Trust must be the most prevalent human trait influencing our behaviour from the day we are born until we die.
Newborn babies have an instinctive inclination to trust their parents to feed them, protect them and save them from falling victims to adversities. As we grow older, we learn that trust takes a long time to build and can be lost in a moment. Trust is indeed the most fragile of human instincts.
In our personal lives, we must all have experienced how fragile trust is. An unfaithful partner, a friend who betrays our trust by being indiscreet in dealing with private information we entrust him with, and employers who fail to appreciate the hard work we put in our job out of loyalty to them are just some too common reasons why we lose trust in people.
Psychologists argue that trust is quickly lost as the human brain is hardwired to be negatively biased. We find it easier to remember a single put-down versus a handful of positive experiences in our relationship with others. One organisational psychologist wrote: “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.”
In our private lives and our work, people judge us for trustworthiness by looking at various elements in our behaviour that prove whether we are reliable, truthful and strong enough to say what we mean and mean what we say. The way we spend or use money from handling the family finances, managing our office petty cash, claiming for expenses reimbursed by our company or handling big-ticket financial transactions often reveals whether we can be trusted with doing what is right with our own and other peoples’ money.
Our word also needs to be our bond if we expect people to trust us. Even as children, we protested vehemently when our parents did not keep to their word to give us something they promised us. As adults, many feel offended when business and political leaders resort to using hollow corporate or political speak to win our trust.
Social media has, unfortunately, increased the verbal assault on our senses. Every morning, we wake up to a plague of waffles spewed by business and political communicators who want to convince us that we are at the centre of their attention. The never-ending political and business jargon we are daily exposed to is undoubtedly not doing much to help us build trust with many leaders of business and politics.
Life experiences teach us how fragile trust is and how to know when this priceless commodity is broken
Here is an example of a corporate waffle in a company’s mission statement that is characteristic of how businesses try to win over our trust: “Our depth of experience allows us to provide the best service possible, satisfying the specific and unique needs of each individual client”.
In a democratic political system, people in a position of authority often depend for their survival on the endorsement of the majority of people they serve. It is generally accepted that we expect integrity from the people we trust to govern us. Yet many often fall victims of communications wizardry that disguises self-interest motivation by depicting it as genuine concern for our well-being.
The business community depends on consumers’ trust to thrive. Thanks to online communication, we are better positioned to decide whether the promises made by product and service providers are trustworthy. People form first impressions fast – between 17 and 50 milliseconds fast.
Those familiar with online shopping websites can form an opinion on how much an online business can be trusted. The buying process flows smoothly until one presses the ‘buy’ button.
However, when one needs to complain about a bought product, the process sometimes becomes overcomplicated. Your e-mails often do not get an acknowledgement and much less a satisfactory settlement in a reasonable time. Fortunately, the competition for e-commerce services is very keen and those who lose the trust of their clients struggle to survive for long.
Advertising texts are rarely impressive enough to remain popular for more than a few weeks or months. One advert that has survived for several years is that of Mastercard. “There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Mastercard.”
This famous slogan, launched in 1997, immediately caught the public’s imagination and it is still used today. It was successful because we all accept that there are some things in life that are priceless. Trust must surely be one of these priceless commodities.
Life experiences teach us how fragile trust is and how to know when this priceless commodity is broken.