I talked to a friend about Trust today. I thought it was a good time to reflect on the concept of the “trust wager,” which impacts me.
Jim Collins, author of the famous best seller Good to Great, shared a story about his mentor, Bill Lazier. Both taught at Stanford.
Jim asked Bill if someone had abused his trust before. Bill said, “Of course. It’s a part of life.”
Jim asked if it makes you distrustful of people over time. Bill said:
“Jim, you need to decide which wager you will make on trust. On the one side, you start off assuming that people are trustworthy, and on the other, you don’t trust someone until they prove themselves.”
Bill believes that we trust people by default and don’t change that until there’s evidence that they are untrustworthy. That’s a trust wager. There are people who, because we show trust first, bring the best version of themselves to us. In other ways, we can bring out the best in people. Once in a while, our trust is abused, and we have to pay the price. We may get burned, or we get to learn and move on. The trust wager implies it’s still worth trusting people and accepting the downsides.
I love that. However, I also realized that trust is highly personal. It depends on our upbringing. What do our parents keep telling us in our childhood? How is the environment we are living in? How are the economic and political situations in the country?
I feel fortunate that I want to embrace the trust wager. I get to interact with smart and kind people every day. If we aim to surround ourselves with the best people, the likelihood that people are trustworthy is also higher.
I stumbled upon pretty interesting data from the Our World in Data website: https://ourworldindata.org/trust
Do people view trust differently based on their nationality or geography?
The World Values Survey (WVS) asks many different questions about trust. Their most general question asks: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” Possible answers include “Most people can be trusted”, “Do not know”, and “Need to be very careful”.
The differences in the trust level seem really large. It’s interesting that more than 60% of the respondents from China agree with the statement that most people can be trusted. I think that’s related to their culture and religion. It’s alarming to notice that less than 10% of people in Peru (Brazil and Colombia are also in this range) think that most people can be trusted.
Is there any link between trust and GDP per capita?
When digging deeper into this connection [between trust and economic growth] using more detailed data and economic analysis, researchers have found evidence of a causal relationship, suggesting that trust does indeed drive economic growth and not just correlate with it.2
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