Rachel Botsman
speaker
139 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Rachel Botsman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There's a whole host of factors that determine when and how trust forms. For instance, how long you've known them, what is the thing you're trusting them with or for, and how bad would it really be if they let you down.
Stanford Business School professor Roderick Kramer found that eight out of 10 executives report being burned at least once because they trusted the wrong person at some point in their career. People tend to make poor trust decisions because they don't understand how trust dynamics really work. So let me give you a simple framework to help visualize how trust happens between two people.
In any relationship, there are two players, the trust giver and the trust receiver. Let's start by focusing on what it means to be the trust giver. A trust giver is the person that is deciding whether to trust someone, a boss, a colleague, a friend, or in my dad's case, the nanny. As the trust giver, we have an important choice. Do we trust them or not?
What influences our choices and decisions is called a trust signal. Trust signals are small clues we knowingly or unknowingly use to decide whether another person should be trusted. how someone speaks, the questions they ask, who they're with, what they're wearing, and even how they say, hi, how are you? These are all trust signals.
In other words, the way we make a trust decision is based on pieces of information we pick up from another person. The tricky thing is we don't always look for or interpret trust signals in the right way. Some trust signals are way louder than others because often we unknowingly tune into the signals that we want to see, that are familiar to us.
Becoming aware of the trust signals you're tuning into is the first important step in making smarter trust decisions. Here's a simple exercise to try. The next time you meet someone for the first time, try to stay aware of what you're tuning into. Is it their voice, their clothes, their demeanor, or their posture? Similarly, what questions do you ask them in the first few minutes?
Just becoming aware of how you're looking for things that are familiar can be powerful. Making trust decisions based on familiarity is a tricky behavior to change because our assumptions about whom to trust are deeply wired. They're often biases that have been with us since we were very young.
Maria Konnikova is a psychologist and author who's written a lot about distrust. She's an expert in the ways trust is exploited by everyone from con artists to poker players. And she happens to be a champion poker player herself.
There's a fascinating study on the link between trust and familiarity. The study, done by a professor named Lisa D. Bryan from the University of Glasgow, showed how facial resemblance enhances trust. Participants in an experiment were shown faces of strangers to be potential playing partners for a game.
When the face of the stranger was similar to the face of the participant, they were more likely to trust the unknown person. Take a moment to think about that. Have you ever trusted someone just because they felt familiar? Maybe they went to the same school as you, like the same sports team, or maybe, as in the study, they even looked a bit like you.
Familiar trust signals are often the loudest because of what's known as confirmation and desirability bias. We use them to confirm our own ideas about how someone or something should be or how we want them to be. That's what happened with my parents and Doris the nanny. She showed up wearing a navy-coloured uniform, complete with a bonnet hat.
She had a mop of curly hair and large steel rimmed glasses. She even played the tambourine. I'm not joking. What a trustworthy person she must be. And even when some major red flags started popping up, my parents let the familiar trust signals override their better judgement. There was the time Doris wanted to get away for a weekend.
So she said her Uncle Charlie had died and she needed to go to the funeral. My dad found out this wasn't true when he called Doris's mum to express his condolences. And Doris's mum said, but Uncle Charlie is just fine. Doris must be confused.
But you know, even after Uncle Charlie, she came with us on a holiday to Marbella.
Even though we were only five and eight, my brother and I could see how Doris was, well, different when my parents were around. It was all an act. And eventually, even my dad couldn't ignore what he was seeing. At the height of suspicion, he did something he'd never done before. He searched Doris's room. found a bag of money under her bed. Quite a lot of foreign currency.
And it happened to be from countries Dad had been travelling to for work.
The same tree. I want to know where this tree is, Dad. And still, Doris stayed with us. That was until my dad's car went missing and he finally kicked her out, called the police and sat guard outside our front door with a baseball bat.
I imagine the Doris saga was in part how I first took a deep interest in understanding trust. Thinking back on it, my dad told me the decision to trust Doris came down to convenience. My parents were busy people with busy jobs. It was more convenient to keep Doris than to find a different solution. It's easy to dismiss or laugh at my dad's reasoning. But haven't we all done that?
Not hire a dodgy nanny, of course, but make a trust decision or continue to trust someone based on convenience. Like when you tell yourself, I know that company isn't entirely ethical. They don't treat their employees well, but their service, it makes my life a little easier. So I'll just carry on using them.
Or perhaps you're under pressure to get something done, so you conveniently delegate a piece of work to a person when you know they shouldn't really be doing it. Convenience so often trumps trust. Understanding the power convenience has over trust has been one of the most important things I've learned about being a trust giver. Let's try another exercise.
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