Trust: a definition

WHAT IS TRUST? A DEFINITION.

A hell of a lot is going on when someone trusts another. It seems a straightforward process, and we use the word 'trust' easily (too easily?) in everyday conversation to cover a multitude of different relationships of varying quality, but if you study the process involved in person A trusting person B it quickly becomes apparent that it is hugely complicated, and endlessly fascinating (to me, anyway).

The way I see it, trust comes in three parts, and generally materialises in this order:

• Trust as a set of beliefs. Albert believes certain things to be true about Doris and about how she will act in the future, and these beliefs form the basis of his trust in her. In other words, these beliefs are his assessment of her trustworthiness.

The important quality of these beliefs, which crucially distinguishes trust from its close cousins - hope, blind faith and gullibility - is that they are confident positive expectations (Lewicki et al., 1998). 'Confident' means Albert has good reason(s) to believe what he does about Doris: his beliefs about her are based on more than intuition or guesswork; he can call on some evidence to back up why he believes what he does. (If he can't, then strictly speaking, he is dealing in hope, blind faith or gullibility instead. Positive confidence is the crucial difference.) I get on to what Albert believes about Doris (i.e. the content of these beliefs) in a bit.

'Expectations' is also a critical word in this definition: trust does not deal in certainties, but nor does it deal in hope. When Albert trusts Doris, he expects (no more, no less) that she will not abuse his trust, or let him down.

Albert thinking that Doris is trustworthy does not automatically mean that he will go on to actually trust Doris. The two are separate concepts.

• Trust as a decision. Albert has to make a decision to trust her. This decision has been defined as "a willingness to render oneself vulnerable" to the other person (Rousseau et al., 1998).

Albert decides to trust Doris, on the expectation (derived from his set of beliefs about her) that she is unlikely to do anything damaging to him... I'd argue that deciding to 'trust' someone without these confident positive beliefs is not technically 'trust', although we call it such in everyday conversation (e.g. "I'm just going to have to trust you"); it is instead 'hope', 'blind faith' or 'gullibility'.

• Trust as a behaviour/ action. Several conceptualisations of trust stop there, at trustworthiness and the decision to trust. This is a mistake. Why is trusting behaviour important for trust?

Well, Albert may believe he can trust Doris, and he may even have decided to trust her, but until he engages in trusting behaviours, is he really trusting her? It's the difference between having trust in someone (the belief and perhaps the decision) and acting on that basis (i.e. the 'trust' behaviours).

These specific, trust-informed behaviours are:

a) Reliance (allowing that person discretion to act on our behalf; relying upon them; surrendering to them control over something that is valuable to you),

b) Disclosure (sharing sensitive information with them) and

c) Deliberate reduction in 'monitoring' of that person's behaviour (i.e. not checking up on them, because we don't feel the need).

For me, these trusting behaviours are key to the whole process of trusting someone, and any study of trust is incomplete without them.

So, with this three-stage trust process in mind, we can summarise trust as:

Confident positive expectations about the likely conduct of another party in the future, such that...
... one is willing to take the risk to render oneself vulnerable to that party, on the assumption that non-detrimental outcomes are unlikely (and beneficial outcomes likely)...
... as a result of which, one may behave in three main ways: relying on the other party, disclosing sensitive information to that party, and deliberately reducing one's monitoring of that party.

In another post I look at the content of these beliefs, and the common sources of evidence we make use of in coming to these beliefs.

The sources of trust: why we believe what we do

When we trust or distrust someone we believe certain things to be true about their likely future conduct. Where do we get these beliefs from?

I'm not talking in a neurological sense, though research using fMRI brain-scanning techniques has looked at how the brain processes judgements of trustworthiness. Apparently there are certain sections of the brain that become activated when we trust...

Nor am I going to go into research on hormone levels and trust. Apparently, oxytocin is a strong predictor of trustworthiness, while testosterone and cortisol are less so. All rather too biologically deterministic for my liking...

I'm interested in what evidence people use to base their judgements on, and where they source this evidence from. What is important about this is that the actual person being trusted (or not) might not have that great a direct input into the decision of the person weighing up whether to trust them (or not)...

Intuitively, we don't take our time to work out what we actually think about people's motives, competence, integrity and predictability when we trust them, or not... (Incidentally, Diego Gambetta at Oxford University has been doing some external forces. The most obvious example is the Hippocratic Oath signed by doctors, although even this cannot provide a cast-iron guarantee of a doctor's trustworthiness...

We trust, for example, accountants to audit firms' finances and assets accurately, for example. We don't know any of these accountants from the proverbial Adam, but we expect them to do their work with benevolence, competence and integrity because of professional codes of ethics (not that this stopped Arthur Andersen staff from facilitating the Enron scandal: you see how trust is only an expectation, not a guarantee?)

Trust at work: introduction

So, this is a blog about trust in the workplace, and in working relationships. Questions to be considered include:

• What actually is trust?
• What is involved in the process of trusting someone (like a manager or colleague), or an organisation (like your employer)?
• What creates and maintains, and even enhances, trust inside organisations?
• What damages and even destroys trust inside organisations? (How can trust be re-built after it's been damaged, or detroyed?)
• Do people have different trust levels for their colleagues, their line manager and the senior management in their organisation - why?
• Do organisations where people trust each other perform better than others (and if so, why?) Are high levels of trust important inside organisations, or is trust over-rated?
• Do people in different countries report different levels of trust in their workplace?