Hi, I'm Severin de Wit, host of the TrustTalk podcast, where we dive deep into the fascinating world of trust. With a genuine passion for understanding the foundations and nuances of trust, I am dedicated to uncovering its secrets and sharing compelling stories that illuminate its profound impact. Join me on this captivating journey as we explore the transformative power of trust. Subscribe now and become part of the TrustTalk community
Hi, I'm Severin de Wit, host of the TrustTalk podcast, where we dive deep into the fascinating world of trust. With a genuine passion for understanding the foundations and nuances of trust, I am dedicated to uncovering its secrets and sharing compelling stories that illuminate its profound impact. Join me on this captivating journey as we explore the transformative power of trust. Subscribe now and become part of the TrustTalk community
Despite decades of research into trust measuring individual trust remains unsatisfying due to problematic survey questions that are used to measure social trust. There are two main methods used to measure trust, surveys and behavior observation. Surveys ask for people’s judgments about trust, while behavior observation looks at behaviors based on trust. The trust game is an example of the latter, where trust is measured by the amount of money sent from the trustor to the trustee and how both parties behave.
Trust reports by major consultancies and non-alignment
He suggests that non-alignment between the many surveys by organizations like Edelman, Pew Research Center, and major consultancies like Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG may be due to different survey questions, different time points for data collection, and different samples. The OECD Guidelines on measuring trust are helpful but could be updated with more recent knowledge. He believes that even though trust is emotional and subjective, it should still be quantified, and mentions his research on audio responses to measure trust. He also points out that definitions of trust are often detached from measurements of trust and discusses his work on finding a better fit between the definition and measurement of trust.
(…) we simply learned over time that the questions we use are to some extent problematic. So, for instance, the most popular survey question that we use to measure social trust goes along the lines: “Do you think that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be careful enough in dealing with people?” And this question contains concepts such as most people, And by now we know that people might interpret this question differently. This is a measurement problem, and we find such measurement problems across different trust survey questions.
Behavioral Trust
(…) So, for instance, I could do an interview with you because I trust you, and in sociology and political science, the most common method to measure trust is to ask people for their judgments in surveys. So we could ask them: “Do you trust your family? Do you trust your neighbours?” and the infamous generalized social trust question that I just mentioned is, for instance, “do you think that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?”. That’s one way, basically directly asking for these judgments. And besides that, we can also observe the behaviour and then conclude that certain behaviours we observe should be based on a high level of trust. So, for instance, I could observe a friend lending money to another person, and then I would assume that she trusts this other person because I’ve observed this behaviour and there’s actually a large literature that attempts to measure what trust researchers call “behaviourally exhibited trust”, in other words, behaviour that is based on trust.
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As the ultimate expert on the role of trust between organizations, Professor ReinhardBachmann talks about the importance of risk and vulnerability: you do not need to trust if you are not vulnerable, nor if you want to avoid any kind of risk. What role play competence and integrity?
In this new episode of the TrustTalk podcast, he speaks about his research into the role of trust and power in two types of inter-organizational relationships, vertical relations (supply chain) and horizontal relations (M&A, joint venture, cooperations) the “system” or “institutional” trust in liberal capitalist countries (like in the UK) versus coordinated capitalist countries (like in Continental Europe).
In the case of acquisition transactions, two organizations need to be integrated, it is not uncommon that one side distrusts the other (job loss, uncertainty) and why is it that many M&A transactions or joint ventures fail, due to lack of trust? In organizational trust you need to see real persons who represent an organization: if it is an abstract organization and you would not associate any human face with it, it is very difficult to trust.
Too much trust is dangerous too: the global financial crisis of 2008 was for a part caused by too much trust in financial advisers (“blind trust”).
He reflects upon organizations that say they do not need trust because they can control and monitor operations more closely by technical means (surveillance, video, etc), wondering whether trust becomes obsolete (he thinks it is not).
On the definition of trust
(…) a trustor always makes positive assumptions about the future behaviour of the trustee. So I think these are common themes that run through all kinds of definitions of trust. Also, we work on the basis of limited knowledge. So if you know everything you don’t need to trust, if you know nothing then is also stupid to trust.
Competence, Integrity and Benevolence
we come to issues such as competence, but also integrity, which is a big difference. So you can trust someone on the basis of competence. You trust someone that he or she is competent enough to fulfil a certain promise, or you focus on integrity so someone can completely fulfil your criteria of integrity but is incompetent. So if that’s the case, then it’s a different situation with regard to trust, then, if that is the other way round. Someone can be very competent, but basically a crook and not trustworthy. And there are other people who would also add a third dimension, which is benevolence, so this is well established. The main difference here is really competence versus integrity.
Trust and why many M&A transactions fail
Surprisingly, a majority of acquisitions does not work very well. And one of the things is that there is a lack of trust from both sides and there are misunderstandings, there’s a problem of integrating different corporate cultures
Organizational trust and the need for a human face
when we talk about organizational trust and we think about trust in an organization, then it seems to be essential that sometimes you need to see, as Anthony Giddens has said in one of his famous writings on modernity and trust into the whites of eyes of people. So you have to have access points to the organizations, and that needs to be persons. Sometimes you have to see real persons who represent the organization. So if it’s just an abstract organization and you would not associate any human face with it, it would be very difficult to trust it for many people.
Interview with subtitles (TrustTalk YouTube channel)
