The Trust Series, Part 2: How the Dynamic of Trust Has Changed in Our New Global Village

Table of Contents

In this essay:

1. Cold ice-cream on hot days
2. The existential origins of trust
3. How trade made money a proxy for trust
4. Choosing the right terrain in the fight for trust
5. How to avoid being slave to modernity’s masters

In the first part of this series of essays on the concept of trust in business, I tried to peel back some of the layers on what exactly trust is, outlined the ideas of the trust economy, considered how fragile trust can be, and described what I think of as a “flywheel” that can help all businesses build trust, and leverage it, in a way that is aligned to your values and long-term sustainable.

In this essay, Part 2, I try to take a macro view of the past and the present of trust, between people in general, and between people and businesses in particular. I will consider the role of trust in the millennia-old history of commerce and society and of civilization itself. I will try to identify the current state of play with trust in business. And I will pose some open-ended questions about how businesses, especially small businesses, should adapt to the increasingly global, increasingly technologized and increasingly fragmented world all of us now live in, and do business in.

1. Cold ice-cream on hot days

Cole Schafer is a writer I admire. By day he is a copywriter-for-hire, by night a writer of heart-raw poetry.

One of his products is a copywriting course titled:

“How to write words that sell like a Florida Snow Cone Vendor on the hottest day of the year”

In Ireland, where I’m from, none of us ever use the term “snow cone”. But almost all of us, wherever we are, are familiar with the unimpeachable allure of an ice-cream cone on a hot summer’s day.

Implicit in the transaction, as we stand in line waiting for our snow cone (or, the staple in Ireland, a “99” with strawberry syrup and chocolate flake), is an almost unbreakable form of trust.

Both of us trust that we will get exactly what we came for: that the ice-cream man will give us what we want; that we will pay up without gripe or discussion. It’s the simplest of transactions, with zero influence, persuasion, or compulsion.

We want it. He has it.

Transactions like this are rare. In almost every transaction, every day of every week, there are countless points of friction.

Go to repair a tyre, and you might wonder how much you’ll be charged, or whether the tyre mechanic might advise you — a little prematurely, or a lot — that the tyre is not worth repairing, and while I was at it, I took a look at the rest, and you could be doing with a new one on the front left as well. Go to fill the car, and you might compute the price-per-litre on the roadside LED and try to recall the price at the other station back up the road and wonder about the whispers you heard somewhere sometime about the quality of the fuel in these particular pumps. Go to the supermarket for milk and bread and you might have an insistent voice in your ear about the ways store designers position such everyday essentials beyond or alongside some small luxuries, such that your two-item list soon becomes a basket of goods that forces you to leave the coins in your pocket and pull out the debit card instead.

In a lifetime, we fight small silent battles like this a million times. Each fight is a fight with trust at stake.

Trust is rare. Trust is powerful. And because of how rare it is, and how phenomenally powerful it is, trust is effectively priceless.

Trust is effectively priceless in two important ways.

In one way — the obvious way — trust is priceless because it can’t be bought. Money can influence, of course. Provided it’s put to good use, money can create the environment, the systems and the personnel that nurtures the growth of trust. But trust is a great intangible, perhaps the greatest intangible, and great intangibles can never be plucked from the shelf and paid for at the till.

In the other way, the much less obvious way, trust is priceless because it’s a deeply psychological and evolutionary concept that predates something so new and modern as price.

2. The existential origins of trust

The Junto Institute, an organization whose stated purpose — like an Olympic movement for organizations rather than athletes — is “to help leaders and their teams become infinitely better, smarter, and healthier”, spent some considerable time and energy developing a comprehensive wheel of human emotions.

In it, the institute attempts to deliver a complete spectrum of emotions, building extensively on the four basic emotions outlined by the turn-of-the-century American philosopher and psychologist, William James (fear, grief, love and rage). The Junto Emotion Wheel includes 108 emotions, broken down into three tiers: a top tier of six (love, fear, anger, sadness, surprise and joy), 34 second-tier emotions and 68 third-tier emotions. The wheel includes everything from hostile to zealous, awe-struck to tranquil, bewildered to tender.

There is one notable absence on the Junto Emotion Wheel, though: trust is nowhere to be seen.

But is trust really an “emotion”, you might object.

Many who have studied it in detail say that not only is trust an emotion, but it’s an emotion that sits at the very heart of all human experience.

An influential earlier attempt to chart emotions in a colour-coded wheel, developed by the psychologist Robert Plutchik in the 1980s, included trust as one of eight primary human emotions, alongside anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, and joy.

Plutchik was motivated by theories that would lead to one of the newest branches of science, now known as evolutionary psychology. These eight emotions, the Plutchik methodology argued, had “high survival value”. While love — not included in Plutchik’s central eight, but represented elsewhere as an alloy of trust and joy — is obviously a powerful emotion, its value for species survival is, he surmised, questionable, or at least not core. (If we consider the reproductive drive as the central thrust of the genepool, and remember that one of the most widely selling books of all time is The Joy of Sex, we can understand that while love might be a welcome addition to sex, it is joy and its close cousin ecstasy that are — psychologically and reproductively —the key driving forces for reproduction.)

Compared with joy, or fear, or anger, trust plays a different role, but one that’s just as powerful.

Without trust, our distant ancestors were, all too literally, dead meat.

Trust allowed humans to keep each other safe from the predators and other existential threats that were everywhere in the primitiveness of their environment. If you and I were hunter-gatherers fifty thousand years ago, and we did not have each other’s back — if we could not trust each other implicitly — both of us were very likely doomed. It’s for this reason that trust often bypasses the thought processes of our brain and goes right to our gut and to our hearts.

And it’s because trust is felt within our bodies rather than our minds that scammers and shysters everywhere go to great lengths to win our confidence, to nurture our trust, not by appealing to the logic valued by our so-recently-developed prefrontal cortex, but by tugging on the deeper body psychology of our heart tissue and gut lining, those parts of the body where many decisions are made, parts of the body that seem to have a direct line to the brain neurons in ways that biology and medical science are only just beginning to understand.

All of this invites multiple questions, then.

Given that trust sits at the core of our survival and prosperity, how is that need being met in the increasingly globalized, hyper-connected society of the 21st century’s third decade? How is that need being massaged? How, on occasion, is that need being shortcutted?

The rest of this essay will attempt to answer to those questions. To answer them, though, let’s first take a look at a few of the vital ingredients that add up to a powerful trust recipe: the need for familiarity; the lure of safety; and the magnetic attraction of eye-to-eye human connection.

Familiarity

To build trust with somebody, we need to know them. This knowledge manifests as a familiarity that requires no words and no explanation. Familiarity is itself assembled with a couple of building blocks: integrity, plus time. If somebody acts in accordance with their words, and does so over weeks or months or years, trust builds gradually and powerfully. If somebody you meet does what they say they will do, and does so repeatedly, trust naturally grows. When the opposite happens, trust dies.

In business, the most successful brands understand this. They understand that there is no substitute for familiarity. They understand that the old saying, “familiarity breeds contempt”, does not apply in the world of business brand-building.

Safety

To trust somebody, they must at some level make you feel safe. At some deep and maybe inexplicable level of your physiology, your body’s cellular response when the scent of a favourite old Ralph Lauren aftershave hits your nose is the same cellular response your distant ancestor felt when he hid in the undergrowth from the saber-toothed tiger and spotted several of his clansmen approaching armed with spears to take out the enemy.

To trust, you need safety. You might find great excitement in the new and unpredictable, but safety comes from the familiar and predictable, and safety is a feeling that humans, in general, appear to cherish above almost all others.

Eye-to-eye human connection

Building on the familiar and the safe is the power of standing face-to-face with another human being. The old adage goes that the eyes are windows to the soul. Vision is arguably as close as biology gets to the divine. (There’s a line in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species — “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” — which some have interpreted to mean that only a creationist God could have created such a perfect instrument.)

The eye developed over 500 million years of evolution. Language, in contrast, is believed to be around 100,000 years old. Writing was developed around five thousand years ago. All this to say that communication through sight — the capacity to say a thousand things without a spoken word — goes to the heart of our animal history. If you have something vital to tell me, you will look me in the eye to do it.

It is these ingredients — these three vital factors that add up to the great intangible we call trust — that brands everywhere are trying to create, and sometimes shortcut, in the globally connected world of today.

Multinational brands invest millions, fine-tuning messaging and applying it consistently across many mediums and many years, to make themselves familiar to you, to represent safety for you, and to look you eye to eye — through the television on the wall or the screen in the palm of your hand — even if your eye is met not by the eye of the coffee company chief executive but by the eye of George Clooney, who brings with him the priceless boon of several decades of familiarity and safety hard-earned through other work in other places.

But now, everything about the way we have lived for millennia is being tipped up and torn apart, and the timeframe is much too short for our genes and our cells, for the very way we are built for survival, to adapt.

And this applies just as much to your business and mine as it applies to any other facet of human experience.

3. How trade made money a proxy for trust

Let’s consider for a moment the survival and prosperity of human beings long before our technological present. The industrial revolution that started sometime in the second half of the 1700s and continued until succeeded or overlapped by the technological revolution that started sometime in the late 1800s — these several successive centuries of mechanized, computerized, systematized progress overtook and often discarded the way things had worked in much of the world for many millennia.

For approximately 99% of human life on earth, men and women were hunter-gatherers, killing or collecting what they needed to survive on a daily basis. With the birth of agriculture around the world circa 10,000 years ago, things started to change, rapidly and irrevocably. Suddenly — or as near to suddenly as possible across the wide expanse of human history — people began to specialize: one person grew grain and cereals, another nurtured and butchered livestock, another produced milk and butter.

Trade between these farmers allowed many more people to prosper, to a greater or lesser degree. In the days before laws and statutes, there was still a contract, albeit an unwritten one.

That contract was trust.

There could be no comeback on a trust broken, at least none that didn’t include vengeance and bloodspill. Trust was easier to come by when the trade was local. That guy raising dairy cows over there, who wanted to barter some of his butter for a batch of your grain, well you knew his father and his grandfather before him, and he knew yours, and those connections and those years counted for everything.

The development of metal coins sometime in the 1000 years before the birth of Christ made international trade possible for the first time. Along the five thousand miles of the Silk Road that developed between modern day Istanbul in the west and China in the east, through Mesopotamia, Persia and India, coins of silver and gold developed a value that was understood by both local producers and traveling merchants. Between people who did not know and cared less about each other’s grandfathers, these coins could fill the role of trust. Once they were the right material and the right weight, the selling party might trust the buyer.

In a pattern that will be familiar to all of us today, as soon as a new technology develops a way of scamming that technology quickly follows. Counterfeiting coins, often through plating valueless base metals with a coating of precious, was so immediately prevalent that the art or craft of creating fake money has become known as “the world’s second-oldest profession”.

By now, however, ruling parties everywhere had been sold on the far-reaching benefits of trade — especially all the tax and tariff windfalls that came with it — and so they moved decisively, making counterfeiting a treasonable crime punishable by death. (Not that governments were above a bit of monetary fraud themselves, if they could justify it. During the American War of Independence in the 1770s, the British flooded the market with fake dollars with the aim of forcing the value of the enemy’s currency to plummet, a tactic repeated by the Union side against the Confederate dollar in the Civil War almost a century later.)

Over these several thousand years of international commerce, three truths have become absolutely apparent:

• First, that trade is beneficial to both parties, with economic prosperity becoming the engine for progress in all other domains.
• Second, that trust is an integral part of trade, and that in the absence of the time factor — or “grandfather bond” — something must be adopted to serve as a proxy for trust.
• And third, that somebody somewhere will always try to scam the system, or short-cut that trust, forcing societies to make dealing effectively with the scammers and fraudsters a central requirement of governments, and prompting a centuries-old battle that has long been fought and never been won by any government, anywhere.

Whether it’s government-sponsored international fraud, a company implementing systematic processes to mix low-grade cane into its supposedly premium coconut sugar, or the streetsmart confidence trickster, the “con-man” trying to separate you from your wallet at the train station, there is always somebody trying to sell you a story of trustworthiness so they can abuse your trust.

4. Choosing the right terrain in the fight for trust

Which brings us to today, and how people everywhere might negotiate this daily and age-old personal battle — who to trust, why to trust them, and how to reduce the risk of having that trust abused — in a world where we’ve gone from a local village to a global village, where the local mall is quickly being replaced by the Internet Everything Store, where in an hour we might get paid for services supplied to a company in Michigan and buy a gadget from another in Hangzhou, without ever speaking to anyone or stepping outside your front door in the Irish countryside.

Understanding how we negotiate this new reality, where almost everything has changed but where trust remains as important as ever, is essential for the survival and prosperity of all ambitious enterprises, whether you’re harvesting coconut sap in Java, providing bookkeeping services from a suburb of Jerusalem, or teaching real estate investment in Jacksonville.

In our newly global village — and wholly subconsciously — we seek out what’s familiar and what’s been shown to be safe. We seek out not the ephemeral world of ideas or concepts, but the eyes of somebody we trust — even if we don’t know that’s what we’re doing, even if we might never in our lives be in the same room as that somebody. And through familiarity, safety and the eyes of a human being into whose hands we are happy to place ourselves, trust is built block by block by block.

You might have stern reservations about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses, but those thoughts will always sit squarely in your prefrontal cortex, while what Amazon gives you every time you click “Buy” goes beyond that, to the older parts of your brain and to the other primitive “brains” that sit somewhere below your neck and above your waistline. And so every year, won over by the trust they have for Amazon, more and more Christmas shoppers do all their shopping there. Whatever you might think of the anti-freedom policies of PayPal, people all over the world are only happy to enter their credit card details when they are reassured by the sight of those big blue “P”s.

For small businesses in particular, so much of this seems to be bad news.

After all, it is abundantly obvious that a key paradox of the Internet is that it increases concentration at the same time as it increases choice. The network effect is compelling. A sort of Internet-enabled Pareto principle on steroids takes place, where the overwhelming majority of the business is conducted by an ever-decreasing number of trusted entities. (Apple’s market capitalization — $2.75 trillion as of September 2023 — is higher than the GDP of all but seven countries in the world. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is worth the same as the entire 12-month output of Spain, a historic superpower and modern industrial country with a population of about 50 million people. More than a third of the dollars spent online in the US are spent on Amazon.)

Every industry has a few standout companies who hoover up the majority of the brand recognition, and thereafter the majority of the business, and thereafter re-invest in the systems and efficiencies that allow them to keep the flywheel spinning.

What are the rest of us to do? Throw in the towel? Look at the odds stacked against us, contemplate how impossible it is to compete with Amazon or Apple or whatever 500-pound gorilla dominates your sector, and give up?

Some will, inevitably.

If you choose not to — and if you’re still reading, I can only assume that you have already made your choice — you must be aware of the terrain on which the battle for the trust of your customers (existing and future) is taking place.

Yes, the old high-street bookshop cannot compete with Amazon. Amazon offers an inexhaustible catalog, multiple format purchase options, Prime delivery, recommendation algorithms and thousands of reviews thoughtfully posted by people like you.

The old line about the putative fight between the bear and the shark applies. A bear can kill a shark, and a shark can kill a bear. The winner is decided by where that fight is fought. So if the old high-street bookshop tries to compete on Amazon’s playing field, it will lose. It has to take a leaf from the Sun Tzu book of war, or inspiration from the Che Guevara strategy of revolt, and go guerrilla.

You cannot compete with Amazon on their terms. But Amazon might not be able to compete with you on yours.

Your challenge, then — perhaps your most essential exercise — is to consider a series of simple questions that might not have simple answers.

What are your terms?

On which playing field are you almost certain to win?

On what terrain can you fight the trust battle and win?

5. How to avoid being slave to modernity’s masters

To answer those essential questions, it’s vital to remember one key thing about charting your course.

Subtly, even invisibly, the charts and signposts that are now deemed to be important have been decided by Google and Amazon and other Big Tech businesses fighting the unequal battle.

Everywhere now in the digital arena of business, we see mention of unique users, view counts, follower numbers, daily active users, market capitalization. Such metrics, and metrics like them, might seem important to you and your small, growing, ambitious company. But focus on them too much and you lose sight of the most critical measurement, the thing that perhaps must be measured more than anything else.

That measurement is both simple and fiendishly difficult.

How, exactly, are you faring in the great competition for trust?

Consider, for a moment, a couple of scenarios.

In the first, your video or brochure or article is seen by a tiny number of people, and noticed even less.

In the second, your business’s digital materials, through your slavish submission to modernity’s three-headed master of algorithm, advertising and analytics, is seen by tens of thousands of people (at least that’s what the view counts say).

Most businesses, if they’re really honest with themselves, are hovering somewhere close to the first and chasing the second.

In a world governed by Big Tech and its sky’s-the-limit race to the sun, it’s not at all obvious that there might be a third scenario, somewhere between total oblivion and viral view counts.

In this scenario, one perfect prospect finds a piece of content you crafted a year and a half ago, feels deep resonance with your worldview and ethos, sees what you have to offer, and wants exactly that.

This scenario is, of course, the best possible outcome for most enterprising and ambitious small businesses.

It is a million times better than oblivion, that’s clear.

But it’s also a million times better than the vanity massage offered by the data that told you a thousand people watched your video on LinkedIn last week. (Because hidden in that data is that those thousand people watched for an average of ten distracted seconds before scuttling off to some other part of the bottomless Internet oceanbed.)

This third scenario is out of sight for most businesses, who operate in a wider culture dominated by Big Tech and in thrall to the unfathomable “number”.

A successful future for your business, and mine, lies not in oblivion, and not in the vanity-laden mire of thousands of faceless and voiceless “followers”, but in the one powerful human connection we make today, the one we make tomorrow and the one we make the day after that, on and on over time.

If you want to play the game that has been mastered — financially and algorithmically, mass-psychologically and exploitatively — by the biggest companies in the history of the world, go right ahead.

If you want to play a different game, a game they cannot play as well as you, that choice is yours too.

It might look like a more difficult game to play, because you have to formulate and write your own rules and devise your own playing field, but it’s the only game you can win.

And in this game, by valuing above all the one-to-one connections you create across the countless invisible foot-bridges the Internet allows, you can finally allow the essence of trust — the emotion that kept your ancestors alive, that has evolved in splendid Darwinian perfection over a hundred millennia — to take its place firmly in your corner.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end. My name is Shane Breslin. I write for globally ambitious businesses, helping them elevate their brand through writing that reaches for the stars. If you run or own a globally ambitious business and you’d like to talk about how I can help, please get in touch.