What does it mean to "trust someone"

[jack]

If you say you trust someone what does that mean? That you trust their integrity, not to deliberately take advantage of you? Or that you trust their competence? Or that you trust their self-knowledge of their own level of competence?

It seems a common sitcom moment that people take "trust" to mean, "if someone is important in your life, you must automatically believe everything that comes out of their mouth, however ridiculous". Which seems obviously a bad idea.

But I think I'm also worse-than-average at inferring whether or not I _should_ take something on trust, that someone hasn't explicitly stated.

It's like, suppose someone offers to post an important letter for you. I think it's reasonable to assume they wouldn't take it as far as the postbox, then choose to crumple it up and throw it away instead of posting it. But is it reasonable to assume they'll REMEMBER to post it? If they SAY they'll remember, is it reasonable to assume they're right? Do you have the same idea of how important it is that it's posted TODAY? For some people, it goes without saying that DO know how, and doubting that is insulting their competence. But it's also true that basically everyone THINKS they can post a letter, but many of us also assume "oh, I forgot and did it tomorrow" or "yes, but I spilled some beer on it" are equally good. So, I always want to clarify, "do you actually have good evidence for the level of certainty I wanted, or did you just assume that you could do it 'well enough'"? But that always comes across as "don't trust you", because we assume that we SHOULD be competent enough, and someone doubting us is assuming (a) we're untrustworthy or (b) we're so stupid we don't know whether we can perform a common day-to-day action or not :(

Comments

[gerald_duck]

My immediate, instinctive, obvious answer is that there are different kinds of trust. If I love someone, I might trust them to hold my interests as dear to their heart as their own. That doesn't necessarily mean I'd trust them to be good at everything they think they're good at, still less trust them to do things they knew were beyond their competence.

Just as we recognise several different meanings of "love", the trust I place in my partner, in my airline pilot, in my work colleagues, are quite different.


The distinctions become quite stark once one is thinking in terms of security engineering. Marketing people, for example, seem to abuse "trusted" to mean "you have no alternative but to trust this", which is emphatically not the same thing as "trustworthy". And the PGP web of trust explicitly distinguishes between your trust that key X belongs to person Y, and your trust that key X will be diligent in choosing which other keys to sign.

[azurelunatic]

I would say that it involves enough knowledge of the subject to know on which axes they can be trusted. I trusted my high school best friend with my life. I did not trust him with my lunch, my girlfriend, or my calculator, as he would spill the first on the second while flirting with the third. Trustworthiness is not a single value. You can be the kindest person in the world but unreliable at completing tasks you've said you'll do effectively or on time; you can be an absolute emotionally abusive shit in a relationship but still carry out the things you've said you'll do with perfect integrity.

So having to inquire whether someone is in fact capable of carrying out the trust-required task you've asked for is in fact a lack of current trust -- you don't have the knowledge that would give you the certainty. However, current lack of trust isn't the same thing as distrust. Distrust is "I am certain in your unreliability on this topic."

[redbird]

It's complicated because the variables here include whether I know someone well enough to know how good their self-assessment is in various areas, and whether our priorities are the same. If I live with someone, "mail the payment for the electrical bill" should be a priority for both of us; if it's my card to my cousin they never met, perhaps not.

At a meta level, if I don't know someone well enough that I have a feeling for how good they are at remembering to do things, I probably shouldn't rely on them for the most important favors/tasks if I can avoid it. I suspect this gets both a general people being bad at evaluating our own skills, and a bit of not wanting to admit that one is forgetful.

[ptc24]

Short version: "seconded!" to all the people who say "it's complicated".

I have this distinction between two senses[1] of "trust". The first is in terms of belief, the second is in terms of action. You can imagine the second without the first: "he's a disreputable slimeball, but we don't have any other options, we're just going to have to trust him". Or the other way around - "objectively, I'd say he's pretty trustworthy, but I'm a coward, so I'm just going to do my own thing."

Except there's probably something between the two, something at the level of emotional response.

There's the moral dilemma where you don't want to trust someone, yet you don't want to distrust them in a way that puts blame on them. Is it meaningful to talk about a right to be trusted?

Another one: "for all I know, most people might say he's trustworthy, but I know I'm a poor judge of character, and there's a lot at stake, so I won't trust him this time." A lot of things to do with trust, I think, come down to issues of "for all I know". Except that not everyone sees it that way, and may take not being trusted as being about them, rather than about you.

There's the issue of trusting onesself. This can be tricky at times, and there's the philosophical problem that you come up with some justification for why you can trust yourself, but then "but what if I've just made a mistake?" You can't even delegate the issue to a third (well, second) party, as you've got to trust yourself to pick the right third party to delegate to, understand what they're saying, etc.

[1] Well, if word senses worked like that, which they don't. Two word-sense families? A distinction that can be used to make up word senses on the fly? You know what I mean anyway.

[azurelunatic]

I think it's meaningful to talk about how much baseline trust any random person happens to extend to any random other person, and the factors that modify it -- appearance, grooming, gender (of both the person extending the trust and the person that they're trusting), as well as any more personalized things about that specific individual.

Being trusted to not immediately commit all sorts of antisocial acts is pretty much a requirement for getting along in society; an institution that is observed to refuse to trust people on the basis of various categories may find themselves the recipient of some very interesting lawsuits. So on that level I think there is a right to be trusted.

However I'm very wary of people talking about "a right to ____" where the consequences of taking it seriously on an individual level could be pretty dodgy. As a person who has passed the age of viability, I have a right to life, and nobody gets to up and stab me because that would violate my right to life. That works out pretty well on the individual level -- society in general isn't allowed to deprive me of my life, and any random person isn't allowed to up and do that either. (Granted I live in a country with the death penalty, so my society would be allowed to do that IFF I'd been established in court to have done something sufficiently heinous. Misgivings about said legal system aside.) Trust only works if individuals are allowed to make a call like "This thing would affect my life badly if the person turned out to be not trustworthy; I have nothing solid but I have a bad feeling." There has to be a lot of second-guessing when that individual is making a decision that will be binding for an institution, but stuff like the right to not have your university make racist fuckhead policies already exists, and is much more concrete than a "right to be trusted".

[hatam_soferet]

You want to be reading realsocialskills.tumblr.com, you do.

[jack]

Thank you, yeah, that was fascinating.