Transcriber: Victoria Vernhes Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
So I'm going to talk about trust.
And I'm going to start by reminding you
of the standard views that people have about trust.
I think these are so commonplace
they've become cliches of our society.
And I think there are three.
One's a claim:
there's been a great decline in trust. Very widely believed.
The second is an aim: we should have more trust.
And the third is a task: we should rebuild trust.
I think that the claim, the aim and the task are all misconceived.
So what I'm going to try to tell you today
is a different story about a claim, an aim and a task,
which I think give one quite a lot better purchase on that matter.
First the claim.
Why do people think trust has declined?
And if I really think about it on the basis of my own evidence,
I don't know the answer.
I don't -- I'm inclined to think it may have declined in some activities
or some institutions and it might have grown in others.
I don't have an overview.
But of course I can look at the opinion polls.
And the opinion polls are supposedly
the sourse of the belief that trust has declined.
When you actually look at opinion polls across time,
there is not much evidence for that.
That's to say the people who were mistrusted 20 years ago
principally journalists and politicians, are still mistrusted.
And the people who were highly trusted 20 years ago
are sill rather highly trusted: judges, nurses.
The rest of us is in between.
And by the way, the average person in the street
is almost exactly midway.
But is that good evidence?
What opinion polls record is of course opinions.
What else can they record?
So, they are looking at
the generic attitudes that people report
when you ask them certain questions.
Do you trust politicians?
Do you trust teachers?
Now, if somebody said to you:
"Do you trust greengrocers?"
"Do you trust fishmongers?"
"Do you trust elementary school teachers?"
You would probably begin by saying: "To do what?"
And that would be a perfectly sensible response.
And you might say,
when you understood the answer to that,
"Well, I trust some of them, but not others."
That's a perfectly rational thing.
In short, in our real lives,
we seek to place trust in a differenciated way.
We don't make an assumption that the level of trust
that we will have
in every instance of a certain type
of official office helder or type of person
is going to be uniform.
I might, for example, say that I certainly trust
a certain elementary school teacher I know,
to teach the reception class to read,
but no way to drive the school mini bus.
(Laughter)
I might after all know that she wasn't a good driver.
I might trust my most loquacious friend
to keep a conversation going,
but perhaps not to keep a secret.
Simple.
So if we've got those evidence in our ordinary lives,
in the way that trust is differenciated,
why do we sort of drop all that intelligence
when we think about trust more abstractly?
I think the polls are very bad guides to the level of trust
that actually exists, because they try to obliterate
the good judgement that goes into placing trust.
Secondly, what about the aim?
The aim is to have more trust.
Well, frankly, I think that's a stupid aim.
It's not what I would aim at.
I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy,
but not in the untrustworthy.
(Laughter)
In fact, I aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy.
(Laughter)
And I think of those people who, for example,
placed their savings with the very aptly named Mr Madoff,
who then made off with them,
(Laughter)
And I think of them,
I think: "Well, yes, too much trust."
More trust is not an intelligent aim in this life.
Intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim.
Well one once said that,
one says: "Yeah, ok, that means that what matters
in the first place is not trust, but trustworthiness."
It's judging how trustworthy people are in particular respects.
And i think this judgement requires us to look at three things:
Are they competent?
Are they honest?
Are they reliable?
And if we find that a person is competent in the relevant matters,
and reliable, and honest,
we'll have a pretty good reason to trust them,
because they'll be trustworthy.
But if, on the other hand, they are unreliable, we might not.
I have friends who are competent and honest,
but I would not trust them to post a letter,
because they are forgetful.
(Laughter)
I have friends who are very confident
they can do certain things,
but I realise that they overestimate their own competence.
I'm very glad to say I don't think I have many friends
who are competent and reliable, but extremely dishonest.
(Laughter)
If so, I haven't yet spotted it.
(Laughter)
But that's what we are looking for,
trustworthiness before trust.
Trust is the response.
Trustworthiness is what we have to judge.
And, of course, it is difficult.
Across the last few decades, we tried to construct
systems of accountability for all sorts of institutions,
and professionals, and officials, and so on,
that we'll make it easier for us to judge their trustworthiness.
A lot of these systems have the converse effect.
They don't work as they are supposed to.
I remember I was talking with a midwife, who said:
"Well, you see the problem is it takes longer to do
the paper work than to deliver the baby."
(Laughter)
And all over our public life or institutional life,
we find that problem that the system of accountability,
that is meant to secure trustworthiness and evidence of trustworthiness
is actually doing the opposite.
It is distracting people who have to do difficult tasks, like midwives
from doing them, by requiring them
to "tick the boxes", as we say.
You can all give your own examples there.
So, so much for the aim.
The aim, I think, is more trustworthiness,
and that's going to be different if we are trying to be trustworthy
and communicate our trustworthiness to other people,
and if we are trying to judge whether other people or office helders,
or polititians are trustworthy.
It's not easy, it is judgement,
and simple reaction, attitudes don't do
don't do adequately here.
Now, thirdly, the task.
Calling the task rebuilding trust,
I think, also gets things backwards.
It suggests that you and I should rebuild trust.
Well, we could do that for ourselves.
We can rebuild a bit of trustworthiness,
we can do it two people together, trying to improve trust.
But trust, in the end, is distinctive,
because it's given by other people.
You can't rebuild what other people gave you.
You have to give them the basis for giving you their trust.
So you have to, I think, be trustworthy
and that, of course, is because you can't fool
all of the people all of the time. Usually.
(Laughter)
But you also have to provide usable evidence
that you are trustworthy.
How to do it?
Well, everyday, all over the place, it's being done
by ordinary people, by officials, by institutions quite effectively.
Let me give you a simple commercial example.
The shop where I buy my socks
says I may take them back.
And they don't ask any questions,
they take them back and give me the money
or give me the pair of socks of the color I wanted.
That's super.
I trust them, because they have made themselves
vulnerable to me.
There's a big lesson in that.
If you make yourself vulnerable to the other party,
then that is very good evidence
that you are trustworthy,
and you have confidence in what you are saying.
So, in the end, I think what we are aiming for
is not very difficult to discern.
It is relationships in which people are trustworthy
and can judge when and how
the other person is trustworthy.
So the moral of all this is
we need to think much less about trust,
let alone about attitudes of trust,
detected or misdetected by opinion polls,
much more about being trustworthy
and how you give people adequate,
useful and simple evidence that you are trustworthy.
Thanks.
(Applause)