I always find it frustrating to realize that our civilization is based on many very important concepts such as respect, love, trust, justice, honesty and truth, which are most of the time and by most people misunderstood, misused or even unknown. Most people uses them in their daily lives but have never stopped to question them, this post is about one of them, Trust.
After reading for a while on the web, I finally reached a definition that seems to be good enough, at least for the moment, to start with. I think it may change the more I understand about it, but lets keep it simple for now.
Trust (Definition). The ability of a person to predict the future behavior of another person, or object.
I now analyze the logical implications of this definition. First, trust is not something that we can give to another person or object, it is something we develop by improving our ability of predicting
future behaviors.
How we gain trust
Trust can be increased by experience. This is done by a series of experiments in which have a set the initial conditions and try to predict the outcome, if it fits your expectations, then you gain trust in that person or object. The better you are able to predict the more confident you feel about the person or object.
In the case of predicting the behavior of people, experience may give us unrealistic ideas about our ability to predict future behaviors. Predicting another person’s actions is rather difficult, that’s why for some people it’s so hard to trust someone.
Explicit and implicit trust agreements
I want to analyze two scenarios in which is common the misuse of the concept of trust. For example, take two persons, they met, start getting along, and after a while they start to share with each other all sorts of information, personal, shameful, funny, confidential, etc.
The first scenario is when there’s not an explicit consensus about what is implied when trusting someone. Depending on their background, they may have different views, for example, about which information is confidential. Thus it may happen that one of the persons shares confidential information with a third person, which may be regarded as a betrayal.
The second scenario is when there is an explicit contract in which one of the persons asks the other to not share a given information with other persons, then if that person still shares that information then it could be seen as a betrayal on purpose.
In any case, the person that feels betrayed has no right to blame the other. You cannot blame other persons because you weren’t able to predict his behavior. No one is to blame. It’s not the betrayed person's fault that he cannot predict the other persons behavior. And it’s not the betraying person’s fault that the betrayed person wasn’t able to predict his behavior.
Self-confidence
It’s also possible for a person to not be able to predict his own behavior. We know our abilities, but we also tend to overestimate our strengths, and underestimate our weaknesses. It is very common for humans to fail at trying something because we had unrealistic expectations
about ourselves.
We gain self-confidence in the same way as we gain trust in other persons or objects, by experience. The best way to know our limits is to put them to test many times, and have the honesty to accept when your performance matched your expectations when it didn’t. Keeping track of this may help us plan strategies to carry out bigger projects each time, since we’ll have the hindsight of knowing which mistakes we made, and try to correct as many of them as possible.
Conclusions
If you agree with this way of seeing trust and try to be honest with yourself, you should never blame other for betraying your trust, ever. This is the most important consequence of this view of trust, and the most hard to accept given that most of us has used the term trust in a not well-defined manner for a long time.
You cannot blame other people for your inability to predict their behavior. Even when it comes to the expectations about ourselves.
We shouldn’t dive into desperation when failing to predict, one way to improve our ability to predict our behavior or performance is by carrying out lots and lots of experiments and analyze with the benefit of hindsight what actually happened.
Even though we can conceptually accept these ideas about trust, it’s easy to feel down because we feel betrayed, even if we are able to rationalize it. That, I haven’t been able to find a way to counteract, but I
think rationalization and the study of depression of this kind may actually help overcome it, or at least
transcend it while you’re are analyzing it.
