Rectifications (17) – Trust, or confidence?

Rectifications (17) – Trust, or confidence?

Torrey Orton– September 27, 2009

Thanks to Effective Negotiation Services, I learned 20 years ago that trust is as useful as the predictability which underlies it… that when people invite our trust as a condition of an agreement or a commitment to action, we should respond with doubt. About 10 years ago I learned in working with Dr. Terry Reilly that the domains of activity which affect trustful feelings number somewhere around 8 minimum. These are real values and processes of relationship among colleagues and in other commercial relationships – some values like fairness, reciprocity and equality; others processes like transparency, openness and information. All can be operationalised. They need not merely be espoused.

Recently, in the flush of interpretation released by the GFC, trust is enjoying a comeback in 'behavioural economics'' claim to replace the mathematically wondrous and empirically simplistic market fundamentalist paradigm. Unfortunately, it's a comeback with no feedback. There is assumed to be a causal link between trust and willingness to participate in commercial transactions, especially the most vaporous and greatly more damaging of them, the financial ones. We are talking here of something called "public trust" – an attribute or affect of people en masse. For example,

Take my word for it, your money's safe

Saturday, 24 October 2009 Australian Financial Review Howard Davies

I was relieved to find something a little more robust for Howard Davies from a few months back with a notionally serious research base in view. In both pieces a slide between "confidence" and "trust" occurs throughout. It goes like this:

"…. So the net is that this research suggests there has been a sharp loss in trust in the financial sector, that that lack of trust can have damaging effects on finance and investment, and that so far government interventions have not been successful in offsetting the consequences of the crisis for confidence."

Confident, but not trusting

Trust and belief (some times in the cloth of faith) are often confused, especially by those who are only recently coming out of the paradigmatic dark to find it is a normal human emotion affecting all manner of relationships. This is may be what's happening with LSE Director Davies' slide from trust to confidence. The latter is an empirical term; the former an ethico-moral one. Both slide into each other from their respective bases, but 'confidence' retains its empirical reference to predictability and concreteness, while 'trust' retains is ethereal values tilt. So for example, when used with respect to people, one might express confidence in another's ability without endorsing the trustworthiness of their intentions or commitments.

Thus you will find in articles of its type that, if we could only repair trust then the masses would once again believe in banks and such instrumentalities, and growth could reignite. Some dozens of them have appeared in various guises over the term (to date) of the GFC. What they pretty regularly fail to do is to say what actions would be likely to rebuild the lost commodity (trust being like esteem and other commoditised emotions taken as entities which can be built explicitly). Some wise guy remarked in passing recently that the repair of certain damages to his community would take two generations at least. Our lost trust has been being eroded for a generation at least for many of us.

A concert of actions

The 11 causes of the GFC advanced by Daniel Yergin might make an interesting starting place for more concreteness in our reflections. If we need, as many believe, to reduce the prospects of more GFCs, then specific actions are required, probably in some intentional concert, for our confidence in institutions and persons to grow in to trust again rather than blind faith. This concert will be assisted by focus on specific actions, not on aspirational trustful outcomes treated as the actions – e.g. the "putting in place" of this and that as if that were the end. We know from the struggle for transparency through mandated processes like Freedom of Information that a put is never a practice.