How to Trust in Times of Uncertainty (w/ Rachel Botsman) | How to Be a Better Human | TED

You're watching How to be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and today on the show, we're asking a really big question. Who do you trust? Do you trust me? Do you trust this video? Should you trust me? I'm just a random guy in your phone or on your computer. Why do you trust me? And yet, every single day, we look at things online. We hear comments from strangers. We encounter people on the street, and we have to decide, are they trustworthy? Is what they're saying true? Today's guest, Rachel Botsman, studies trust at Oxford University. She's put a lot of time and energy and effort into figuring out why we trust what we trust, what we actually should trust, and what deserves our confidence and what doesn't. Here's a clip from her TED talk. Trust is an

elusive concept. There are in fact hundreds of definitions of trust and most can be reduced to some kind of risk assessment of how likely it is that things will go right. But I don't like this definition of trust because it makes trust sound rational and predictable and it doesn't really get to the human essence of what it enables us to do and how it empowers us to connect with other people. So I define trust a little differently. I define trust as a confident relationship to the unknown. Now, when you view trust through this lens, it starts to explain why it has a unique capacity to enable us to cope with uncertainty, to place our faith in strangers, to keep moving forward. Hi, I'm Rachel Botsman and I've been studying trust for over 15 years across cultures, uh, across different areas of our lives. I've written three books. Um, I teach at Oxford University and I'm just really fascinated by helping people to think differently about trust. Okay.

So, Rachel, in your books, What's Mine is Yours, Who Can You Trust? And the new audio book, How to Trust and Be Trusted, you've been looking at this question of trust. I I've been thinking about this a lot because it seems like each year and every honestly each month more and more technological advances come out that make us trust less. Whether it's because we see people saying extreme things that we know are not true or honestly increasingly because of artificial intelligence that shows images and presents audio that we know are actually not real. So it's hard to know how to trust even objective facts these days uh much less other people. Um do you feel like this work has become over the years that you've been studying it more of a daily hot button issue rather than kind of a big virtue?

I don't think we trust less. I think we trust differently. So, we used to largely trust people and now it's very hard to distinguish when we're trusting a who versus a what. And um so are we trusting a real human being? Are we trusting an algorithm? Are we trusting a

piece of generated content? And when we're trusting a what, who is behind that? That's why there is this very complex relationship between the truth and trust that is probably one of the most profound things affecting our lives and society. What are some whats that we trust or that maybe you trust? Okay, so to make it really simple, right? Um when I get in my car, if the car is not intelligent, I trust that the car will turn on and that when I press the indicator, a light will come on, right? Like that's trusting the capability side of a car. Now once that car becomes slightly smart, right? So maybe it assists you with parking, you start to trust that car's facial judgment more than yourself. Now you move the next stage on and you go to a car that is fully autonomous. You're having to trust that car's decision making um in high-risisk situations. So the degree of trust that you're placing in the what becomes much higher and in some instances it starts to replace the human trust and the thing that I find interesting you know I study humans yes I study their interaction with technology but fundamentally I love understanding how humans connect so this idea that technology can replace human things has been very challenging to me just to give you an example example, like one of the key traits of trust is empathy. And I really wanted to believe that AI wasn't capable of empathy. And something I've been rethinking lately is what I've realized is AI is very capable of two dimensions of empathy. So um if I write a medical question um it can identify um not just sort of information it can identify how I'm feeling and it can write an appropriate response and this is the cognitive side of empathy but by its very nature it can't feel right. So, if we're having an empathetic conversation, if I'm crying, that might prompt an emotional response in you. And the AI can't feel that. And for a long time, I thought, well, that's its limitation, right? Like, how can something practice empathy if it can't physically feel something? And then what I realized is actually its limitation is its strength. So if you think in the context of health care or education or mental health support, a lot of reasons why practitioners get burnt out is because they absorb too much, right? They take on the stress and the feeling of the other person. So if you start to think about this and you go right, well actually the AI can take on the identification and the response side of empathy and then that frees the human up for the support and the care which can only be delivered through human connection. it becomes a very different trust question, right? We should trust it to do certain things because actually it can do them better than a human and it can relieve the burdens from human because of its limitations. My only hesitation on that is that there's I think there's sometimes this like superficial level of um connection and you can get it with people too where like they're saying all the right things and it feels like it should be good but it's almost like are they actually saying that or did they just like read that in a little pamphlet called like how to be a good listener you know will using AI in that way push us towards the deeper more real more genuine connection or will it push us towards being like I'm a doctor and I'm walking in the room and what I'm supposed to say to you right now is it sounds like it's very hard what you're going through. Okay, pat on the back. See you later. You know, I hope it's not the second, but I don't know. I don't know either. And

the thing that worries me is um you know, when I interact with people who are studying AI very deeply, practitioners and academics, one thing I've noticed is they are starting to speak faster and in a like a more artificial way. It's like the more they interact with this form of processing, they are speeding up. And humans, the human brain wasn't designed to move at the speed of processing power. So that is my concern that um the identification response piece feels very constructed and artificial. What the research is showing is that patients are saying it feels more empathetic than a medical professional. So you know that um they're listening and they feel heard and it takes in to account all their previous cases because it can read history and data and pull things that a doctor just doesn't have time to process and join the dots around. So that's where I have to think I think we have to keep ourselves very open and once we start to understand these lines of yes actually we should trust it to do this but we shouldn't that that's when it can actually start to carry more integrity and start to feel like it's serving our best interests. I live in Los Angeles and as we're recording this there are still fires burning. They're much more under control than they were before. But there was this horrific wildfires that so many people lost their homes. And for those of us who didn't lose homes, who were in neighborhoods that were largely spared, there's still been this second order question of is it safe to be here? Because what is in the air? Is the air toxic only if you're in the burn zone? Is it safe if you're two miles away? 5 miles away from the active fire? And there's been this moment where my family and everyone in our neighborhood has been trying to figure out is it safe or is it not safe? And it's a very practical big question that would change what we do. Do we go outside? Do we stay inside? Do we leave the city entirely? It's hard to get a definitive answer. And it's hard to know who to trust. And it's put me back in this mindset that I felt during a lot of the height of the corona virus lockdowns where it was all of a sudden I had to be the you know the public health expert who knew about droplets virus transmission through the air and now it's like I have to learn about wildfire ash wind movement. I think that is a very modern feeling the sense that like we don't have a definitive source to trust and we have to become the expert ourselves and it's very exhausting and I imagine you must have studied this lack of a single institutional source of information that we can just definitively rely on and where do you go for information out of interest like uh well first things that I go to are I ask other people that I I'm friends with what are you doing um I still have a lot of deference I think towards institutions and especially towards like scientific expertise. So I watched a webinar that the California Coalition for Clean Air put together that had like six different PhDs and they were all air quality experts. But again, the hard part is like not all of the air quality experts agreed. There were disagreements amongst them. So it was a little bit like I was at a scientific conference where there wasn't a definitive answer and it was hard cuz I just want the definitive answer. I don't necessarily want the like nuance of and we need more research into this type of wind pattern and this type of particle. So that's what I tried to do is to go to like the scientists and experts and then filter that with the help of um community members. But it it's hard to not have a definitive answer. I think it's hard to not feel like I'm just going towards what I want the answer to be. Yes. And

because in these times of extreme uncertainty um what we innately look for is control. And part of control uh is reducing that uncertainty by someone telling you exactly what to do or can you go out or when will this end and in the absence of that information it's incredibly stressful and I think it's something that often gets missed around the debate of misinformation is that in the chaos and the noise and not knowing where to trust um that creates stress. But what you're talking about is a really profound trust shift where for decades trust blowed upwards. So in the UK we had like the BBC or you know I work in one Oxford University all these things and experts um even like the weather people when they came on right we trusted them um and we looked up and there was like difference to those people what they said we trusted was factually true. That no longer is the case for the majority of people. So even if you respect institutions, that isn't the natural default behavior. What's happened is trust moves sideways. So you said, you know, you ask your friends, you ask your family, maybe you go on social media, maybe you look at what influencers are saying on Instagram. It's this fragments, lots and lots of fragments of information that you're gathering from these sideways sources. And then you as the individual become the filter for deciding what is true. And the problem with that is that you are full of motives. I don't know, but maybe you're a runner, Chris, and you really want to go out for your run. You're going to find all kinds of information that says the air quality is clean. And we're remarkably good at that, like finding all this information that affirms what we want to believe. So, one of the things I actually encourage people to do is to really think about not what you believe, but why you need to believe something. If you find yourself looking for information to affirm something, like ask yourself that question. Why do I want to believe this? Why do I need to believe this? And is this influencing where I'm looking for information? And challenge yourself to look in the opposite place. But it's a huge societal problem. Um I'm actually doing this big piece of work in the UK around younger generations and their relationship to the truth and trust and how it's imp impacting everything from anxiety to loneliness. And truly like it is frightening what is coming out in terms of how young people are feeling around information. Well, one thing that I associate strongly with my conversations with young people is just this real sense of exhaustion. And I feel like that wasn't necessarily true when I was, you know, 20. I don't think we had this like pervasive exhaustion. And I think one of the reasons is what we're talking about, which is just this constant daily need to be the filter to sort through what is true, who's manipulating you, how are you being manipulated, what should you do. It it's hard to put down that cognitive burden and they have it just every single day. I feel like that must that lack of um that trust shift that you've talked about into this distributed trust. There's lots of positives of it, but there's also this real work that is put on individuals instead of it being done by some sort of institution. A real burden that never

stops. It doesn't switch off. And I have a 13-year-old and an 11year-old. One's a boy, one's a girl. And um the 13-year-old only just got his phone, so we were like the last ones to hold out. But even watching the change in him in 6 months is since he got the phone is remarkable. Um, and I don't mean with his friends, I mean his views, like just listening sometimes I'm like, where is that coming from? Because it's definitely not coming from us. Mhm. And I don't think it's his school or his and that I find quite frightening that it's like what is influencing his beliefs. Um, it's and it's partly age, but it is definitely access to social content. One thing that I I'm surprised by frequently is how I can see a piece of information online and be told that it is not accurate. So, I know that it's wrong and still finds that inaccurate information influencing my belief down the road. Like, even though I know it's fake and I've been told it's not real, it's hard to not have that just the fact that I heard it at all kind of shift my perception of a thing. I mean, I study

this stuff and then suddenly I'm like, how, you know, I'm training for a marathon right now and I find it frightening how many moments my day now are signals about runners and what I should do. And I one day I wrote down everything that people were suggesting. And there was like 15 contradictions in every piece of information about a marathon plan. That is so tiring trying to figure out like who do I listen to? I mean that it's a very privileged problem to have, but it's just one example of trying to sort through the noise to actually figure out a direction all of this is incredibly difficult. So, thinking now about the personal the persontoerson side of trust. Um, I grew up in New York City. My dad grew up in the Midwest of the United States. So, a place that's historically certainly more like out outwardly friendly. And so my dad has now lived in New York for 40 years, but he still when we get on like the public bus, if he sees someone reading a book that he's read, he's like, "Wow, great book. What do you think about the book? " And people always kind of assume that like there's some sort of scam there, but there's not. He just is trying to be friendly and outgoing. And I grew up with that. And I saw the real benefits of my dad approaching people with this kind of like inherent trust which is he would have these fun interactions where all of a sudden we're like chatting with someone on the bus or the subway and sometimes like that person later on comes over to our house for dinner and you know it felt like there were all these adventures and also just positive moments that got unlocked through that trust. Um, and I sometimes think about that as one of the like undersold benefits of trusting other people is that you go through the world in a way where you actually do exist in a more positive world just because you believe that it is a more positive world. Yeah

it's a really beautiful way of looking at it and it's actually trust is a two-way thing. It sounds like a really obvious thing to say. Um, and what most people the most common question I'm asked is how do I build trust? And the reason why that question is so interesting and different from your dad is that's about like I want to build trust because I want something from someone else, right? Like it's quite manipulative when you think about it. But what your dad is doing is in those situations you have a trust giver and receiver. And so on the bus when he's like, "Oh, great book. I read that book. " But he's being like a trust giver. And when the other person catches it, they're the receiver. And then they create this loop. And that loop is the basis of all human connection, right? It's it forms a moment of reciprocation. And this is so important to understand that um if we turn inwards and we all retreat to our homes and things become increasingly digitized those very human moments for reciprocation whether it's you do something and someone does something in return or you have that casual interaction they get reduced. If you look at all studies that determine like the number one factor that drives happiness and well-being, it's not money, it's not fame, it's human connection. And for that human connection to form, you have to have those moments of reciprocation. catching loops. And so that's why I think people describe trust as the social glue that really holds things together. Absolutely. Yeah, it really makes sense and it resonates. And um it also makes me think that there are all these little subtle clues that we get in person that tell us that it's okay to trust, you know, like first of all, like if we're talking about this bus example, right? Like there's other people on the bus, it's day, it's lit. Um when someone is saying hello to you, they're standing far enough away that it's not like invading your personal space. There's just all these like trust signals tiny what I'm sorry, you call them trust signals. Yeah, they're called trust signals. So they're cues that you're picking up on. Yes. And it feels like sometimes those trust signals are a lot harder if you're even just talking on the phone or you know certainly if you're typing through a social media app in a comment. It's a lot harder to get all those trust signals to say like oh this person is a safe person or is well-intentioned versus is a aggressive monster or a

robot. Yeah. I mean I even find it hard now just talking on the phone. I mean I know actually I was reading this report that for Gen Z it's a phobia. Speaking live on the phone is a phobia for 70% of that generation. But it is really interesting because what's happened is all these signals that used to be verbal and visual have become nonverbal. So you're like cutting out your pallet. You're cutting out context which is a huge thing with when it comes to trust. like trusting that person on the bus to have an exchange about a book is very different from maybe trusting that person to pick your kids up from school, right? Like context is really important. And again, digitization can flatten that context because you don't have all the environmental cues or relationship cues. It also makes me think that um I have a a one-year-old son and one of the things that has been really interesting after having a kid is there's just this level of um especially in the early months of parenting, it's too hard and it's too all-consuming and you're frazzled from not having sleep for you to put up a front. And so when you talk to another parent who's in that same phase, there's just this level of you both saying like, "Wow, we are in it right now. " And that really does build trust just that it when you talk to somebody who goes like, "Actually, it's perfect. " And um it's not hard at all. You're like, "Okay, that has to be a lie. I don't believe that could possibly be true. " But then the people who share the things that are really hard, there's this immediate kind of solidarity. I felt like, wow, we are both in this battle together. Yeah. And

you're talking what you're talking about is this very close relationship between vulnerability and trust. Um so you're probably familiar with the work of Bnee Brown where you know she describes vulnerability as this like emotional exposure and taking a risk with another person and trust and risk are like brother and sister right like it you need to have risk for trust to be required. So what's happening in those moments is you're sort of taking these micro risks with people and if you think about other moments where someone shares something they've never shared with anyone else like something really deeply personal and you could see I'm not exaggerating they had probably been holding this in for 20 years. Those moments I really take as a privilege because you think that person has picked to place their trust in you above anyone else and you have to hold that very carefully and that's another thing that I worry we're not putting into practice enough because we don't go out enough and we don't connect with people enough. So if we're not good at those micro moments, like how do we actually develop the skills to really be vulnerable with people? And on the flip side of that, like hold those moments like they are real privilege. Something that you do in your work and you've done in this conversation that I really admire, you think about the individual scale, but you also think about the broader systems and the societal pieces that are part of this too that influence it. you know, one of the big examples of a trust shift that you've used in your work before has been, you know, the classic example of like a hotel to an Airbnb. So, it used to be, you know, you trust Marriott or whatever it is. And now then you're staying in someone's house. And there's this big shift that was really new. I'm old enough that there was like a moment where before Airbnb was really big, there was also couch surfing and a lot of people were using couch surfing and it wasn't like at all a fringe thing. It was this moment where most things on the internet didn't involve paying for things. Um, and I had a couple of really amazing experiences where I stayed with someone in a really nice place. They hosted me because they wanted to meet someone and I went to their house because I wanted to have this experience with a local person. And now I think that is much more likely that if I was having that exact same experience, it would be me paying to stay in a person's home and it would be much more formal. I wonder how does that change trust? Because a lot of times when money gets involved, the trust piece drops out a little bit or at least it changes the tenor of what the trust is when I'm paying someone rather than we're just doing it from the goodness of our hearts or curiosity about another person. Yeah, I'd say

there's still trust involved in those situations. So, you have to trust that the way they're describing the place actually meets expectations. Um, you have to trust that it's not fraudulent. You have to trust the insurance policy. There's still layers and layers of trust. What's happening is if you sort of imagine like a trust stack um you know you've got trust in the idea and then other person what we call in the platform. So when you move from couch surfing say to paying for something via Airbnb or whatever platform is that you've kind of moved from the top more to the middle of the stack. So, it's become less relational and more transactional. And so, yeah, it's kind of interesting because the commercialization of trust um is often what allows things to scale because you're putting mechanisms in place that prevent people from doing harm and also that if something goes wrong, there is some kind of social safety net. So it's not necessarily a bad thing to formalize these trust systems. It just takes the dynamics from being purely relational and personal and more transactional. That idea of putting systems in place to make things safer and also, you know, be able to scale. It also makes me think it depends a little bit on our personal identities as well, right? Like it's very different for me to trust as like a straight white man walking through the world, right? I'm at less risk of being harmed or being attacked if I'm walking around at night. It's easier for me to trust that like this is a safe street or place to stay. Um people with other identities, right, certainly have more risk or they have to think about trust in a different way than I do. Yeah. The more

risk that you have, the more trust that you need. So it's not necessarily that you're more trusting, it's that you actually require less trust because there's less risk involved. So the way I define trust is that trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. So in situations like the fires, like the pandemic, where there are lots of unknowns and there's lots of uncertainty, that's when you need the highest levels of trust. But when you know things or you know what the outcome is or there is very little risk, less trust is required. And I think it's really interesting that you've taken that to an identity level and recognizing um and it's, you know, it's not just in our personal lives, but in the workplace for some people to trust it is a higher risk, higher stakes situation. And that can be as simple as the level you're at in a company. It can be to do with your gender. Um, all kinds of things. Um, and even something as simple as saying something in a meeting that might be slightly controversial for one person that requires a much higher level of trust in themselves and others than for other people. So once you start really recognizing and understanding this relationship between trust and risk, it's really helpful because you can start to understand where you hold back and maybe where you worry about taking risk because there isn't enough trust in the situation or the environment or the person holding you that really hits home. I mean just to give a a specific example of that is for myself I have felt that level of trust and risk change a lot even just over this is season five of this podcast and I have felt it change really dramatically where like season 1 I was in a tough financial spot I didn't know that I was necessarily secure I felt pretty replaceable and so when they asked me like will you do an ad for blank I would my answer was yes I will read whatever ad you It could be like, "Would you like to smoke lead cigarettes? " And I'd be like, "I guess I'll say that and I'll try and communicate through my tone that I actually don't think smoking lead cigarettes is good. " But like now when they ask me to do stuff, I feel I have such a deeper level of trust that it's okay for me to really say like I will voice my concerns or objections. I will be like more my full self in positive

ways and negative ways. you very quickly got to the heart of what trust does, which most people don't get to, which it gives you permission. It gives you permission in different ways. So, it gives you the permission to say, "No, no, I don't want to work with that sponsor because they're not aligned with our values. No, I don't want that guest on the show. " Um, so that that's the first thing it's doing. And then the second thing, as you felt the trust level go up, um, you can take more risks. Well, one of the people who works on this show and who does a lot of the helps me with prep, Morgan, we both have friends who sometimes bemoone themselves for saying that they're too trusting. I think especially in romantic relationships, this comes up a lot. Um, is that a thing? Is it possible to be too trusting? And if so, what are some steps that a person who's in that situation can take to make smarter decisions about how they give their trust away? Yeah, I don't think it's

that they're too trusting. I think it's that if you think in a professional context, um when I ask people like what's a bad trust decision that you've made, uh what will often come up is I should never have hired that person. Um or worked with that client. Um they just turned out not to be trustworthy. And then you say, well, how did you make that decision? And they're like, oh my god, I was under so much stress and pressure and I really needed to hire someone, so I did it really quickly. And they're going on intuition, right? It comes back to where we started, right? They're seeing what they want to see. And speed really is the enemy of trust. So, they're placing too much trust in that person too quickly or they don't have enough information to make a good decision about that person. Um, romantic relationships is not You have to ask Esther Pel this question, but I'd imagine what happens is people um, how can I find this? they give a lot of themselves to that person and that person is not ready to give it back in return. So, they've opened up about something or they've been vulnerable in a way um and they don't feel that met. That feels like a breach of trust. And this really ties to something that is really important when it comes to trust is being very clear about expectations. So you fill that trust gap sometimes where in your head those expectations are really clear what you want back from that person. You've never said that out loud and that creates the trust gap that if it's not addressed it just gets wider and then eventually leads to a breakdown of trust. If someone is in charge of an organization and they're thinking about um how they can make their company or their organization be trusted, what's one there's obviously many things, but what's one thing that they should think about? Well, consistency is an easy one like so, uh it's tied to expectations, right? And this happens a lot with customer experiences uh where you know the first moments of interaction there's a lot of investment and then uh the middle is not so great and then maybe they try to impress you at the end and this up down is really bad for trust. Just think about it in the context if you ever stay in a hotel like how much they put in that moment of arrival and then like there's something in departure but sometimes things get up and down in between. So I would really look at those touch points and what does consistency look like because consistency not intensity is what leads to trust. Okay, same question. If you are uh one of the lowest down people at a big company or a big um organization where you don't have the power to you know define the consistency or change big things, how can you still think about your work um and your relationships at professionally through trust? Um, I think it's really learning how to trust up and sideways yourself. Those things are in your control. So, you cannot control how people trust you. But the more you take risks and show other people that you're comfortable taking risks, that trust will come back. And the more you demonstrate that you are very good at empowering others sideways or slightly out the organizations and you're very good at letting go that you are not a micromanager the faster you will accelerate through that organization. Well Rachel Batsman thank you so much for being on the show and thank you Mac the dog. You did really good until right at the end. You did fantastic. Can you hear him woofing? Yeah. Yeah. But you know what? That's great. We I love it. I love that you held it till the end. You held it as long as you possibly could. He did. He held it in. He did so well. So, it's so nice talking to you, Chris. You take care. And please, please do listen to the book. It's made with a lot of love and um I think it generally can help people. So, that is a shameless plug for How to Trust a I really I will second that shameless plug and say that I really strongly recommend it.