What is Trust?
- Sumay Lu
- Aug 5
- 6 min read
Our family never liked the word trust, as it seemed to imply an aspect of faith. All humans are fallible, so how does one “trust” an imperfect being? However, as we’ve continued to explore the world, meeting hundreds of people, and having adventures and misadventures developing relationships, I think that trust has an important place.
Radical Transparency
Principles are valuable, but they require a lot in order to be practically implementable. Two people can agree upon a principle in theory, but do they have the same understanding of it? Never. Although their understandings can roughly approximate each other. However, even if they have a perfect shared understanding of a concept, applying it and interpreting it to individual scenarios is a completely different can of worms.
The principle of radical transparency has been a foundation in our lives for a long time since we learned about it from Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater. Dalio applied radical transparency in a professional context. Live-streaming meetings and giving negative feedback openly in groups. Many were put off by this culture and found it to be unnecessarily abrasive. In kindergarten children are often told “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Thought leaders such as Jordan Peterson, expanding upon theories developed by Carl Jung, discuss the shadow of human nature.
No tree can grow to Heaven, unless its roots reach down to Hell
Carl Jung
Jordan Peterson discusses how one should look at the atrocious events throughout history through the lens that you would be capable of committing those treasons. To ignore your susceptibilities toward evil, you are enticing it into your own life.
Our family adopted radical transparency under the notion that one cannot even trust themselves. You must be aware that you are capable of doing harm, even to the people you love the most, without knowing it. Radical transparency, attempting to become as transparent as possible to those around you, is a way to mitigate risks. But it is not a perfect strategy.
One, only you can attempt to communicate your subjective reality, and your own understanding of your subjective experience is imperfect. There will always be things about yourself that you don’t know that you don’t know, and are therefore impossible to warn others about when trying to communicate your weaknesses and blind spots.
Two, others must be able to interpret what you communicate about yourself in a way that’s roughly accurate. This is very difficult to accomplish, especially because people are not used to others being honest and transparent. We are trained to guess at the underlying motivation and emotion behind what people are saying, so others interpretations can become very removed if they don’t understand that you are trying to communicate exactly what you’re experiencing.
Three, you can try to be transparent with those when you are around them, but are you able to communicate all your thoughts, experiences, and emotions that you’re experiencing all the time? Do you only communicate what is relevant to others? Are you the right person to be deciding that?
Overall, radical transparency can be a helpful tool if you are able to develop a shared understanding with others on how to practically wield it.
Predictability
What is understanding? Ultimately, when we learn we update the models in our brains about how the world works. When I learn your profession, I will update the model in my brain that will anticipate different outcomes based on the new information. The more you understand something, the more predictable it will become. The more you understand someone the more predictable they become.
When evaluating the efficacy of a model, you must be aware of your own data bias. When evaluating another person, you only have the data from when you are engaging with that person. If someone is a colleague, you only have data about them in a professional context.
Models can also break with regime changes. Whether the environment goes through a radical change (e.g. losing a job), or the person does.
The more data you have about a person, whether that be influenced by time span, variety of environments, the number of properties, etc. the better you can attempt to evaluate the quality of your model.
Honesty and Actions
Once you start to build a quality model of someone, that’s not enough to build trust. For example, one can discover that another individual is an untrustworthy person. Much of what trust comes down to is alignment between understanding and outcomes. Can you trust someone to be able to understand and articulate their situation in a way that mirrors the outcomes of their actions and the world around you.
If someone tells you that they know the store you’re looking for is right down the street and it isn’t, you wouldn’t trust that person as much. If a person tells you that they believe in something, but their actions imply otherwise the same reasoning applies.
➡️ The most important signal for building a strong bond of trust is how well you can trust someone’s understanding of themselves.
If someone understands themselves well, many weaknesses and mistakes can be mitigated. They can let you know if they aren’t good at something, or don’t have much experience in a certain area. They can let you know about the ways in which they might upset you or cause distress. However, if one lacks an understanding of themselves it is very difficult to build trust because their words and actions will often conflict.
This type of untrustworthiness can be dangerous as most people know the simple ways to get positive reactions out of others. Those who are nice and positive can seem trustworthy and often easily win the trust of others, but be aware of if their actions align with their words.
Strong Understanding Wielded with Malice
While all forms of untrustworthiness can be dangerous, this is the most dangerous. Pretty much every case in which someone does someone else harm, whether major or minor, comes from a place of misunderstanding, not malice.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
For example, in the show Ted Lasso, the character Rebecca hires an American football coach to coach soccer for her club because she is trying to destroy the team. She believes that this will hurt her ex-husband who cheated on her. However, as she learns more about Ted Lasso (the American coach), herself, and her ex-husband she realizes the mistakes she is making and the best way to produce better outcomes for everyone, including helping her ex-husband work through his own struggles.
However, there are very rare cases in which someone with a deep understanding of themselves and other people will wield this understanding with malice. These are the most dangerous kinds of people and it can be hard to find good examples because there is always more going on behind people’s motivations than what can be perceived.
It is also very dangerous to attribute another's actions to this type of intent as it is an extremely strong assertion that should never be your first assumption. While for most everyone this kind of intent is not relevant, it is depicted in fictional stories and is often on the minds of people these days which is why I included it here.
Accountability
If you have built a strong mental model of another person, they have a good understanding of themselves and demonstrated through their actions, the last qualifying factor in my understanding for building trust is accountability.
Trustworthy people don’t run from feedback. Whether this includes feedback from other people, natural consequence, environmental feedback, or just exposure to novel environments.
Receptivity to feedback indicates a desire to close the gap between understanding and outcomes. While a trustworthy person can have a good understanding of themselves, they will understand that they don’t have a perfect understanding and will want to continuously improve by listening to others.
The more forms of feedback you have in your life, the more you can develop an understanding of yourself. If someone does not have any form of concrete feedback in their life, it is generally less likely they will have a strong understanding of themselves.
This is why hard sciences can be a good thing to expose yourself to. While things like art and music are valuable pursuits, without initiative there is no natural external feedback that can lead to an accountable learning process. Long term relationships are especially valuable feedback loops, which is why people tend to trust those that have long term relationships such as a marriage, or a good relationship with their family.
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Ultimately, you want to have people in your life that you trust. But these days it’s extremely hard to get to a point where you trust someone. However, the best place to start is with family. Shared history is extremely valuable in a world with abundant opportunities for new connection. Having a longer timeline allows you to understand someone in context, which is extremely important given the diversity of backgrounds different people have.
We all crave understanding, but understanding has to come from accountability. When someone understands you, they’ll see the good parts and the bad. It means they will be able to help you see the blind spots maybe you didn’t know that you had.