In this episode, Steve van Riel, Senior Strategy Director and EMEA Head of Trust Development at Edelman UK, discusses his journey from UK politics to consumer trust research. Reflecting on the 2015 UK general election, Steve explains how trust influenced the outcomes. Labour wasn’t trusted to manage finances effectively, while the Conservatives weren’t trusted to do so compassionately, leading to an inconclusive result. This experience highlighted the importance of trust in high-stakes elections.
Steve’s academic research, influenced by Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow,” examines how System One (fast, intuitive thinking) and System Two (slow, deliberate thinking) processes affect trust decisions. He applies this framework to consumer trust, explaining that low-stakes decisions often rely on fast thinking, where simple rules of thumb and heuristics guide choices. In contrast, high-stakes decisions require slow, deliberate thinking, where individuals weigh the evidence and consider potential risks more carefully.
He explains the concept of trust games, which provide a more nuanced, risk-based measure of consumer trust compared to traditional surveys. These games, involving real money, offer insights into consumer behavior towards brands, demonstrating how people use different cognitive processes when trust is at stake. For example, participants might make quick, intuitive decisions in familiar, low-risk scenarios, while they engage in more deliberate, thoughtful decision-making in high-stakes situations.
Steve also discusses the practical implications for businesses. For quick, intuitive decisions, companies can leverage simplicity and familiarity to build trust, using elements like simple logos, straightforward messaging, and user-friendly websites. For more deliberate decisions, businesses need to provide detailed, reassuring information and emphasize their reliability and regulatory compliance. He explains that in high-stakes scenarios, consumers are more likely to trust companies that demonstrate transparency and accountability.
Furthermore, Steve addresses the challenge boards face in turning abstract trust concerns into actionable strategies. He advocates for a unified framework across all business units to ensure trust is an integral part of business strategy and evaluation. He shares examples of successful implementations, such as Tesco’s approach to pricing and McDonald’s efforts to rebuild trust over decades.
Steve concludes by highlighting the ongoing challenge of maintaining precision and discipline in trust research. He stresses the need for practical applications of academic insights to solve real-world problems, using the example of how Boeing could apply trust research to rebuild its reputation after a series of accidents.
His former involvement in UK elections
So I suppose the thought for me is always: are elections about just being popular, or are they really about being trusted? And I think it varies depending on the election, but it’s a really useful frame. So I worked for the Labour Party at the end of the kind of New Labour period, and by the time I was sort of sitting at some of the top tables, 2008, 2009, we weren’t a very popular government, we’d been in power for over a decade, we’d been involved in big foreign policy crises, the economy had crashed, Gordon Brown was our prime minister, and he had strengths but he was also criticised a lot as not being very polished. And our opponent was David Cameron. He was very polished, quite charming, had a big lead in the polls, nice family, said things that was hard to disagree with for a lot of people. But the amazing thing wasn’t that Labour lost the subsequent election because they were likely to, but that the conservatives didn’t do too well. They didn’t get the majority that you expect in the UK and doing work on that campaign, what we found was that Labour didn’t become more popular as you got to the election, but there was a real lack of trust in the conservatives motives. This was a time when everyone agreed on the need to cut public spending, but there was a sense that the conservatives really wanted to cut some of the things that people found quite valuable. So my conclusion coming out of that election was that it was really a trust election, that Labour wasn’t trusted to sort out the public finances in an effective way, a competent way, but the conservatives weren’t really trusted to do it with compassion. And so you ended up in this situation where neither party got a substantial majority. And so when I look at politics since then, since the experience of that campaign has always been that the trust prism is a really useful way of thinking about particularly big elections, elections where there’s a lot at stake. Trust might not matter where people think there’s nothing to lose, or the stakes are low. When the stakes seem high, it’s not just about how likable the parties are, how likable the leaders are, but it’s what do you trust them for and what might you have doubts about?
Following Daniel Kahneman “Thinking, fast and slow”
Kahneman and people like him have talked about these fast Type One processes that whether easy rules of thumb and that allow us to make lots of decisions very quickly so we don’t calculate the best route to work every day. We just do what we did yesterday. Or we have a rule of if my train is delayed, I go by bus, that kind of thing. Our brains do have the power to go beyond these simple rules and weigh the evidence and decide what’s the best thing to do, but we only do that really when the stakes are high or the situation is unusual, or we’re having to concentrate because it’s difficult. So if you imagine I came to Amsterdam for a big job interview, I would use my Type Two reasoning to decide whether to fly or to get the train, or to arrive the night before, and what I should wear, because it’s not a city I know well, it’s not my irregular habit, it’s not a language I know well, so I really need to concentrate. I don’t do that deciding where to go to work every day. So how does that apply to trust? Some trust decisions are low stakes and familiar and they feel super easy. What newspaper should I buy in the morning? Where should I buy my morning coffee from? I don’t think about who is most trustworthy in these situations with great depth anyway. But some trust decisions are high stakes, they’re unfamiliar, they feel hard. So where should I put my kids into nursery? Should I go ahead with this new surgery that might affect my health, that kind of thing, which car should I buy, what house should I buy?
A novel, risk-based measure for assessing consumer trust
99% of the time when we measure trust, we say, hey, Severin, on a scale of 1 to 9, how much do you trust Steve? And you give your answer and we usually give you a barrage of those questions, so we ask about Steve, we ask about John, we ask about Jane, we ask about lots of different people. And going back to our two processes from Kahneman, when people are filling out those kind of surveys, they’re probably using that Type One thinking quite a lot. There’s no consequences to the number they give, they need to fill out lots of these things in order to earn any money from it, they’re probably doing it with the TV on in the background, so they’re probably in that Type One mode. That’s fine if you want to know about how they will act in Type One situations. So if you look at the survey answers to a trust question about a coffee chain, for example, they probably do line up pretty well with whether you actually trust the coffee chain to sell you good coffee. Then there are lots of situations where trust decisions are this Type Two high stakes decision, and then the survey might not be quite so good at predicting what you’re going to do about buying a house, or choosing which company to work for, or choosing to go back to my old world, a prime minister and a crisis. So what we sought to do was to deliberately develop a measure of consumer trust that built on the Type Two slow thinking by introducing an element of risk into the decision.
Betrayal aversion
Betrayal aversion is this really fascinating concept, developed by Iris Bohnet at Harvard and her colleagues and the idea is it’s worse to be let down by another person than it is to be let down by something impersonal, like the weather. And that’s what distinguishes trust from just taking a gamble. We trust another person to not let us down, but we don’t trust that it will be sunny when we go on holiday. That’s an impersonal thing, it’s more a chance thing. So if you’re a brand, it’s really interesting to think about when do people thinking about you as an impersonal, huge organization that’s not really a kind of a partner to them and when do they think of you as another person? So if they interpret your actions as the flight is late, is that because that happened to be some weather blowing in the wrong direction, or something went wrong with the computers, that was totally unavoidable maybe they don’t think of that in trust terms, they don’t have this betrayal aversion feeling, but if they feel like the flights late because, actually this company never books the right slots or because they are trying to maximize their revenue somehow, then suddenly people are a lot harder on the idea of things going wrong, and they’ll need extra reassurance to convince them to trust you.
