Revisionist History - How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Rachel Botsman, Oxford University professor and author of the new Pushkin audiobook How to Trust and Be Trusted, joins Malcolm to talk about how to make smart decisions about trust. Then, a preview of How to Trust and Be Trusted, which is available on Audible or wherever you get your audiobooks.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, hello revisionist history listeners. Malcolm here. Today we have a special guest in the house, Rachel Botsman. Rachel is a lecturer at Oxford University and a world renowned expert on the topic of trust. And importantly, not most importantly, but importantly, she's the author of a new Pushkin audiobook, How to Trust and Be Trusted. After more than 15 years teaching trust to CEOs, entrepreneurs, world leaders, and all kinds of students,

she's now sharing these powerful lessons with you in her new audiobook. You're going to get a chance to hear one of her lessons from that audiobook in just a moment. But first, I want to speak with a woman herself, Rachel Botsman. Welcome to Revisionist History. Tell me a little bit about your interest in trust. How did you come to this subject? It's a funny subject to study because it's really intangible trust. But it came from a fascination in human connection. So I've always been interested in why we're attracted to some people and we repel from others. I've always been interested in what holds groups and teams and society together. And the force, the social glue,

is trust. And what I realized is that in the field of trust, you sort of have people who study like cells and negotiations. So essentially, how do you manipulate trust to get something from someone? Or you have the other end, which is like the Esther Perel end, which is like the therapist, let's repair trust when it breaks down. Now wasn't a lot in between, which I found fascinating. Yeah. And are we, you were drawn to this because

is this something we do naturally and well, or something that we're bad at? It's a good question. We of us trust naturally. It's a very intuitive thing. Most of us do it badly because we rely on intuition and not information. Especially in high stakes situations or high risk situations, we're not really taught how to trust well, how to give our trust to the right people and products and information, which is a big one. And everything about our society and technology now

is speeding up those decisions. So our trust making is getting worse, not better. What would be some of the most common mistakes we make when we're trying to kind of make a trust evaluation. Well, speed is the enemy of trust. So making it too quickly or under pressure is a really big one. So most big decisions we have to make

because we've got to hire someone or whatever that might be. So that's number one. The second is intuition over information. So I still believe in trusting your gut, but what is the information? There's a lot of evidence around charisma and confidence over weighting capability. And I think we're seeing that play out in sort of leaders that are getting elected. So those that seem like bold and disruptive versus steady and capable, or maybe even bland, that really influences trust.

They'd be my top three. Yeah, I'm reminded of, years ago I read this study of student evaluations of professors and how the evaluation a student makes after like, you know, five seconds is the same as their evaluation they make at the end of the term. And they're clearly not making a reasoned decision about whether this teacher is good or whether they should trust this information or they never get beyond the initial question of, do I like this person? The snap judgment. Yeah, the snap judgment. They never transcend the snap judgment.

And sometimes it's not even like, does this person feel familiar? They can't even get beyond that. And it's the person that feels strange or unfamiliar that sometimes we just can't or choose not to trust. And that's a real problem. Yeah. You spend a lot of time on the question of transparency. Can you talk a little bit about what do we gain from adding transparency into these? And what do you mean by transparency in this context? Or what do we lose as well? What do we lose, yeah. I think it's one of the biggest myths around trust that needs blowing up. So well, transparency, I always think of disclosing information, right?

So disclosing lots and lots of information so you understand why something is happening or good transparencies, understanding the context behind a decision. So why did you choose to do that thing? But transparency in practice can feel like surveillance. So if you think about transparency, you're trying to get visibility into something. You're trying to understand where someone is by tracking them maybe on their phones. We're trying to understand what they're up to and what they're doing. And that is the very opposite of trust. So the way I define trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. So if you think, Malcolm, of people in your life,

your professional or your personal life, that you deeply trust, you don't need to know where they are. You don't need to know what they're up to. It's that visibility is a form of control. And that control can be a sign of lack of trust. So I think it's, I'm not saying transparency is completely a bad thing, but this idea that you fix trust issues, systemic trust issues, trust issues in an organization, even in a relationship by making things transparent, it has a backfire effect where it might work initially because you think, oh, that person's being more open or I have more visibility into that situation

and therefore more control. But over time, it actually leads to less trust. But does that, you know, when you said earlier that one of the things we need to do is to not make decisions quickly and gather more information, what's the difference between getting more information and transparency? It's a great question. So it sounds like semantics, but there's a difference between openness and transparency. So if I came to you and said, oh, I'd really love to know why you chose to put me on your

podcast, Malcolm. And you said, sure, I'll share that information. That's being open. But if equal, if you said, you know what, you don't really need to know, or I can't really explain why if I really trusted you, I wouldn't need to know. Oh, I see. Yeah. Do you see what I mean? So the problem is with transparency is when leaders promise it and then an employee goes to them and says, well, I really want to understand what that person is being paid or how the bonus structure works or why

you've changed the pricing mechanism or whatever it may be. And then the leader goes, I can't tell you that. Well, you promised to be transparent. So there's this difference between being open and being visible and promising for transparency. Yeah. What are, so what if you just put us in the context of leaders who are managers trying to create high trust teams, what advice do you give people who are trying to do that? Well, the first thing, often people are trying to create high trust teams because they're trying to be innovative. They're trying to get those teams to be able to tolerate uncertainty. So high trust teams and creative teams, there's a real correlation there. So one of the things that you say is don't mistake

reducing risk for increasing trust. So what a lot of teams do is they figure out all the bad things that could go wrong, right at the beginning. And it's a mindset. It's like, we'll just figure out how to mitigate risks before they've even happened. And if you create those kind of cultures in your teams, your trust mindset, your tolerance for uncertainty

in the unknown actually reduces. So one of the really powerful things to do is actually go, okay, how does this team expand their capacity to be in the unknown and to be in that creative space versus how much of our culture is actually wired to measuring and managing risks? That's a really big one. Or another one. Give me another one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Curious. I mean, that one's harder to do

because I don't think many organizations think, they think they're thinking about trust, but they're actually thinking about risk. So that shift is quite tricky. An easier one that you can put into practice tomorrow is to become a better expectation setter. So, so many trust issues, and I think many managers and leaders

are really bad at doing this, is how you set clear expectations that allow people to be empowered and to sort of live and work in the unknown. So it's like, this is what I expect of you within this timeframe, within these boundaries, now go play and go and do it. But we're often really bad at setting expectations.

Yeah, yeah. So tell me, we're about to listen to a chapter from your book or an excerpt from your book. Can you tee it up for us? What are we about to hear? You're about to hear the introduction or chapter one, which really lays the foundations on what trust is and how it works in our lives. And I find it fascinating and also a beautiful thing that trust has more definitions than love. So it is the most debated sociological concept in our lives.

And so in chapter one, we really dig into this understanding of what trust is and how it works and how it influences your decisions and choices in ways that you may be aware of or may never have thought about before. Yeah, wonderful. Rachel, this has been really fun. And I think I speak for all of my listeners when I say that we are looking forward to hearing what follows. Yeah, I really hope it changes the way people think about trust. That's the reason for doing this.

Yeah. And the name of your book is? It's called How to Trust and Be Trusted, intentionally a two-way title because trust is something that you give and something that you earn. And we have to think about both those things in our lives. Yeah. Thank you so much, Rachel. Thank you, Malcolm. How to Trust and Be Trusted by Rachel Botsman is available on Pushkin.fm, Audible, Spotify, and anywhere you get audiobooks. Keep listening for a preview of the audiobook.

Chapter one, how to give your trust to the right people. Have you ever trusted the wrong person? In this chapter, I'm going to teach you a really important workplace skill. How to give your trust to the right people. Because we can all learn how to make better trust decisions. I know first hand about bad trust decisions because when I was 5 years old, my parents put their trust in the wrong person. A nanny.

Hello? Dad? Hi Rach, just a sec. I called my dad to ask him more about it. So, I'm calling about the nanny. You know which nanny? I think I know which nanny. A nanny are called Doris.

It's hard to ever forget Doris. What was your first impression of her? What do you remember when she came into the house? Um, she was very unimpressive, which is quite a good feature in an au pair. Unimpressive? What do you mean by that? Well, she was so, she was a bland person. It was just inconceivable that somebody like that could do those sorts of things. Oh yes, bland old Doris got up to all sorts of things.

The nanny my parents trusted to take care of me and my brother turned out to be very untrustworthy indeed. She forged my dad's signature to get a loan for a car. She stole from us in the most brazen ways. And she was even running a drugs ring. Really. Deciding whom to trust can be pretty complicated. Okay, so not everyone has put their trust in a drug-dealing nanny.

However, we all know how bad it feels to make a poor trust decision. But I want you to be able to make good trust decisions because being able to trust people is a positive thing and it will make you better at your job. So I'm going to tell you why we sometimes trust the wrong people, like Dodgy Doris, and I'll teach you how you can fix this problem. So let's start by unpacking what trust actually is. It's a word we use a lot in our lives. But if I asked you to write down one word to describe trust, what would it be? Maybe you're jotting down confidence, faith, or perhaps risk.

Some people think of trust as a state, or as an outcome, or a feeling. But trust is a belief. It's your belief about how someone will behave or how something will turn out. To go back to my definition of trust, it's a confident relationship with the unknown. So what does that mean in the workplace? Let me give you an example. Trust is a belief that when someone is working from home and you can't see what they're up to, they will behave in a way that you expect. They can be trusted to be productive and not let you down.

If you need to know exactly what someone is doing and are constantly checking in and monitoring them and asking them for updates, that's not trust. It's control. Once you see trust as your belief lens, it can have a profound impact on the way you make decisions and how you behave at work. Trusting another person is complicated. There's a whole host of factors that determine when and how trust forms. For instance, how long you've known them, what is the thing you're trusting them with

or for, and how bad would it really be if they let you down? Stanford Business School professor Roderick Kramer found that eight out of ten executives report being burned at least once because they trusted the wrong person at some point in their career. People tend to make poor trust decisions because they don't understand how trust dynamics really work. So let me give you a simple framework to help visualize how trust happens between two people. In any relationship,

there are two players, the trust giver and the trust receiver. Let's start by focusing on what it means to be the trust giver. A trust giver is the person that is deciding whether to trust someone, a boss, a colleague, a friend, or in my dad's case, the nanny. As the trust giver, we have an important choice. Do we trust them or not? What influences our choices and decisions is called a trust

signal. Trust signals are small clues we knowingly or unknowingly use to decide whether another person should be trusted. How someone speaks, the questions they ask, who they're with, what they're wearing, and even how they say, hi, how are you? These are all trust signals. In other words, the way we make a trust decision is based on pieces of information we pick up from another person. The tricky thing is, we don't always look for or interpret trust signals in the right way. Some trust

signals are way louder than others. Because often we unknowingly tune into the signals that we want to see that are familiar to us. Becoming aware of the trust signals you're tuning into is the first important step in making smarter trust decisions. Here's a simple exercise to try. The next time you meet someone for the first time, try to stay aware of what you're tuning into. Is it their voice, their clothes, their demeanor, or their posture? Similarly, what questions do you ask them in the first few minutes? Just becoming aware of how you're looking for things that are familiar can be powerful. Making trust decisions based on familiarity is a tricky behaviour to change,

because our assumptions about whom to trust are deeply wired. They're often biases that have been with us since we were very young. When you're about three months old, you start trusting people who look like your parents more than other people. Maria Konikova is a psychologist and author who's written a lot about distrust. She's an expert in the ways trust is exploited by everyone from con artists to poker players. And she happens to be a champion poker player herself. We trust people who seem like us, who look like us, who sound like us much more than we do people who don't. That's something that con artists, by the way, manipulate all the time as well.

Oh, you know, you're from New York, I'm from New York, and they might not have ever been to New York. But they try to get those little superficial similarities so that we have a basis for trust. There's a fascinating study on the link between trust and familiarity. The study, done by a professor named Lisa DeBrien from the University of Glasgow, showed how facial resemblance enhances trust. Participants in an experiment were shown faces of strangers to be potential playing partners for a game. When the face of the stranger was similar to the face of the participant,

they were more likely to trust the unknown person. Take a moment to think about that. Have you ever trusted someone just because they felt familiar? Maybe they went to the same school as you, like the same sports team, or maybe, as in the study, they even looked a bit like you. Familiar trust signals are often the loudest because of what's known as confirmation and desirability bias. We use them to confirm our own ideas about how someone or something should be,

or how we want them to be. That's what happened with my parents and Doris the nanny. She showed up wearing a navy colored uniform complete with a bonnet hat. She had a mop of curly hair and large steel rimmed glasses. She even played the tambourine. I'm not joking. What a trustworthy person she must be. And even when some major red flags started popping up, my parents let the familiar trust signals override their better judgement. There was the time Doris wanted to get away for a weekend, so she said

her Uncle Charlie had died and she needed to go to the funeral. My dad found out this wasn't true when he called Doris' mum to express his condolences and Doris must be confused. You can't be confused about whether Uncle Charlie is dead or not. He's either dead or he isn't. At this point, being quite quick to grasp things, I thought all was not well. But you know, even after Uncle Charlie, she came with us on a holiday to Marbella. Well, that was very convenient, yes. Even though we were only five and eight, my brother and I could see how Doris was, well, different when my parents were around. It was all an act.

And eventually, even my dad couldn't ignore what he was seeing. At the height of suspicion, he did something he'd never done before. He searched Doris' room. He found a bag of money under her bed. Quite a lot of foreign currency. And it happened to be from countries Dad had been traveling to for work. I did question her and she told me that she'd found the money under a tree in the park. And we still didn't get rid of her?

No. And when I found more money in her room, she said she'd gone back to the same tree. The same tree? I want to know where this tree is, Dad. And still Doris stayed with us. That was until my dad's car went missing and he finally kicked her out, called the police and sat guard outside our front door with a baseball bat. with a baseball bat. I imagine the Doris saga was in part how I first took a deep interest in understanding trust. Thinking back on it, my dad told me the decision to trust Doris came down to convenience. My parents were busy people with busy jobs. It was more convenient to keep Doris than to find a different solution. It's easy to dismiss or laugh at my dad's reasoning, but haven't we all done that?

Not hire a dodgy nanny, of course, but make a trust decision or continue to trust someone based on convenience. Like when you tell yourself, I know that company isn't entirely ethical. They don't treat their employees well, but their service, it makes my life a little easier. So I'll just carry on using them. Or perhaps you're under pressure to get something done.

So you conveniently delegate a piece of work to a person when you know they shouldn't really be doing it. Convenience so often trumps trust. Understanding the power convenience has over trust has been one of the most important things I've learned about being a trust giver. Let's try another exercise. Think of the last time you made a poor or very bad trust decision at work.

Did you blame it on the character of the other person? They turned out to be unreliable, incompetent, dishonest, or you fill in the blank. Someone's character plays a critical role, but what we often overlook is the importance of having the right information. As the social scientist Diego Gambetta puts it, trust has two enemies, not one. Bad character and poor information. So, the next time you find yourself making an important trust decision, I'd recommend

asking yourself these three questions. One, what trust signals am I tuning in to? Two, am I trusting this person out of convenience? And three, am I making this trust decision too quickly? Now, let's look at something else that influences what trust signals we pay attention to. Our gut. My dad's gut told him that a nanny who seemed bland was a safe one. His gut told him that blandness was a good trust signal.

But our gut feeling, or intuition, is rarely the source of trustworthy decisions. For Maria Konikova, the expert in distrust, there's a common saying about this that's a real pet peeve. Maria Konikova-Trusting your gut, I hate that phrase. And I think it's very misleading and very bad advice. Because here's what we know from psychology. Our quote-unquote gut has very strong reactions, and they're sometimes correct and sometimes wrong. And our ability to distinguish the two is at about 50-50, so chance. We have very little ability to be able to figure out which of our gut feelings are correct and which are not correct. So let me share with you something from my research that has made me think differently

about the role of gut feeling in giving trust. Gut feeling is not the decision makermaker but a decision-driver. So use your intuition but challenge it with other information to make sure it's accurate. Here's how this might come up in your job. When you're thinking about how to have a difficult conversation with a colleague or when you're taking a brief from a potential client and you're not entirely sure what they do. And of course, when you're hiring someone new, don't let your gut make the trust decision. Throw your gut out the window, you don't know. You are relying on people perception that is most often wrong.

That is why so many hiring decisions are so terrible because people go with those feelings and we know that those thin slice judgments are made within the first few seconds of meeting someone. And that's when your hiring decision is made, and that's just crazy. How can you base someone you're going to hire into your organization based on two seconds, 10 seconds, it doesn't even matter, 20 seconds? Anything that has seconds after it should not be a basis for such an enormous decision. Instead of making important trust decisions in seconds,

Maria recommends going by the old mantra that former President Ronald Reagan was so fond of, trust but verify. Our default has to be trust. Initially, you have to believe the things you hear, believe the people you meet. You're not going to be able to go through life if every single moment you're doubting everything and it's completely impractical. However, you have to have that second verification stage. Verify, verify everything that's important and verify even when you don't really want to. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's definition of a gut feeling is spot on.

He says a gut feeling is thinking that you know without knowing why you do. Even though I've studied the ins and outs of trust for over a decade, I have still gone with my gut countless times. Sometimes things have gone right and other times things have gone horribly wrong. So let me share with you a useful tool that will help you better read trust signals. It's called a trust pause. A trust pause is a healthy hesitation where we question if a person,

a product, or a piece of information is worthy of our trust. If you find yourself wanting to make a trust decision quickly, from your gut, take a trust pause, and ask yourself the following questions. Where is this confidence coming from? Am I seeing or hearing something I want or need to believe to be true? Is it because this person feels familiar or similar to me? And a really important question, what information do I still need to make a reliable decision. When you put these questions into practice, they will intentionally slow you down. Now I know that in a world that's so driven by efficiency, this might sound counterintuitive,

but speed can be the enemy of trust. I'm not suggesting you overthink every single trust decision. I mean, you'd never leave the house. But if it's something important, take a trust pause. For example, if you have some sensitive or confidential information to share with your boss, take a trust pause before speaking to them. If you're going for a new role in an organization, take a trust pause before speaking to them. If you're going for a new role in an organization, take a trust pause to speak to someone in a similar position.

If you're starting an important contract with a new supplier, take a trust pause to speak to some other customers. Are you sure? Are you sure? That's at the heart of a trust pause. It might feel like you're wasting valuable time, but otherwise you may be left wondering why you didn't pause for a bit longer before giving your trust. Because once trust has been given, it's in the other person's hands to take care of or break.

My dad could have taken a trust pause with Doris, and it would have saved a lot of anguish and his Volvo. Of course, there are regrets, but after everything, it hasn't really changed my dad. He just tends to trust people. I have run my life on the basis of trusting people and I found that generally that has worked out for me and has that trust been abused a bit. But I think that what I've gained from trusting people is more than if I've been constantly looking over my shoulder and not trusting people. And by and large, that worked out okay. Some people trust too much and too readily, like my dad. They have what psychologists call a high propensity to trust. They assume they won't be taken advantage of.

Human beings are wired to trust. Trust is our default state. And the only reason society exists and all of our institutions exist and just the world functions is because of trust. Here's something else Maria helped me rethink. The existence of con artists like Doris actually says something very good about humanity. That may sound strange, but the only reason they succeed is because as people, for the most part, we are trusting. As the late master magician Ricky Jay once said, you wouldn't want to live in a world where you couldn't be conned because it would mean you're living in a world where you never trusted anyone or anything.

And that to me just gets at the heart of it. You know, the fact that I can get conned is the flip side of the fact that I believe in things, I believe in people, and that's beautiful. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to trust giving. Ultimately, trust is a choice. It's yours to give or not. So let's just recap the four main ideas about giving trust that you can now put into practice.

1. Be aware of the trust signals you're tuning into by remembering that we tend to trust what's familiar. 2. Recognise when you're allowing convenience to trump trust. Three, reframe your gut feeling as a decision driver, not the decision maker. And finally, four, speed can be the enemy of trust. So take a trust pause to get the right information. I'm going to leave you with a question to think about as we head into Chapter 2. How do you get someone else to trust you? Thanks for watching!