Psychology – Trust Talk

The Placebo Effect and the Role of Trust

October 8, 2024 by admin

#nocebo, doctor-patient relationship, medicine, placebo

In episode 100, Andrea Evers, Professor of Health Psychology at Leiden University, joins us to discuss her expertise on the placebo effect and its significant relationship to trust in healthcare. Andrea explores how patient expectations and trust can shape surprising medical outcomes and influence trust in doctors and the broader doctor-patient relationship. She explains how the placebo effect is more than just a “sugar pill” and emphasizes the power of positive expectations for enhancing the impact of real medical treatments. Andrea also discusses the important role that communication and the environment of care play in boosting or diminishing these effects.

Listeners will learn how trust, both in past experiences and in current healthcare providers, plays a critical role in how patients respond to treatments. Finally, Andrea touches on future research opportunities, including how the placebo effect can be better integrated into clinical practice to improve patient outcomes and reduce medication use. This insightful conversation offers a deep dive into the psychology of medicine and the vital role trust plays in healing.

The Placebo Effect is a context vector

The placebo effect you could say is a context vector, so is everything what is not the medicine in itself. So all these extra effects like communication from the doctor-patient relationship, your own expectations, your own experience from the past, but also the context factors how the office looks like, how much trust you have in the treatment, so all these factors play a role. And the good thing is for clinical practice that you can influence them also. So we don’t have only the medicine effect, but we have much, much more. The whole context plays a role and that is the patient-doctor communication, your own experience, the experience of the doctor, the experience of the whole hospital. So everything has to be taken into account but can be also be used for interventions.

The whole treatment effect

The whole treatment effect is always a combination of the medicine and the context factors that are influenced by the placebo effect. And that’s a positive expectation of the patient, but also the positive expectations of the doctor. The communication and all these context factors play a role and have to be taken into account. And importantly, this is not only what we call a subjective response to our feelings, we can see indeed these responses in our brains, specific brain areas are activated like reward mechanisms, or in the nocebo conditioning, or the stress mechanisms that play their role, and that they can also induce direct physiological changes, as I explained of our immune system. So that these extra contextual factors are always part of every treatment effects, and that they can

The mother kisses the injured knee of a child

(…) the most well known example of the placebo effect that always works and it’s such a fantastic effect we should always use, of course. And in essence it also works in adults, not only in children of course, perhaps the children might even believe it a little bit more, but it’s the same time, of course so nocebo effects or opposite can also work and can have really very traumatic experiences, as for example in hospitals when children are ill. And the most important difference, of course, between children and adults is then if you have a child who has already a very negative experiences as a child in the hospital or a traumatic experience, it can have long, long life consequences of how you come into the hospital and how much trust you have in medicines or the medical doctor, and so on.

Transcript interview Andrea Evers

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Publications Prof. Andrea Evers

See here for a full list of publications by Andrea Evers:

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Trust in Action, From Blame to Restorative Justice

August 22, 2024 by admin

Conflict Management, Psychology

Alphonse Chapanis, authenticity, blame, NASA Apollo 13, onveilige werksituatie, Paul Fitts, restorative justice

Our guest for episode 97 is Sidney Dekker, Professor and Director of the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He explores the negative effects of a blame culture in organizations and advocates for a restorative justice approach. He explains how blaming leads to a lack of honesty and authenticity, negatively impacting organizational learning, performance, and safety. He explains that a blame culture causes individuals to hide mistakes rather than address underlying systemic issues. He emphasizes that restorative justice focuses on impacts, needs, and obligations rather than rule violations and consequences. He also touches on the concept of human error, arguing that it should be seen as a consequence of deeper organizational troubles rather than the cause. The focus should be on understanding why people made certain decisions based on their goals and knowledge at the time, rather than blaming them for errors.

Throughout the interview, Sidney provides practical examples to illustrate his points. He cites the Apollo 13 mission as an example of successful crisis management through trust in frontline operators and focusing on what is working rather than what is broken. He discusses the importance of including multiple stakeholder perspectives to learn and improve organizational practices. When addressing severe cases like a dam breaking due to government negligence, Dekker argues for a restorative approach to accountability. This involves truth-telling, repentance, and actions to repair harm and address the needs of affected individuals.

He also connects his views to Kant’s philosophy, suggesting that while past actions cannot be undone, the relational consequences can be addressed through restorative practices. He reflects on recent incidents of inappropriate behavior in organizations, stressing the need to address broader sociological issues rather than just individual behaviors. Trust, built on compassion and empathy, is fundamental to fostering a just and safe organizational culture. Sidney concludes by emphasizing the importance of trust in both professional and personal contexts, highlighting its role in collective success and his commitment to promoting restorative justice in organizational safety practices.

Why blaming after a mistake is not what should happen

What happens in a blaming approach obviously, is, well, many things, but one is that people will start ducking the debris, the fall out of a particular incident and not want to contribute to the conversation, which means that you shrink the number of stories that you get dramatically. In fact, you’re often not really interested. One story is enough, if that is enough for you to blame or put the blame on a particular person, you can say, well, this person sucked, they screwed up, they should have done this, they should have zigged instead of zagged and that explains the whole thing that carries the explanatory load of our incident. A restorative approach actually is much more active in inviting multiple stories and voices into the conversation. As you do that, you get a much broader picture and often a much deeper picture of how long standing conditions give rise to particular circumstances that set people up for failure, and that these things existed for a long time prior to the particular incident with which they showed up.

Surviving a crisis through teamwork and problem-solving is NASA’s Apollo 13 mission.

Let me lift up, I think, two key things that are consistent with the ideas that we’ve been discussing. The first is the trust that you give to the front line operators, which is in some ways really cute to suggest that that was sort of an active and deliberate choice in that case, which it wasn’t, because nobody else could help. They out there in space had to solve the problem. The front line guys had to figure this out. But it’s an instructive example that once you do that, you actually can get really interesting bottom up results rather than top down saying, oh, here’s what you should do, here are the rules, here are the protocols, follow the crisis protocols and you will be fine. Of course, complexity theory would predict that none of that is going to work, because crises throw all kinds of novelty and unanticipated and unpredictable things at you. So that’s the first thing, trust the front line operators. I think the second thing in that particular example is very consistent with safety two or safety differently thinking, which is focusing on that which works. What is the key question that Gene Kranz down in Houston asks the boys up in the module? He says, tell me what is still working in the module? And I don’t think those are the exact words, but that’s basically what he wants to know. Tell me whatever system is still working, that’s what he wants to know. And from there you built your solution. This is vastly different from what we typically do in organizations, which is, well, what is broken, what has been screwed up, what’s not working well, that’s not the focus. The focus is on what is working, which is consistent with safety two thinking, which is safety is about the capacities and the things present that make outcomes go well. That’s, I think, very instructive in Apollo 13 as well.

Books and Publications above Blaming and Restorative Justice

Sidney Dekker has published a great number of books on the subject. He also published a vast number of articles. Here is a full overview of the books published. Here is an overview of the articles and papers he wrote.

Transcripts of the interview

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The podcast interview

Rethinking Trust: A radical new vision -From Molecular Origins to Global Systems

August 8, 2024 by admin

Biology, Psychology

biology, CABmodel, circular trust loop, neuralnetworks, psychology

In episode 96 Erik Schoppen discusses his forthcoming book “Trust Reset: A Radical New Vision on Trust” and the need for a new perspective on trust theories. He believes that traditional theories are insufficient in the face of rapid technological advancements and global changes. Schoppen emphasizes that his upcoming book integrates new insights from biological and artificial research, offering a comprehensive view on trust that spans from its molecular origins to complex social and digital systems.

Erik explains that trust has evolved as a survival mechanism, starting from early neural networks in ancient organisms. This evolution has led to the development of three biological forms of trust: cognitive, affective, and conative (behavioral) attitudes, known as the CAB model. He elaborates that these attitudes play a role at various levels, from self-trust to interactions in social networks, and larger organizational structures, to system and societal trust.

He highlights the need to understand trust as expanding networks that increase in complexity., describing trust as information that flows through these networks and levels, allowing for the measurement of trust attitudes in various contexts.

He also introduces the concept of the circular trust loop, consisting of three transformational processes: regaining, rebuilding, and renewing trust. These processes help restore trust in individuals and societies, especially in the face of current global conflicts and uncertainties.

Addressing the integration of biological aspects of trust, Schoppen acknowledges Paul Zak’s research on the neurochemical oxytocin but emphasizes the need for a broader, multidimensional approach. He introduces his “integrated multilevel trust framework”, which considers trust from a molecular to a global scale, addressing challenges such as the climate crisis. He further breaks down the cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses that shape trust today. He provides examples, such as hiring decisions, to illustrate how these responses influence our interactions and decisions based on trust.

Discussing the future of trust and AI, Erik raises concerns about whether AI will trust humans rather than the other way around. He explains that AI processes information much faster and more logically than humans, potentially perceiving us as untrustworthy and irrational. This shift necessitates a new field of research on trust in the context of AI.

The book offers various trust levels

(…) in the book we walk you through several trust levels that increase in complexity and where we use different networks for different survival strategies. So for example, one of the differences is that what we call trust developed in organisms out of self-protection, which are survival mechanisms dating back around 300 million years ago in the first neural networks. And this shaped the wiring for our later developed three biological forms of trust. This is the behavioral, this is the affective and the cognitive trust attitudes. We also known this as the CAB model. So the CAB, and I explained this in my book as well. These trust attitudes play a role in self-trust just the first level of the framework, but also in other levels and in this way you can measure them in all the levels. So for example, the second level is that we interact socially with each other in dyads and in groups. And this is just another survival strategy to cope with the changes in our environment. And therefore you need to trust each other on a social level. Well, this is already known, but you also need to trust each other in social networks where you had long lasting relationships based on kinship, reciprocity, and the willingness to share risk so we could hunt together and barter goods, share knowledge and resources. And this all happened in what we call the cognitive revolution.

Circular Trust Process

Changes in trust have always existed on a personal level, social level, or on a systemic level, and even on a societal scale. But what these changes have in common is that they all share the same circular trust process. This is a cyclical process, which I call the circular trust loop in my book, and it has three transformational processes. It’s the regain process how to get trust back when it’s lost, the rebuilding process, what kind of tools are you going to use to rebuild the trust for the population and then you have the renew process. This is when you predict the future based on these trust processes. It helps to regain trust for example, if you start with already worked in the past, these are the best practices and what people are familiar with. And this is the initial step that can happen fast depending on the severity of the damage that was done. For example, in society at the moment, there is a lot of conflicts going on in the world, and what you can see is that people are looking for new ways to restore trust in our societies. So this whole process of regaining trust is actually building a foundation to rebuild trust for that population.

Paul Zak

During the interview reference is made to an earlier interview with Paul Zak “Trust and the Moral Molecule” (27 November 2021)

Book details “Trust Reset

More details about the (upcoming) book by Erik Schoppen can be found on this website: https://www.erikschoppen.com/trustreset/

Transcript Interview Erik Schoppen

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Understanding the Trust-Law Dynamic: Insights on Legitimacy

September 6, 2023 by admin

Law, Psychology

In this interview with Tom Tyler, a renowned psychologist, and professor at Yale Law School, he talks about the fascinating interplay between trust, law, and legitimacy. He highlights the paradox within the legal system, where beliefs about psychology play a significant role, yet empirical research is often overlooked. During the interview, we explore the importance of procedural fairness in exploring trust and fostering compliance. Fair treatment, respect, and providing a voice to individuals emerged as key elements shaping perceptions of authority.

Our discussion also examines the impact of trust-based systems versus sanction-based approaches, showcasing the benefits of cooperation and community viability. Tom’s expertise illuminated the need to bridge the gap between empirical research and legal practice, urging legal professionals to integrate evidence-based insights.

Books by Tom Tyler

Professor Tyler’s research explores the role of justice in shaping people’s relationships with groups, organizations, communities, and societies. In particular, he examines the role of judgments about the justice or injustice of group procedures in shaping legitimacy, compliance, and cooperation. He is the author of several books, including Why People Cooperate (2011); Legitimacy and Criminal Justice (2007); Why People Obey the Law (2006); Trust in the Law (2002); and Cooperation in Groups (2000). He was awarded the Harry Kalven prize for “paradigm shifting scholarship in the study of law and society” by the Law and Society Association in 2000, and in 2012, was honored by the International Society for Justice Research with its Lifetime Achievement Award for innovative research on social justice.

Transcript Interview Tom Tyler

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The Human Psyche and Trust

February 24, 2023 by admin

Experience, Lifestyle, Psychology

biases, dunning kruger effect, psychology, trust

Our guest in this 63rd episode of the TrustTalk podcast is David Dunning, a social psychology professor at the University of Michigan and best known for the “Dunning -Kruger effect”, talks in this new episode of the TrustTalk podcast about trust being a rational decision in an irrational world. He discusses the trust game used in economics, psychology, and sociology to test the extent to which people trust others. In the game, participants give money to an anonymous stranger and expect their trust to be honored. The experiment found that people are often more trustworthy than we would imagine, with the real percentage of people who give the money back being 80% or higher, which is higher than what participants expected.

Dunning explains that people’s behavior in the trust game is not solely driven by the possibility of losing money. Instead, people are more concerned about the message their behavior sends and are emotionally involved in the situation. He suggests that personal judgments based on trust are important in even the most technical and national decisions, as seen in the failed negotiation between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986.

Dunning also discusses how the Dunning-Kruger effect played out during the COVID-19 pandemic, with people being overconfident and making missteps due to their lack of knowledge. He suggests that individuals and organizations can become more aware of their biases and misbeliefs by designating a devil’s advocate to pick holes in their strategies, projecting themselves into the future to imagine potential disasters, and benchmarking their performance against other organizations. Additionally, individuals should be wary of their own biases and seek out expert opinions to improve their decision-making abilities.

Books by David Dunning

Ballantyne, N., & Dunning, D. (2022). Reason, bias, and inquiry: The crossroads of epistemology and psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dunning, D. (Ed.) (2010). Social motivation. New York: Psychology Press.

Alicke, M., Dunning, D., & Krueger, J. (Eds.) (2005). The self and social judgment. New York: Psychology Press.

Dunning, D. (2005). Self-insight: Roadblocks and detours on the path to knowing thyself. New York: Psychology Press.

Dunning, D., Heath, C., & Suls, J. (2004). Flawed self-assessment: Implications for health, education, and the workplace. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5, 71-106.

About his “Self and Social Insight Lab”

(…) my lab (that conducts research on the topics that I’m interested in or have fallen into. And the basic question we ask is people’s beliefs about the world, how well do they really match up with the world? Do people have an adequate conception of human nature? And more often than not, do people have an adequate conception of their own nature? Are people good psychologists when it comes to understanding themselves and understanding other people? Those are the types of topics we tend to work on.

About the role of psychology in researching trust

I think the home for trust is everywhere because it infuses every single aspect of life that we live in, both as individuals and as a society. So it has a home in political science, has a home in economics, and it certainly should have more of a home in psychology. It’s rather odd that it isn’t more of a focus in psychology, given that if you go to other fields like economics, trust doesn’t work the way it should. And some fields from their equations would say that trust shouldn’t work at all. Yet it does. And that seems to be more properly, the home of psychology, where we try to figure out, okay, if it’s not, what’s going on over there, what is it going on in the human psyche that’s allowing people to trust.

Is Trust a “Fool’s Errand”?

it is a little bit of a paradox, which is trust is the rational decision if the world is irrational. And what do I mean by that? In economics, if you’re a complete rational actor interested in your own self-interest, you should never be trusted. Because as soon as someone trusts you, you have often no reason to honor their trust. So you can basically act in your own self-interest and punish them, take the money, take the time, take whatever that you want to take. So in a rational world, trust would be irrational, but it does turn out, luckily for us, that people are irrational. People trust other people when really, according to the economics of the rational analysis, they shouldn’t. And more confounding people prove to be trustworthy, even though they have no reason to honor our trust, really. And it’s this irrational, people trusting and people honoring trust that allows trust to be the rational decision.

About the classic trust game

you’re given €5 and you’re given a choice: you can either keep the €5 or you can give it to some stranger that you’ll never know, they’ll never know you, this is completely anonymous. And you may ask, why would you do that? Well, what the experimenter will do is if you give the $5 and by the way, we can arrange it so the experimenter never really knows what you’re doing, this is completely anonymous, if you give the $5, to this complete stranger, the experimenter will inflate it to $20. I give the second person their own choice and that own choice is they can keep the 20, thank you very much, or they can give you $10 back. So if you trust the other person, you have a chance to double your money, get it going from $5 to $10, but if the other person decides to keep the money, you’re out, so to speak, you’re betrayed. And the question we ask is how much do people expect their trust to be honored? And also, do they ultimately make the decision to give up the $5 to trust the other person?

About the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”

if you take a look at COVID, what you found were a lot of people doing what we call “epistemic trespassing”, that is, there’s an expert field, it’s going to get things wrong, but it has the best chance of getting things right. But these people didn’t know what they didn’t know, and they knew something like math or a little evolutionary biology and they thought, well, I can dream up an answer to what’s going to happen with COVI, and they went and publicly made that available to everybody, even though they were not the experts, they were trespassing into the field that they really didn’t have any expertise in and misled a lot of people along the way.

Transcript of the interview

TrustTalk explores the power of trust in various aspects of life. We are committed to bringing you valuable insights and perspectives through our interviews with experts and thought leaders. As part of our mission, we have transcribed our latest interview with our esteemed guest to make it accessible to a wider audience. However, producing these transcripts comes at a cost, and we rely on the generosity of our listeners to keep bringing you quality content. If you found our transcript helpful, we kindly ask you to consider making a donation to support our efforts. Your contribution will go a long way in helping us continue to produce more valuable content for you. It costs only 2 minutes to donate. We are very grateful for your support.

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The Trifecta of Trust

October 12, 2022 by admin

Management, Psychology

communication, Leadership, psychology, saltofleadership

From research Joe Folkman and his partner Jack Zenger did, using a database of 3,422 global leaders, they discovered five leadership behaviors most important to a remote workforce. In this 53rd episode of TrustTalk Joe talks about the minimum number of things that a leader needs to do well to be trusted. Number one is relationships, the ability to build positive relationships. Number two is expertise or competency. Even more powerful is to be a good communicator. If a person was trusted at the 75th percentile but they weren’t a good communicator, there’s a 2% probability of them being a great leader. But if they’re a good communicator, but you’re not trusted, there’s a 17% chance. If the two are put together if a leader is trusted and is a good communicator, the probability of the person being a great leader is 80%. In the research, he and his partner found that if you added trust to any other competency, it significantly enhances that competency and that is why they call it “the salt of leadership”.

Book The Trifecta of Trust

In The Trifecta of Trust, Joe Folkman has collected compelling data to make the case for the value of trust in leadership. His research shows that there are three core behaviors that create and reinforce trust from others. By mastering this leadership trust trifecta, you can increase your success and happiness, both in business and life.

Folkman’s life mission has been to provide accurate assessments for leaders to help them understand their effectiveness, impact on outcomes, and specific insights on what they can do to improve. To discover the differences between leaders with high levels of trust and those who are not trusted at all, Folkman collected data from millions of raters and hundreds of thousands of leaders from across the globe. The results revealed:

The measurable disparities of trust between poor and good leaders
Three behaviors that are most important to gain trust
How leaders can vastly improve the trust others have in them

Now you can discover the tools for increasing trust based on quantifiable results and have a greater impact and effectiveness as a leader.

Publications

Joe is also a regular writer of articles for Forbes and Harvard Business review:

July 28, 2020: Understanding Trust: The Salt Of Leadership (Forbes)

December 30, 2020 (with Jack Zenger): “Research: Women Are Better Leaders During a Crisis” (HBR)

October 2011 (with John H. Zenger and Scott Edinger: “Making Yourself Indispensable” (HBR)

Transcript

Here is the transcript of the interview with Joe Folkman

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The Podcast “Trifecta of Trust”

The interview on the TrustTalk YouTube channel -with subtitles

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Trusted Coaching

August 24, 2022 by admin

Coaching, Lifestyle, Psychology

coach, dialogue, John Shotter, resonance, third-generation coaching, Transformational dialogue, withness thinking

Coaching is the most potent tool to achieve positive personal change. I am talking about a new third-generation coaching approach with Reinhard Stelter, Professor of Sport- and Coaching Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He advocates a new form of coaching as a transformational dialogue, one that fosters trust between the coach and the dialogue partner by a more relational “attunement” or resonating with the coaching partner.

In his TrustTalk interview he talks about his move from performance-oriented sports psychology towards developing coaching as a transformational dialogue where trust is the foundational premise. The focus is on developmental issues, where clients or dialogue partners struggle with themselves or specific challenges they are faced with. The perspective of “dialogue coaching” can be described as fellow-human companionship: dialogue guides – a professional coach or colleague or a friend – support their dialogue partner by including themselves in the dialogue as a collaborative and co-reflecting partner.

“Withness Thinking”

I think one of the elements is what I would call relational attunement. So it’s really something where you tune into another person and this is the basis for developing trust, that you meet the person, the other, your dialogue partner, in a relationship where there is a possibility for the other to reflect on something, to feel a fundamental acceptance for everything the dialogue guide meets in the other. Also, I’m inspired by a term from John Shotter, a communication research and practitioner who used the term “Withness Thinking” or “Withness Talk”. So and this way of relating to another person is actually the foundation for developing trust.

John Shotter wrote, in “Understanding process from within: An argument for withness-thinking”, Organization Studies, 27, 585-604 (2006):

“Withness (dialogic)-talk/thinking occurs in those reflective interactions that involve our coming into living, interactive contact with another’s living being, with their utterance, with their bodily expressions, with their words, their ‘works’. It is a meeting of outsides, of surfaces, of two kinds of ‘flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968), such that they come into ‘touch’ or ‘contact’ with each other. …

In the interplay of living moments intertwining with each other, new possibilities of relation are engendered, new interconnections are made, and new ‘shapes’ of experience can emerge.” (p. 600)

The Art of Dialogue in Coaching

From the interview:

And we as a dialogue guide, the coach, are actually able to be giving resonance to something and really see something also through our eyes. It was actually quite an experience for me because I used in “The Art of Dialogue”, in coaching, I used the term “resonance”. And later on I noticed that a German sociologist by the name of Hartmut Rosa has actually published a book which has the title “Resonance”. It’s translated to English also in 2019. And I mean, he approaches actually that we live in a society of growing acceleration. He describes it in the way that if acceleration is the problem in many fields, technologically, individually and in social processes, if acceleration is the problem, resonance might be the solution. And he hasn’t really focused very much on dialogue. But I use this term resonance to really show how we in this process of resonating with another person, can develop trust, can develop growth in our relationship, in that sense. So from this perspective of resonance, the term is also very fundamental for leading a good and trustful, or building a good and trustful relationship.

From his book “The Art of Dialogue in Coaching”:

I also engaged in active withness thinking and acted as a co-reflective partner during the dialogue. As a co-reflective partner I offered my own reflections on my perception of some of the situations she described. Without taking over the conversation, I served as a sounding board for her [the client] own thoughts and feelings. (p. 52)

And later in the book (p. 118):

Through the dialogue the interlocutors develop a shared reality by listening to and exchanging ideas, thoughts and experiences based on their individual understanding and meaning-making. The concept of withness-talk or withness-thinking seeks to describe this intense meeting with the other (followed by the quote of Shotter mentioned above)

and then there is also the term being a witness for the other or “witnessing”:

it was crucial for the coach to be present as a fully engaged dialogue guide. Sometimes, the coach or other members of the group will provide feedback to the statements made in the dialogue. This is where the appreciative perspective takes form. As a dialogue guide the coach acts as a withness-thinking and responsible dialogue partner who relates to what the other says. In narrative thinking, this is called witnessing (see White, M. (2007) Maps of Narrative Practice, New York, NY. Norton, Carey, M. & Russell, S. (2003). Outsider-witness practices: some answers to commonly asked questions. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, 1.

About “Third Generation” Coaching

I’ve tried to develop coaching further. In the old tradition of coaching, I was a neutral person as a coach, and I think what is important for me is that we develop ourselves as a dialogical guide or coach. Dialogues can happen in very many situations, not just in coaching, but we can be inspired by dialogical coaching so that we really work towards being a fellow human companion in the dialogue. And this companionship is actually what builds trust, that the other can see that we are not perfect, although we have a professional role and this fellow human companionship is actually something which makes our coaching partner, our dialogue partner, more open for reflections that we also try to as a dialogue guide or coach, that we include ourselves in the reflective process so that it becomes somehow a collaborative process or a co-reflective process that I include myself in that sense that I say, you just talked about this and this, and this reminds me of a situation where I’ve been in and I’ve tried to unfold something and I do this to be a servant for the other. This is important. I do not include myself as a dialogue guide to just tell something about my life. I do it with the intention to support the other, and this is also something which really develops trust in specific abilities also in the other.

Transformational Dialogue

When I talk about transformational dialogues, I think we can, as friends, as leaders, as colleagues in organization, also fulfill the role of a transformative dialogue partner. So in that sense, it’s not necessarily bound to a situation where you go to a professional person, you can have it with your spouse, you can have it with friends and colleagues. What is important is really to be aware of not imposing anything onto the other, because the starting point for a trustful relationship is to be acceptant, to accept the other person, to be in a state of acceptance of the other.

I actually read about David Bohm in a later book, which was published by William Issacs. The book is called “Dialogue and Art of Thinking Together“. William Issacs describes actually when he was a young scholar, he was actually working together or was invited to these conversations. I think how David Bohm was interested what he was interested in was really to go from this material world to a more spiritual perspective. They found out that suspension was actually the basis, and this is a different position than, for example, the position of defence. If you defend your position, then it will not become a trustful relationship. Then you are put into another position. And I think as a transformative dialogue guide, you need to suspend your own position and you don’t impose the other. So suspension means that you listen without resistance and that you somehow identify yourself with the position of the other. And this leads to reflective dialogues as a difference to skilful conversations

Transcript of the Interview with Reinhard Stelt

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Trust Responsible Use of Drugs

January 27, 2022 by admin

Psychology, Research

criminalisation, drugs, neuroscience, responsible use

That is the core view of Carl Hart, Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at Columbia University, New York. In this 37the 37th episode of TrustTalk, he talks about the “responsible drug user” and describes the negative societal effects of vilifying drug use.

Drug Use and Criminalization

Answering the question of whether drugs use leads to criminalization, he replies:

that is the wrong way of looking at it. But let’s just say people are concerned about, I don’t know, people who sell drugs illegally. They worry that those people may engage in some abhorrent behaviours, like killing people. We have laws against that sort of thing, number one and number two, that’s a pure function of having drugs be illegal. If drugs were legally regulated, then you wouldn’t have those kinds of issues where someone who sold drugs or what have you is fighting for territory or they’re on trial for doing so illegally and now they kill someone. So that’s a function of how we are banning these substances and not regulating them.

About the advantages of legal regulation of drugs:

I think that legal regulation certainly would take care of a lot of problems. It would certainly take care of having drug adulterants be introduced into the model, into the market where people die from contaminated drugs. It would also deal with the issue of the legality of the sales and what regulates people who actually sell the drugs. So yeah, I don’t think of, I don’t think it would be a panacea for problems that are in a society. And so that’s one of the things we have to be careful about, because if you regulate drugs, then you also now you have a different set of problems, and those problems, of course, are common to all human endeavour. And so I don’t want people to think that all of a sudden all your problems go away. That’s not how the world works when humans are involved.

Can we trust drugs not to lead to addiction?

Drugs certainly can be addictive, that’s absolutely true. Just like sexual behaviour, just like some types of food. I mean, there are a number of things that activities in which humans engage can be addictive, but it’s important for people to understand that drug addiction itself has very little to do with drugs. You quoted the stat earlier, where we have 70 to 90 percent of the people who use drugs, they aren’t addicted. When you have the vast majority of drug users of any drug not becoming addicted, then that tells you have to look beyond the drug to figure out where the addiction problem is because it doesn’t lie in the drug only, or the drug itself. It’s it has to do with a number of psychosocial barriers, variables and a whole range of other issues, and we tend to stop at the drug.

For the full interview visit the TrustTalk podcast or on any major podcast platform or go to the “podcasts” in the menu above, or listen here:

Carl Hart published a number of books, his latest one is “Drug Use for Grown-Ups, Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear”

From the New York Times review of the book (by Casey Schwartz:

Our drug policies have resulted in the wildly disproportionate imprisonment of Black Americans. As Hart argues, the drug war has in fact succeeded, not because it has reduced illegal drug use in the United States (it hasn’t), but because it has boosted prison and policing budgets, its true, if unstated, purpose. In his last book, “High Price,” Hart described his evolving views on drugs and those who use them, a gradual rejection of the overly simplistic idea that drugs are inherently evil, the destroyers of people and neighborhoods.

and, about his research findings (again, New York Times’ review by Casey Schwartz)

“I discovered that the predominant effects produced by the drugs discussed in this book are positive. It didn’t matter whether the drug in question was cannabis, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine or psilocybin.” The positive effects Hart cites include greater empathy, altruism, gratitude and sense of purpose. For Hart personally, coming home and smoking heroin at the end of the day helps him to “suspend the perpetual preparation for battle that goes on in my head,” he writes.

Here is the full transcript of the interview:

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Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Trust

September 8, 2021 by admin

Experience, Psychology

Emotional Intelligence, EQ

Deep trust and high expectations are set to be two pillars of high-performing cultures and Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is essential to both. It is said that when leaders set high expectations without the EQ necessary to create trust, they breed anxiety. They breed stress and burnout. Bert Iedema, a board room coach, has extensive experience with EQ and how to improve it by training, helping to create trust.

Bert: “EQ is nothing else than a measurement of emotional intelligence. Like IQ is a measurement of, let’s say, rational intelligence. So this is the difference between those words, and normally I use the word EQ, as most people do. To explain it in the simplest way possible, I would suggest to just reverse the words emotional intelligence. It is becoming more intelligent in handling emotions. And there are four basic core components. The first one is self-awareness, which means being able to recognize your own emotions. The second component is self-regulation, and that means to be able to regulate your own emotions. The third one is being able to recognize emotions in other people. And the fourth one is being able to regulate the emotions of other people. These are the four components that all academics agree about that are elements of emotional intelligence.”

Interviewer: Bert, as this podcast is about trust, if we talk about EQ, I still have a little bit of difficulty in understanding the relationship between EQ and trust. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Bert Iedema: What happens in a crisis situation and I go to your brain. In a crisis situation, all kinds of wrong hormones and wrong substances are released in and into your brain and these wrong substances, block your neuroreceptors. Neuro receptors are the little holes at the end of a neuron. As they are blocked, they, in turn, cannot receive anymore the right, useful neurotransmitters at that moment. So the wrong substances block the neuroreceptors, which cannot receive the right neurotransmitters. What is the consequence? Your access to your memory reduces your ability to reason becomes handicapped and you get into a fight or flight modus. How does the outside world perceive you as acting completely irrational? You are not irrational, but when your access to your memory is partly blocked and your reasoning capability is reduced, of course, you are arriving at different decisions, especially in complex situations.

And what I have seen in my coaching practice over and over and over again, let’s say an executive comes in has a ranking at an EQ level of, let’s say, 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. Most probably I would be able to bring him to a level 7 or so in just 8 coaching sessions. And the beauty is that his outside world, his environment perceives that level as an 8 or a 9. So you bring into 6,5 to 7 and they perceive it and both in the working environment and in the family environment. And what I thus far most of the times I have seen, is that even after three sessions already, people who don’t know that the person is coached, already spontaneously start to give feedback: “you change so much for the better, what happened to you?” Unbelievable. And that is very, very rewarding, and that gives a big motivation to continue the track.

The full transcript of the interview with Bert Iedema:

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^{_{All podcasts are being audio-edited by Job Dijk of Steigerstudios in Veenendaal, The Netherlands}}

Trust, Vitamin S, and Well-Being

February 20, 2021 by admin

Psychology

bubbles, doris brothers, dyad, education, low cost cooperation, psychology, roderick kramer, social mindfulness, social psychologist, trust, Vitamin S

On February, 20 we published a new podcast where our host, Severin de Wit, interviews Paul van Lange, Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Section of Social Psychology at the VU University at Amsterdam, and Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Professor Van Lange discusses the importance of social contact, which he and his co-author Simon Columbus of the University of Copenhagen frame in terms of “Vitamin S”, arguing that brief encounters with strangers can yield some happiness, an insight that is important for (young) adults during this era of COVID-19 lockdowns. He views trust in terms of accepting dependence on others and anticipating some critical level of pro-sociality from others. Norm violations by other people pose a challenge to trust, including norm violations enacted by strangers. Yet most people have developed a capacity to navigate to a relatively high level of trust, a default that we are often are not aware of. Like well-being, we start to wonder about trust in others when it is seriously challenged by others’ norm-violations. Various other intriguing questions are addressed. For example, what are the benefits of one-on-one interactions in pairs over interactions in larger groups? Why do we seek interactions with like-minded people? And why do we sometimes disclose more private information with a taxi-driver than with a friend?

In the interview (see on this blog under “podcasts” in the top menu) three authors are mentioned as well as an upcoming academic article, written by Paul van Lange and his colleague at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, Simons Columbus (also known as Simon Hadlich):

Van Lange, P., & Columbus, S. (2021, in press). “Vitamin S: Why is Social Contact, Even with Strangers, so Important to Well-Being?”, Current Directions in Psychological Science. Preprint available at https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jaxck

Roderick Kramer, Stanford professor and social psychologist, in “Rethinking Trust”, Harvard Business Review, June 2009

Doris Brothers, cited in: “If Trust is the Main Ingredient of Leadership, Is Trust the Main Ingredient of Successful AI?”

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on Professor Paul van Lange.

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_{All podcasts are being audio-edited by Job Dijk of}_{Steigerstudios}_{in Veenendaal, The Netherlands}