Would You Trust Me? I'd Trust Me.

A couple of articles on the topic of trust just caught my attention. It's also something I've been thinking about in my work life and I would love to share some related thoughts, but that would probably delve a bit too much into details of my workplace to be okay. I'll simply say managers and administrators need to always consider what their practices and policies indicate about how much trust they have for their employees. It matters. Since I'm not going to add any personal material beyond that, I'll simply share. The two new things to begin, followed by related content, some new and some repeated from other contexts in other posts.

Why Are Flash Mobs Looting Stores? Because Today’s America Gave Them the Go-ahead

This model for robbery has always been available to enterprising thieves. It’s simple math. What can one or two security guards do if 60 people decide to just walk in and loot the place? . . . What is it about this particular era that has inspired this particular trend?

Here is a theory: The social covenant has shattered.

Meaning the thousand unspoken understandings by which a society functions, the agreements to which we all sign on without a word being spoken. Some are encoded in law, others just encoded in us. Either way, they are rules — “norms” might be a better word — people usually obey even when they could get away without doing so.

You don’t stand facing the back wall of an elevator. In heavy traffic, you take turns merging. You stop at the red light even when the street is deserted. And, oh yes, you don’t join a mob to ransack a store. . . . 

Surely the opportunistic looting that marred last year’s largely peaceful protests for racial justice helped influence them. But that’s hardly the only — or, arguably, even the most corrosive — transgression of social norms we’ve seen in recent years.

To the contrary, we’ve seen police and other authority figures exempt themselves from mask and vaccine mandates — and dare mayors and governors to do anything about it. We’ve seen ex-public officials thumb their noses at congressional subpoenas. We’ve seen a seditionist mob breach the U.S. Capitol and be lionized for it by certain members of Congress and the media. And we’ve seen a president who delighted in shattering norms, refusing to provide his tax returns, flouting the emoluments clause of the Constitution, openly politicking on government property . . . the list goes on. And on.

Worst of all, we’ve seen little in the way of accountability for any of it. So the question isn’t how ordinary people could have gotten the idea a holiday from social norms was possible, but how could they have not? Everywhere you look, someone else is seceding from the covenants that make it possible for civil society to function. Which makes these smash-and-grab robberies seem less a mystery and more just another troubling reflection of our times.

The End of Trust

Trust. Without it, Adam Smith’s invisible hand stays in its pocket; Keynes’s “animal spirits” are muted. “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust,” the Nobel Prize–winning economist Kenneth Arrow wrote in 1972. . . . 

We may be in the midst of a trust recession.

Trust is to capitalism what alcohol is to wedding receptions: a social lubricant. In low-trust societies (Russia, southern Italy), economic growth is constrained. People who don’t trust other people think twice before investing in, collaborating with, or hiring someone who isn’t a family member (or a member of their criminal gang). The concept may sound squishy, but the effect isn’t. The economists Paul Zak and Stephen Knack found, in a study published in 1998, that a 15 percent bump in a nation’s belief that “most people can be trusted” adds a full percentage point to economic growth each year. That means that if, for the past 20 years, Americans had trusted one another like Ukrainians did, our annual GDP per capita would be $11,000 lower; if we had trusted like New Zealanders did, it’d be $16,000 higher. “If trust is sufficiently low,” they wrote, “economic growth is unachievable.” . . . 

Trust in government dropped sharply from its peak in 1964, according to the Pew Research Center, and, with a few exceptions, has been sputtering ever since. This trend coincides with broader cultural shifts like declining church membership, the rise of social media, and a contentious political atmosphere. . . . 

To hear the anthropologists tell it, we once built reciprocity by picking nits from one another’s fur—a function replaced in less hirsute times by the exchange of gossip. And what better gossip mart is there than the office? Separate people, and the gossip—as well as more productive forms of teamwork—dries up. In the 1970s, an MIT professor found that we are four times as likely to communicate regularly with someone sitting six feet away from us as with someone 60 feet away. . . . 

Trust is about two things, according to a recent story in the Harvard Business Review: competence (is this person going to deliver quality work?) and character (is this a person of integrity?). “To trust colleagues in both of these ways, people need clear and easily discernible signals about them,” wrote the organizational experts Heidi Gardner and Mark Mortensen. They argue that the shift to remote work made gathering this information harder. Unconsciously, they conclude, we “interpret a lack of physical contact as a signal of untrustworthiness.” . . . 

Add to the disruption and isolation of the pandemic a political climate that urges us to meditate on the distance—ethnic, generational, ideological, socioeconomic—separating us from others, and it’s not hard to see why many Americans feel disconnected. . . . 

A trust spiral, once begun, is hard to reverse. . . . 

We considered playing pandemic at my birthday party, but . . . 

As I stand behind him, it occurs to me just how much trust we put in other people. Complete strangers, friends. Everybody. Dalton's just sitting there, relaxed, trusting that I'm not going to lose my temper and stab him in the back of the neck with a fork. Every time we get into a car, we trust everybody else on the road. Every time we walk on the sidewalk, we put our lives in other people's hands. We'd never even leave the house if we actually thought about how little control we have over living and dying.

― Coert Voorhees, The Brothers Torres

Have You Heard? Gossip Is Actually Good and Useful

Social topics—personal relationships, likes and dislikes, anecdotes about social activities—made up about two-thirds of all conversations in analyses done by evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. The remaining one-third of their time not spent talking about other people was devoted to discussing everything else: sports, music, politics, etc.

“Language in freely forming natural conversations is principally used for the exchange of social information,” Dunbar writes. “That such topics are so overwhelmingly important to us suggests that this is a primary function of language.” He even goes so far as to say: “Gossip is what makes human society as we know it possible.”

In recent years, research on the positive effects of gossip has proliferated. Rather than just a means to humiliate people and make them cry in the bathroom, gossip is now being considered by scientists as a way to learn about cultural norms, bond with others, promote cooperation, and even, as one recent study found, allow individuals to gauge their own success and social standing. . . . 

A piece of gossip, they argue, is an opportunity to find out how someone did something right, or something wrong, and learn from the example. Learning how to live with others is something that continues throughout life—once you’ve learned not to eat paste, you can graduate to more nuanced lessons of human behavior. . . . 

“Even if we’re interacting with somebody we’ll never see again, we live in a very gossipy society, so everything we do, in a sense, is public knowledge.”

This has benefits at the group level, by motivating people to act in everyone’s best interests, not just their own. . . . 

“Hearing gossip communicates norms of the group,” lead study author Elena Martinescu told me in an email, “but individuals who receive this information will use it to reflect on themselves: Do they personally respect the norm? What can they expect if they break it?”

From The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself by Hannah Holmes

The behavior of sharing is so fundamental to human interaction that we do it from dawn till dusk without noticing. Every group of humans that forms a culture forges rules of conduct, then conforms to them, more or less. (More when someone's watching, less when unobserved.) . . .

Humans are particular about their partners in these efforts. I won't trade twice with someone who takes advantage of me . . .

Altruistic behavior is that which costs me effort, risk, or resources, but which doesn't benefit me. The problem is, it's hard to find an altruistic act that doesn't ultimately strengthen my hand. . . .

What if altruism isn't selfless at all, but rather a sly, long-term investment strategy? . . .

For one thing, it appears that we are hardwired to behave benevolently when we're being watched. . . .

Reputation is now strongly suspected as the engine that drives altruism: Because I am such a social animal, it's important to me that other humans trust and respect me. . . . What goes around comes around, in human groups. . . .

First of all, let's dispense with the girl-down-the-well syndrome. This is the phenomenon in which humans will donate one thousand dollars to aid one human infant, but won't donate one thousand dollars to save one hundred infants in Bangladesh. The difference is that the girl down the well has a reputation. Alas for those one hundred Bangladeshis, their faces and reputations are unknown. . . .

What exactly happens to my brain when I hand a PowerBar to a homeless human? For one thing, based on MRI experiments, my trusty dopamine receptors rev up, just as they do for great food, sex, and other life-prolonging goodies. Apparently kindness is addicting. A separate brain region simultaneously dampens my urge for instant gratification, so that I can act in favor of the long-term result. . . .

I join my dog and find that my pulse is racing. I have taken a huge social risk. I've punished a noncooperator. Theorists have argued since Darwin over why human niceness persists in spite of cheaters. . . .

Punishing is crucial to the survival of cooperation, because punishment erodes the cheater's precious social support. However, punishing also looks like a purely altruistic act: I confront the cheater, and all I get out of it is a racing heart and a peeved wolverine. No dopamine rush, even. Why, then, should I make such a sacrifice for the common good? Once again, the behavior looks biologically bankrupt at first glance. And once again on closer inspection, it appears punishing the cheaters is part of a long-term strategy wherein I trade today's stress for tomorrow's social support. When I volunteer to punish a cheater, I advertise my own high standards for trustworthiness and decency. I attract a better class of allies. My stock rises. . . .

Anyway, the sad truth about cooperative behavior seems to be that we're all wolverines inside, wolverines in bonobo clothing. If we consider only the short term, it undeniably serves me best to blow through stop signs, lie to the IRS, and ignore the little girl in the well. But in the long term, I rely on my fellow humans in so many ways that such cheating (in front of them, at least) just doesn't pay.

From Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari:

Most people presume that reality is either objective or subjective . . .

However, there is a third level of reality: the intersubjective level. Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans. Many of the most important agents in history are intersubjective. Money, for example . . .

Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. . . .

In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world. . . .

Being able to distinguish fiction from reality and religion from science will therefore become more difficult but more vital than ever before.

Our Consensus Reality Has Shattered

Consensus is a tool for reducing uncertainty, so it becomes much more important during times like these. But in the current information environment, the search for consensus is fraught. When we reach out to others for a gut check, we find a new level of chaos—multiple competing realities, often in violent conflict. . . . 

People who are experiencing uncertainty tend to assign a higher value to the in-group’s most distinctive traits, such as skin color or religious practice. They are attracted to in-groups with rigidly defined rules and boundaries, and to in-groups that are internally homogenous—filled with people who look, think, and act in similar ways.

More destructively, people who are experiencing uncertainty tend to develop hostile attitudes toward out-groups, seeing them as threats, and entertaining dark fantasies of hostile actions toward the hated other. Some in-group members may go beyond fantasy, engaging in acts of violence, terrorism, even genocide. They gravitate toward social movements that are bigoted, hateful, and authoritarian.

They become extremists. . . . 

In-groups have become vital to establishing what is real, but the normally overlapping circles of consensus have drifted apart, and the less they overlap, the more divergent our realities become.

Young Americans Are Raising Alarms About the State of U.S. Democracy in a New Poll

The poll found that 52% of young people in the U.S. believe that the country's democracy is either "in trouble" or "a failed democracy." Just 7% said that democracy in the United States is "healthy." . . . 

The poll also found that nearly half of young Republicans say there is a 50% chance or better that they will see a second civil war in their lifetime, compared to 32% of young Democrats and 38% of independent or unaffiliated voters.

The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage

I’ve been spending considerable time digging into the source of our collective rage, and the answer to this question is trickier than most people think. For starters, any good answer has to fit the timeline of when our national temper tantrum began—roughly around the year 2000. The answer also has to be true: That is, it needs to be a genuine change from past behavior—maybe an inflection point or a sudden acceleration. Once you put those two things together, the number of candidates plummets. . . . 

There are a few things that have notably changed for the worse. From a political standpoint, the critical one is trust in government. As we all know, trust in government plummeted during the ’60s and ’70s thanks to Vietnam and Watergate, and then flattened out for the next few decades.

From 1980 to 2001, trust stayed at roughly 40 percent except for a brief dip, during Bill Clinton’s first term, that was quickly regained. Then, right after 2001, trust began to plummet permanently. By 2019 it was down to 20 percent. . . . 

What accounts for this? . . . 

To find an answer, we need to look for things that (a) are politically salient and (b) have changed dramatically over the past two to three decades. The most obvious one is Fox News.

As anyone who’s watched Fox knows, its fundamental message is rage at what liberals are doing to our country. Over the years the specific message has changed with the times—from terrorism to open borders to Benghazi to Christian cake bakers to critical race theory—but it’s always about what liberal politicians are doing to cripple America, usually with a large dose of thinly veiled racism to give it emotional heft. . . . 

To an extent that many people still don’t recognize, Fox News is a grinding, daily cesspool of white grievance, mistrust of deep-state government, and a belief that liberals are literally trying to destroy the country out of sheer malice. Facebook and other social media outlets might have made this worse over the past few years—partly by acting as a sort of early warning system for new outrages bubbling up from the grassroots that Fox anchors can draw from—but Fox News remains the wellspring. . . . 

The Fox pipeline is pretty simple. Fox News stokes a constant sense of outrage among its base of viewers, largely by highlighting narratives of white resentment and threats to Christianity. This in turn forces Republican politicians to follow suit. It’s a positive feedback loop that has no obvious braking system, and it’s already radicalized the conservative base so much that most Republicans literally believe that elections are being stolen and democracy is all but dead if they don’t take extreme action. . . . 

The evidence is pretty clear: . . . it’s Fox News that’s set the country ablaze.

source

The Smart Move: We Learn More by Trusting Than by Not Trusting

When you trust someone, you end up figuring out whether your trust was justified or not. An acquaintance asks if he can crash at your place for a few days. If you accept, you will find out whether or not he’s a good guest. A colleague advises you to adopt a new software application. If you follow her advice, you will find out whether the new software works better than the one you were used to.

By contrast, when you don’t trust someone, more often than not you never find out whether you should have trusted them. If you don’t invite your acquaintance over, you won’t know whether he would have made a good guest or not. If you don’t follow your colleague’s advice, you won’t know if the new software application is in fact superior, and thus whether your colleague gives good advice in this domain.

This informational asymmetry means that we learn more by trusting than by not trusting. Moreover, when we trust, we learn not only about specific individuals, we learn more generally about the type of situations in which we should or shouldn’t trust. We get better at trusting.

Reciprocal Altruism

For societies to survive and thrive, some significant proportion of their members must engage in reciprocal altruism. All sorts of animals, including humans, will pay high individual costs to provide benefits for a non-intimate other. Indeed, this kind of altruism plays a critical role in producing cooperative cultures that improve a group’s welfare, survival, and fitness. . . .

Evidence is strong that for many human reciprocal altruists the anticipated repayment is not necessarily for the person who makes the initial sacrifice or even for their family members. By creating a culture of cooperation, the expectation is that sufficient others will engage in altruistic acts as needed to ensure the well being of those within the boundaries of the given community. The return to such long-sighted reciprocal altruists is the establishment of norms of cooperation that endure beyond the lifetime of any particular altruist. Gift-exchange relationships documented by anthropologists are mechanisms for redistribution to ensure group stability; so are institutionalized philanthropy and welfare systems in modern economies.

At issue is how giving norms evolve and help preserve a group. Reciprocal altruism—be it with immediate or long-term expectations—offers a model of appropriate behavior, but, equally importantly, it sets in motion a process of reciprocity that defines expectations of those in the society. If the norms become strong enough, those who deviate will be subject to punishment—internal in the form of shame and external in the form of penalties ranging from verbal reprimand, torture or confinement, and banishment from the group. . . .

If we are trying to build an enduring and encompassing ethical society, tight boundaries around deserving beneficiaries of altruistic acts becomes problematic. If we accept such boundaries, we are quickly in the realm of wars and terrorism in which some populations are considered non-human or, at least, non-deserving of beneficence.  

The concept of reciprocal altruism allows us to explore what it means to be human and to live in a humane society. Recognition of the significance of reciprocal altruism for the survival of a culture makes us aware of how dependent we are on each other. Sacrifices and giving, the stuff of altruism, are necessary ingredients for human cooperation, which itself is the basis of effective and thriving societies.

Cooperation Is Self-Interest

There are different lessons a person can take away from the economic example known as the Prisoner's Dilemma.  The traditional rationalist perspective, for instance, is that deciding based on individual self-interest is the best option because it guarantees a better result than not.  But that is only the case from an individualistic perspective, where the operating assumption is that everyone will act from purely individual self-interest.  What's always seemed the more powerful lesson to me, though, is that the absolute best result can only be achieved when everyone acts cooperatively and puts the group's interests ahead of their individualist inclinations--not only does the group do better, but from a long-term perspective everyone does better as individuals as well.

I particularly like this definition of the game from Investopedia:

A paradox in decision analysis in which two individuals acting in their own best interest pursue a course of action that does not result in the ideal outcome. The typical prisoner's dilemma is set up in such a way that both parties choose to protect themselves at the expense of the other participant. As a result of following a purely logical thought process to help oneself, both participants find themselves in a worse state than if they had cooperated with each other in the decision-making process.

The hitch is that achieving this result requires that every individual must trust that every other individual will behave cooperatively, because once that trust breaks down so does the group and the cooperation.  Many will tell you that such trust is unnatural and not attainable, and so they base all of their views, positions, and actions on the idea that it will never happen and see individualistic self-interest as the only option.  I passionately believe the opposite, which is probably apparent to anyone who knows me (or this blog) at all.  And I believe it's not just pie-in-the-sky thinking, as there is a multitude of examples from nature and the history of human societies supporting the idea that cooperation is not only possible, it leads to thriving successes.

The Chat Box Is My Secret Weapon

I was recently asked how I’ve adapted my facilitation during the pandemic. And I realized that the biggest shift in my practice has been the attention I now place on creating psychological togetherness in virtual settings as quickly as possible. For me, the best tool to do that stitching is also the simplest: the chat box.

When we gather in person, numerous (often unconscious) factors contribute to a sense of togetherness. A physical journey transports us between worlds: a drive, an airplane ride, a walk down the hall. On entering, we pick up endless silent cues about each other — what folks are wearing, where they’re sitting, how they're moving their bodies. We see micro-expressions of choice: Earl Grey tea in a beloved mug, a Starbucks iced coffee, a new almond regimen. In our virtual gatherings, we lose so much of this social, orienting context. As hosts, we need to create it. . . .  

1. Connect your guests in the chat box within the first 5% of the gathering . . . 

I had them type in three words:

1. the town or city where they were joining from
2. the space where they were taking the call
3. the floor material currently underneath them . . . 

2. Remind your guests that they have a body

This humble prompt (town, space, floor) punches above its weight. It reminds people they have a body, and so does every other guest. It locates them in the specificity of place. These are real people! With feet! It makes a potentially disembodied, anonymous group embodied, specific and real even when they can’t see each other.

3. Ask questions that invite specificity and are answerable in a word or phrase

I then asked the following four questions designed to make the group feel like a group (and had them answer in the chat):

“What do you hear right now?” . . . 

“Who did you need to check with to be here today with no other obligations?” . . . 

“If you could play this group a song to evoke a specific emotion that you think is appropriate for this moment, what would it be?” . . . 

And finally: “If you weren’t following your current path, what else might you be pursuing?”

There were dancers, innkeepers, gardeners, and travel writers among us. This question creates a sense of expansion and possibility. We are each more multi-faceted than perhaps assumed. . . .