Rachel Botsman, Oxford University Lecturer and author of the new Pushkin audiobook How to Trust and Be Trusted, joins Malcolm to talk about how to make smart decisions about trust. Then, a preview of How to Trust and Be Trusted, which is available on Spotify, Audible or wherever you get your audiobooks.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What is trust and why is it important?
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.
When you're about three months old, you start trusting people who look like your parents more than other people.
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.
We trust people who seem like us, who look like us, who sound like us much more than we do people who don't. That's something that con artists, by the way, manipulate all the time as well. Oh, you know, you're from New York. I'm from New York. And they might not have ever been to New York, but they try to get those little superficial similarities so that we have a basis for trust.
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.
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