a self protection mechanism.
It's just saying I don't think I want to give
(19:27):
you my trust at this particular moment. And you can
think about that even in the context of online information, right,
like when you just share something without reading it that
would benefit from a trust pause.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
So far, we've talked about cases where we trust a
little bit too much or a little bit too early.
But when we get back from the break, we're going
to discuss the other problem when it comes to trusted happiness,
trusting too little. The happiness lab will be right back.
(20:02):
Rachel Batsman, author of How To Trust and Be Trusted,
is an expert on the science of trust. But I
was curious how she thinks about the opposite, what is distrust.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Oh, So the first thing I'd say is there's a
difference between low trust and distrust, and that's really important
to understand. So low trust can just be you don't
have enough information, like you're new to a situation or
a relationship. It's not necessarily a bad thing. And also
this is why I hate a lot of poles and surveys.
If you try to live your whole life in a
(20:34):
high trust state, it'll be pretty exhausting, right, Like, there's
certain things that just don't require a high degree of trust.
So that's the first thing I would say. Distrust it's
very difficult to define. I have not yet come up
or seen a definition that I really like. But the
way I think of distrust is more through the lens
of behaviors. So I find it helpful to think of
(20:57):
these three d's. So when someone is distrusting, you tend
to see this spectrum play out where you see a
defensiveness set in. And that defensiveness is because you have
made yourself vulnerable or you've placed something of value and
in some ways you feel that it's being exploited or
it's not being taken care of, and so the first
(21:19):
instinct is to be quite defensive about that. Now, the
thing about that stage of distrust is you can still
fix the situation because the person cares. The second phase
is disengagement. Disengagement is when you start to pour back.
So you might have experienced this at work where you're like,
I'm not really sure I trust this personalised situation or
(21:40):
this boss, so I'm just going to pull back. I'm
not sure I'm going to really show up or really care.
And then the last phase, which is incredibly dangerous and
I think it's how we talk about distrust in society today,
is disenchantment. And disenchantment means you have turned against that person,
that organization, that system, and you're in a downward spiral
(22:00):
because your only motive is to bring that thing down.
You have become anti you are pushing against. And the
reason why this is so dangerous is because it can
become all consuming for yourself, for others, and very very toxic.
So you see this in sports scenes where someone turns
against the coach. You see it in workplaces where they
(22:23):
want everyone to leave. We see it wider in society,
where you want to turn against a party. That's how
I tend to think of distrust is moving through these
three phases.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
And you mentioned sort of society, especially politics. It seems
like this idea of disenchantment is running rampant. At least
that's what we hear a lot from the news. But
I know this is an idea that you've pushed back
against a little bit that, like the kind of the
freefall of trust might not be as bad as we think.
Explain why that's the case.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, I mean, I find it really difficult to listen
to news for so many reasons. But it's often because
everything is described in free fall, including trust. So you'll
see these graphs where it's just like this downward line
and from about twenty twenty, it's like falling off a
(23:08):
clip that's across the spectrum. Actually, the institutional the social
and the interpersonal trust. To me, that is problematic because
the way I think of trust is more like energy
that it's not getting destroyed, it's changing form. And so
what might look like low trust or distrust to you
is just someone trusting differently. And once you see this,
(23:31):
it explains so many things, and it's stopped so much judgment.
So it doesn't even have to be between political parties.
You see it within generations where people will say, well
that gen Z or jen Alfa they just don't trust anymore.
That is not true. Their trust is sideways, like they
trust their peers and friends and influencers because that's where
they get their information. They don't trust upwards. So thinking
(23:54):
of flows of trust versus amounts of trust can be
really helpful in understanding dynamics in relationships and then bigger
paradise shifts happening.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
It seems like one of those bigger paradigm shifts is
kind of the trust that we have that in some sense,
for lack of better word, is kind of distributed, right,
You mentioned kind of gen Z and gen Alpha trusting,
influencers trusting what they read on social media. Is that
a cultural shift that you're seeing in this trust research too.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yes, it's huge. So what we see is like if
you imagine like an evolution of trust. We had institutional trusts,
so everything was very top down and hierarchical and centralized
and defined by fixed boundaries. So we used to get
a newspaper, we turn on the TV that's institutional trust,
(24:40):
and technology inherently blew that up and distributed it through
networks and marketplaces and platforms and now through artificial intelligence.
So the easiest way to understand this is imagine a
trust that for decades flowed upwards and now it's distributed sideways.
And this has so much influence over so many things
(25:01):
because who we believe is trustworthy, who influences our opinions
and beliefs, what we decide to act on in the
context of health, politics, education, life decisions, wellness. This is
all moving sideways, and sometimes the people sharing that information
are not the most trustworthy. I mean, just if it
(25:23):
actually you see this in the happiness face that you know,
it really bothers me. Like when I see influencers online,
they're usually alone, Like do you know what I mean?
Like they wake up alone, they meditate, their their coffee,
they stretch they run alone, right, they work alone, just
really bothers me that that's the image of happiness.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
And I think we're falling prey to a lot of
the biases that you talked about earlier about trusting too much, right,
Like many of these influencers have, you know, this beautiful
home that they go into, and they tend to be
really beautiful, right, Like we're falling for these tropes of
like familiarity and maybe some of the things we like
and a halo effect, that's a fact where we kind
of like people who have other good things happening to them.
(26:04):
Like it is true that like we're putting putting our trust,
this distributed trust winds up maybe following pray to as
many of those same biases as you just talked about
in the interpersonal trust domain earlier.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah, and it's in sound bites and fragments, some very
carefully curated images and I know all this stuff. And
I started running last year and I fell down this
rabbit hole so hard, and then I realized no one
looks like that when they run, right, Because I'd be like,
why am I so much pain and sweaty and disgusting?
(26:34):
And they're all like you know, here's weighing and stuff,
and because they're making money off me, and you've just
made me think of something I hadn't thought of. But
if you think about the trust you play in influencers,
like just a scrolling behavior, it's a one way thing, right,
it doesn't flow back to you, And so much of
healthy trust is reciprocation. So I do something for you,
(26:58):
which then creates the space for you to do something
for me. And those loops are what form trust, These
one way forms of trust. Let's not call them shallow trust,
but these one way form so trust. They're breaking those loops,
those possibilities for reciprocation, and that's damaging the social glue,
which i'd imagine is impacting our happiness and satisfaction. I'd
(27:19):
be interested if the research correlates to that.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
So that's kind of the over trust we put in
these distributed networks, you know, to these influencers and things
like that. And that's, as you mentioned, happening alongside a
real kind of emergence of distrust for institutions, whether that's
you know, governments or academic institutions like the one I'm
at and so on. And this was the kind of
thing that the World Happiness Report was really looking at. Right,
The chapter of the World Happiness Report that's on trust
(27:44):
is trying to look at this puzzle about why there's
been so many kind of voting behaviors that have shifted
kind of more anti institutional right for candidates that maybe
want smaller government or kind of want to do away
with government, you know, kind of candidates that really represent
these sort of views that are kind of anti establishment.
Walk me through some of the things that this chapter
found and how trust was really important for some of
(28:06):
these changes in voting behavior.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
The report is really interesting. I don't agree with all
of the framing. Sort of at the highest level. It's
basically saying the far left have high trust and higher
life satisfaction and the far right have low trust and
lower life satisfaction. That's like top level, which is a
problematic framing for me. And one of the reasons why
(28:29):
is they're saying that when you're in a low trust date,
you tend to be anti You invest your energy in
pushing it against things, the status guo, you want to
break down the system, and when you are high trust,
you are four so you're more progressive. Where the report
gets really interesting is when you dig further down. So
(28:50):
what I found interesting is that if you stick with
this far left, in this far right dichotomy, the far
right had higher distrust in strangers, but much higher trust
in their private circles, close knit family, friends, work, colleagues,
really high bonds of social trust. And then on the
left hand side there are actually signs of lower interpersonal trust,
(29:15):
higher signs of learniness and disengagement. And that I think
is really interesting. Essentially, what the report is saying is
that the social fabric is damaged for both.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Sides, yeah, and damaged and damaged in different ways. That
might lead to the fact that it's very hard to
see across the aisle right because people are thinking about
trust in different ways across different sides of the political spectrum,
which is maybe what's leading to a disconnect in what
people want governments to be doing over time exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
And so this idea of high trust and low trust,
that's the problem because both sads hype high trust, but
in different things. It's not that they lack trust, they
just trust differently. And this is what we see is
that when you take trust away from one area of
our lives, it creates a vacuum, and that vacuum has
to be filled with something, and that could be different beliefs,
(30:06):
it could be conspiracy theories, but you have to feel
that for But I think holding on to this idea
that the social fabric is damaged and that the root
causes of that that are driving trust issues and problems
with happiness are insecurity and loneliness on both sides. It's
those two things that are merging together to really cause
(30:27):
this sort of reconfiguration over trust.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
So is there any hope that our tattered social fabric
can be repaired? And if so, how can we go
about creating a future where we trust each other and
our institutions. We'll look at that when the Happiness Lab
returns in a moment. In her audiobook How to Trust
(30:49):
and Be Trusted, Rachel Batsman has lots of great suggestions
for increasing trust in our lives. One interesting concept is
what she calls a trust leap.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
So, a trust leap is whenever you take a risk
to do something new or to do something differently. Now,
when you talk about trust lease, people often think about
big things in a self driving car or buying bitcoin
that involves like a new technology and that is a
trust leap, that is how we change behavior. But trust
sleeps can also be relatively small in our lives. So
(31:22):
it can be choosing to put your hand up at
work to do something completely differently. It can be choosing
to speak up in a meeting. And one of the
problems I've actually seen around trust leaps is that first
of all, people focus on the outcome, so they focus
on where they want the leap to go, and they
imagine these leaps being really really big versus small, consistent
(31:45):
ways of doing something new or doing something differently and
seeing where that takes us. So that is the concept
of trust leaps.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
So I'm guessing I know the answer to this, but
what are some of the things that prevent people from
making these trust leaves. It seems like part of it
maybe is a bias to assume the trust leap is
going to go badly in some forum.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
It's interesting to say badly, because we often don't even
get that far. Because if you imagine a trust leap
involved going from the known and the safe and the familiar,
and that's, as you know, Laurie, where we all love
to be, like, that's where we're wired to be, and
it involves like going to the unknown, because that's when
we discover new things. Most of us, it's so hard
(32:26):
to move from that place that is safe and familiar
that we never even really take the first leap. So
it's not that we are assessing risk. We're not thinking
about all these bad things could happen. It's often just
the getting started and breaking the leap down that is
the problem.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I love this idea because it's really about like recognizing
that getting out of your comfort zone, which we so
many of us struggle with, is in some ways a
trust leap, right. It's like embracing that unknown and kind
of trusting yourself that it's going to be fine no
matter how it turns out, even if it doesn't go
perfectly as planned.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, and I think you know you said you don't
like being on a bike. I hate being on a bike.
It fills me with dread. I don't like skiing on
the edges of things because I don't like ledges right.
So often where we find it hard to take trust
leaps is associated with risks. So there are some risks,
like physical risks that are really hard for me to take,
like when I swim in the ocean, my husband's Australian
(33:20):
and we go to Australia. I'm so afraid of the sharks.
But no sharks in a common three centimeters of order, right.
But those trust leaps are really really hard, but creative
trust leaps are really easy for me to take. It's
a very different type of risk, and so understanding that
again can be and it's something I talk about in
the book because I really believe it can help you
(33:43):
understand where you're stuck and where you like things to
be comfortable and where you really find it hard to
stretch yourself. Is usually to do with different types of risk,
financial risk, emotional risk, physical risk, creative risk. They all
have a very different makeup in our lives.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
You've also argued that we'd be helped in terms of
finding more trust by trying to sort out our trust barriers.
What do you mean by trust barriers and what are
some ways that we can understand them?
Speaker 2 (34:08):
So the trust is, as you can tell, I like
my metaphors, it is the thing that gets in the way,
you know, like the number of people who say I
can't move like they've never lived in a different country,
or they can't move jobs, or in some ways they
can't get off of a relationship, they can't take up
a new hobby. They are describing well being stuck. That
(34:29):
they are in some way paralyzed, and that is because
there is some kind of barrier in the way. Now,
that trust barrier. It might be a very practical thing
like money, financial security, but it can also be things
like companionship just really frightened to do it alone. Not
to go on about running, but I wouldn't been able
to run if I didn't find a friend, because I
(34:51):
wouldn't run around the parks in the dark, and I'd
be really scared of what was going to happen if
I got lost. That's a trust barrier, and in companies
these barriers get bigger. It's actually a really useful framework
if you're launching a new product or service because often
what you think is the trust barrier is very different
from what the cust some that thinks is the trust barrier.
So understanding what that perception is around risk, whether it's
(35:15):
real or perceived, can be really helpful for launching a
new product or service as well.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
And imagine there are lots of trust barriers that come
up in the domain of politics, which is what the
World Happiness Report is about what are some examples of
trust barriers that come up in that domain.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
I'm not really sure where to begin, but a trust barrier,
actually it's a funny thing, but it can be like
nothing's going to change. So it can result in apathy,
like I'm just not going to vote, I'm going to abstain.
So believing that there is no way things are going
to change direction or system's going to change. Financial insecurity,
(35:51):
that is a massive trust barrier. Not believing there's going
to be any kind of redistribution of wealth or that
my life is going to get better. Trust barriers can
be much closer to home. You're probably seeing in the
research the number of people and it's a real worry
that they're never going to own a home, they're never
going to be able to retire, and so it can
actually paralyze people from even getting started, even though that
(36:12):
life stage might be forty to fifty years away. So
these are real trust barriers that are impacting people's happiness
and immediate decisions.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
And so what are some questions we can ask ourselves
to overcome these trust barriers. I mean, some of the
ones you're talking about are structural right, they don't have
enough money for a home. These things might be harder,
but some of the trust barriers, like well I can't
do it by myself, they might be easier to overcome
if we consult our fears of it. So what are
some questions we can ask ourselves to overcome these trust barriers.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It's a good question where did it come from? Was
it something I developed or was it something that I
was told as a child. Is a really big one.
So if you grew up in a family that always
like be careful, don't go that far, or get down
from there. A lot of it starts really young, Laurie,
and that's not surprising because our relationship to risk and
(37:00):
trust it's really formed around the age of four. The
second thing I would ask is, again, how much of
this is real and how much of this is perception?
So how much of this is rooted in facts and
data versus my own fits? That would be the second,
and then the third is not necessarily getting rid of
(37:23):
the barrier, but lowering the leap. You know, I feel
so lucky to teach at Oxford, but then I have
friends who are like, I'd love my child to go there,
and You're like, that is a very ambitious leap for
many children, Like, why don't we just lower that leap
a little bit? And if it ends up like that, great.
It's not about not being ambitious and wanting achievement. I
(37:44):
just think so much pressure comes in life because we
make these leaps way too high.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
And I think that that happens in politics too, right.
I think both because of the misinformation you talked about, right,
you know my information accurate? Have I gotten the right facts?
But also because we make the barriers to entries so high, right.
I think when we envision maybe talking to somebody from
across the aisle, we picture really extreme on the other
side of the aisle, right, you know, because that's you know,
(38:11):
what we see in our distributed trust networks, that's what
the influencers attacking us about. Are there ways that we
can maybe overcome these trust barriers in those domains too?
Speaker 2 (38:20):
I think it's it's a really important point because the
way it's sort of pictured it often is taking on
the system or taking on the other side. And I
would start by just having a conversation that makes you uncomfortable,
being comfortable with the discomfort of a difficult situation is
the starting place. So I have a lot of friends
that have very difficult and different views on the war
(38:42):
in Gaza. And you know, at my children's school, they're
banned from talking about wars or politics because I quote,
it brings up big feelings. And I have a real
objection to that, because what are we teaching our children
that they can't deal with that discomfort, that they can't
have a difficult conversation, that they can't hold that space
with another human being that maybe has a different belief
(39:04):
or viewpoint from them. So you know, you can start
with your own friends and your family and people that
you know at the end and just they're going to
hug and tell you that they still love you, right
and knowing that nothing changes in that relationship. There's so
much we can learn just from being with that discomfort
and that heat and learning that everything is okay.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
And then on the other side of that discomfort, if
you push through, it might be a trusting relationship that
you're going to value tremendously and it's going to make
you much happier.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah, or like not to go to my children, but
like this did happen in their school where they had
quite a difficult conversation around the Holocaust where some children
you know now don't believe the Holocaust has happened now
they're nine and ten. That's not coming from them, that's
come from somewhere. And the fact that the history teacher
then backed them up and gave this very factor assembly.
(39:51):
They were like, wow, there's someone who cares right, and
there's information that we can trust. And he explained where
he got this information from. Now, regardless of what your
side you're on, that assembly would have impacted both sets
of children, the non believers and the children that this
was really important that this chapter in history was members.
So I feel like those moments, particularly with children, it's
(40:13):
really like, I can trust this person, I can trust
this situation. It's really important to teach.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
So as we think back to the World Happiness Report
and the importance it's placed on trust, and how trust
might be going down institutionally, how lack of trust is
kind of affecting our politics, and so much any last
advice for how people on both sides can become a
little bit more trusting.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
I think too much of the conversation is around institutional trust.
These are systems that ninety nine percent of us cannot fix.
They are too big, they're too far out of reach, right,
So I would say, focus on local trust doesn't even
have to be your family and friends. Focus on things
going on in your community, in your neighborhood, in your street,
(40:56):
and really getting involved in something like that. It can
do so much for your social ties. It can do
so much for the glue and make you feel in
some way back in control because you can impact the
people around you. So that would be my advice is
just stop looking outward and upward so much at these
big problems and letting them consume so much energy. And
(41:18):
it's not about withdrawal. If I'm not saying that, I'm
not saying like, be at home more alone. We don't
need more of that. It's about local ties and community
ties and connections that you could in some way put
into action Tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
I hope you've enjoyed my conversation with Rachel and that
you've learned a bit more about what you can do
to trust and be trusted more effectively. If you want
to hear more, be sure to check out Rachel's fabulous
new audiobook, How to Trust and Be Trusted, available everywhere
you get your Audio Books. That's a wrap on our
special series on the World Happiness Report. But not to
worry because the Happiness Lab will be back next week.
(41:54):
I'll be chatting with my friend, the happiness expert, Gretchen
Rubin about her secrets to adulthood. So I hope you'll
returned soon for the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Larry
Santos
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