Lately, it seems that more drivers speed up to prevent me from entering their lane. The driver has nothing to gain or lose by being nice, so that’s an index of how intrinsically motivated people are to do the right thing.
That started me thinking about the broader question of trust. How much can we trust people to do the right thing? And how can we assess how much to trust a given person?
I think my optimism about human nature started to be shaken when John Kennedy was killed. That accelerated when I read about the clerics who molest children and who steal money from parishioners. It saddens me to think we can’t unquestionably trust even "God’s emissaries."
Also, growing up in the era of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, I felt that journalists were noble seekers of truth. Now, having, for more than 25 years, written for major media outlets, I've learned that ever more reporters are less interested in reporting than in manipulating us to agree with them about how the world should be. (That’s rather hubristic in that many journalists have spent little time in the real world, having gone straight from academia’s bubble to journalism’s bubble.)
Recently, I learned that every year, thousands of men are victims of paternity fraud. Most men can’t imagine they’d be falsely accused and so don’t get a paternity test. How wrong that some women would lie to unfairly force a man to spend 18 or more years raising some other man’s child and to incur the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to raise one.
Then there are the physicians. I viewed doctors as saviors, the people who can protect me from unnecessary illness and premature death. But I recently read that 210,000 to 440,000 patients die because of medical mistakes and millions more suffer “excess morbidity,” an antiseptic term for “unnecessary suffering.”
Most personally painful, I was playing a game with one of my closest friends. We agreed to take turns answering each others’ questions completely honestly. I asked her, “Do you ever have any negative thoughts about me?” I assumed she’d say something like, “You can get intense.” Instead she said, “I’m jealous of you so I sometimes think of hurting you.” I was shocked. If you can’t trust your close friends to at least not want to harm you, then whom can you trust?
Especially in tough times, people may be less trustworthy that we’d like. How do you figure out whom and how much to trust?
Before trusting a person, try to determine how often he or she is correct. For example, read Yelp reviews of physicians, not so much to see whether patients like them but how often they diagnose correctly.
If you’re thinking of trusting someone with money, assess how financially desperate or materialistic they are. I’d worry about entrusting my money to someone who drives a Mercedes and wears Faconnable shirts and a Rolex.
Perhaps most important, I’d try to see if a person acts justly even when it’s inexpedient. That’s especially key if the person has much to gain by acting against your interest and you’re unlikely to detect it. For example, 20 years ago, I had gone to a new dentist and for the first time in my life, a dentist said I needed a crown. The next year, he said I needed another one. Before agreeing to the second one, I got a second opinion—and that second dentist was sure the tooth was not cracked. I changed dentists (to Dr. Thomas Smithers in Berkeley, CA) and in those 20 years, he has never said I need a crown nor even a filling and I’ve had no problems with my teeth. So if at some point Dr. Smithers says I need some treatment, I’ll trust his recommendation.
We have limited control over others but I hope this article reminds us at least that core to the life well-led is striving to be just and even kind.
Dr. Nemko was named “The Bay Area’s Best Career Coach,” by the San Francisco Bay Guardian and he enjoys a 96 percent client-satisfaction rate. In addition to the articles here on PsychologyToday.com, many more of his writings are archived on www.martynemko.com. Of his seven books, the most relevant to readers of this blog is How to Do Life: What They Didn’t Teach You in School. His bio is on Wikipedia.