You Might Also Like: Revisionist History

Summary

Detailed Summary of "You Might Also Like: Revisionist History"

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Great Detectives Present Dragnet (Old Time Radio)
• Host/Author: Adam Graham
• Description: Host Adam Graham makes his second journey through every episode of Dragnet as well as quite a few bonus episodes and programs.
• Episode: You Might Also Like: Revisionist History
• Release Date: February 1, 2025

Note: The provided transcript appears to be from an episode of Malcolm Gladwell's "Revisionist History" podcast featuring Rachel Botsman, rather than the "Dragnet" podcast. This summary is based on the supplied transcript content.

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1. Introduction to the Guest and Topic

Timestamp: [00:37]

The episode opens with host Malcolm Gladwell introducing Rachel Botsman, a lecturer at Oxford University and a globally recognized expert on trust. Gladwell highlights Botsman's new audiobook, "How to Trust and Be Trusted," setting the stage for an in-depth discussion on the intricacies of trust in human relationships and organizations.

Notable Quote:

• Malcolm Gladwell: "Rachel is a lecturer at Oxford University and a world renowned expert on the topic of trust... she's now sharing these powerful lessons with you in her new audiobook."

2. Rachel Botsman's Exploration of Trust

Timestamp: [02:42]

Rachel Botsman delves into her fascination with trust, describing it as the "social glue" that holds individuals, teams, and societies together. She emphasizes that while trust is inherently intuitive, most people rely too heavily on intuition rather than information, leading to flawed trust decisions, especially in high-stakes situations.

Notable Quotes:

• Rachel Botsman: "It's the force, the social glue, is trust."
• Rachel Botsman: "Most of us trust naturally. It's a very intuitive thing. Most of us do it badly because we rely on intuition and not information."

3. Common Mistakes in Trust Evaluation

Timestamp: [04:29]

Botsman identifies key mistakes people make when evaluating trust, highlighting:

• Speed: Making trust decisions too quickly or under pressure can undermine the quality of trust.
• Intuition Over Information: Favoring gut feelings over factual information often leads to misplaced trust, especially when charisma or confidence are mistaken for capability.

Notable Quotes:

• Rachel Botsman: "Speed is the enemy of trust."
• Rachel Botsman: "We're not really taught how to trust well, how to give our trust to the right people and products and information."

4. The Role and Misconception of Transparency in Building Trust

Timestamp: [06:07]

Botsman critiques the common belief that increased transparency inherently builds trust. She distinguishes between being open (sharing information) and creating a surveillance-like environment (excessive transparency), which can erode trust by fostering control rather than confidence.

Notable Quotes:

• Rachel Botsman: "Transparency in practice can feel like surveillance."
• Rachel Botsman: "Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown."

5. Building High-Trust Teams in Organizations

Timestamp: [09:38]

The conversation shifts to practical strategies for leaders aiming to cultivate high-trust teams. Botsman advises against merely mitigating risks to build trust, arguing that this approach can stifle creativity and tolerance for uncertainty. Instead, she recommends:

• Expanding Capacity for the Unknown: Encouraging teams to embrace uncertainty can enhance innovation.
• Setting Clear Expectations: Defining what is expected within certain boundaries empowers team members to operate confidently without micromanagement.

Notable Quotes:

• Rachel Botsman: "Don't mistake reducing risk for increasing trust."
• Rachel Botsman: "Set clear expectations that allow people to be empowered and to sort of live and work in the unknown."

6. Excerpt from Rachel Botsman's Audiobook

Timestamp: [11:44]

Botsman introduces an excerpt from her audiobook, "How to Trust and Be Trusted," which sets the foundational understanding of trust. She asserts that trust has more definitions than love, making it the most debated sociological concept, and explores how it influences daily decisions and long-term choices.

---

7. Malcolm Gladwell’s Personal Anecdote on Trust

Timestamp: [15:57]

Gladwell shares a personal story about his family's experience with a nanny named Doris, who betrayed their trust in severe ways, including financial fraud and running a drug ring. This narrative serves to illustrate the complexities and potential pitfalls in trust decisions, especially when initial trust signals are misleading.

Notable Quotes:

• Malcolm Gladwell: "The nanny my parents trusted to take care of me and my brother turned out to be very untrustworthy indeed."
• Malcolm Gladwell: "Deciding whom to trust can be pretty complicated."

---

8. The Psychology of Trust Signals and Familiarity

Timestamp: [23:22]

Botsman and Gladwell delve into the psychology behind trust, focusing on how trust signals—such as appearance, demeanor, and superficial similarities—affect our trust decisions. They discuss how familiarity breeds trust, often leading to biases where individuals trust those who resemble or remind them of people they already know.

Notable Quotes:

• Maria Kournikova: "When you're about three months old, you start trusting people who look like your parents more than other people."
• Malcolm Gladwell: "Participants in an experiment were more likely to trust the unknown person when their face was similar to theirs."

9. Intuition vs. Verification in Trust Decisions

Timestamp: [33:15]

The discussion critiques the reliance on gut feelings for trust decisions. Psychologist Maria Kournikova emphasizes that while our instincts can sometimes be correct, they are as often wrong, advocating for verification processes to ensure reliable trust decisions.

Notable Quotes:

• Maria Kournikova: "Our ability to distinguish the two is at about 50-50. So chance."
• Malcolm Gladwell: "Gut feeling is not the decision maker, but a decision driver."

10. Introducing the "Trust Pause" Technique

Timestamp: [36:00]

Gladwell introduces the concept of a "trust pause," a deliberate hesitation designed to evaluate the legitimacy of trust signals before making a decision. This technique involves asking oneself critical questions to assess whether trust is being granted appropriately or if it's being influenced by biased signals.

Steps in a Trust Pause:

1. Where is this confidence coming from?
2. Am I seeing or hearing something I want or need to believe to be true?
3. What information do I still need to make a reliable decision?

Notable Quotes:

• Malcolm Gladwell: "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."
• Maria Kournikova: "Throw your gut out the window. You are relying on people's perception that is most often wrong."

11. Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Timestamp: [39:33]

The episode wraps up with a recap of the four main strategies for improving trust decisions:

1. Be Aware of Trust Signals: Recognize that familiarity heavily influences trust.
2. Avoid Convenience Over Trust: Do not let ease or convenience compromise trust integrity.
3. Reframe Gut Feelings: Use intuition as a guide but not the sole basis for trust decisions.
4. Implement Trust Pauses: Take deliberate moments to assess trustworthiness before making decisions.

Gladwell poses a reflective question to the audience: "How do you get someone else to trust you?" encouraging listeners to consider their role in fostering trustworthiness.

Notable Quotes:

• Malcolm Gladwell: "Trust is a choice. It's yours to give or not."
• Maria Kournikova: "Trust is our default state... because trust is our default state... society exists because of trust."

---

Final Thoughts

This episode of "Revisionist History" adeptly explores the multifaceted nature of trust, blending academic insights with personal narratives to provide listeners with a comprehensive understanding of trust dynamics. Rachel Botsman's expertise, combined with Malcolm Gladwell's storytelling, offers actionable strategies for enhancing trust in both personal and professional spheres. The introduction of concepts like trust signals and the trust pause equips listeners with the tools necessary to navigate and improve their trust decisions in an increasingly complex world.

Transcript

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Foreign.

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[Rachel Botsman]

From sponsor Intuit TurboTax Taxes was feeling stuck trying to squeeze in getting tax help but never having enough time. Now Taxes is getting a TurboTax expert who does your taxes from start to finish. While they work on your taxes, you get real time updates on their progress and you get the most money back guaranteed. Get an Expert now on TurboTax.com only available with TurboTax Live full service real time updates only in iOS mobile app. See guarantee [e-mail] guarantees as many of you know, I've been on tour across the US Promoting my new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. I found a great new restaurant when we stopped in Nashville, walked all around San Francisco and stopped by the Texas Book Festival in Austin. If you travel as much as I do, you might want to consider hosting your home on Airbnb. Whether it's your whole home for a few nights or an extra bedroom for a few weeks, hosting on Airbnb is an easy and smart way to make some extra money. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how [e-mail] host 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 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 sells and negotiation. 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. There wasn't a lot in between which I found fascinating.

Yeah. And 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. Most of us trust naturally. It's a very intuitive thing. Most of us do it badly because we rely on intuition and not information. And 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 sort of 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 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 the study of, 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 they, you know, whether this is whether this teacher is good or whether they should trust this information or they, they never get beyond the initial question of do I like this person?

The snap judgment.

Yeah, the snap judgment. Never. They never transcend the snap judgment.

And sometimes it's not even like it's, does this person feel familiar? Like 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? Yes, I think it's one of the biggest myths around trust that needs blowing up. So. Well, transparency. I always think of disclosing information.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Right.

[Rachel Botsman]

So disclosing lots of information so you understand why something is happening or good transparency is 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. Um, you'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, ooh, that person's being more open, or I have more visibility into that situation and therefore more control.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But.

[Rachel Botsman]

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 gathering 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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's.

[Rachel Botsman]

That's being open. But if equally, 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's 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 promise to be transparent. So there's this difference between being open and being visible and promising for transparency.

Yeah. What are. So what are. If you do just put this 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 risk 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. Want another one?

Give me another one. Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I mean, that one's harder to.

[Rachel Botsman]

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 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. Hearing what follows.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Rachel Botsman]

I hope it. I really hope it changes the way people think about trust. That's. That's the reason for doing this.

Yeah. And the name of your book is.

It's called how to Trust and Be 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. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Welcome to the new year, everyone. It's a time when we're all supposed to turn over a new page, follow up on our resolutions. In my case, believe it or not, is to start taking Pilates classes. But you know what? I should be thinking bigger than that. All of us should. From time to time, we should take the opportunity to think about the story of our lives. Do we know what we want? Are we happy with who we are? I know those sound like ambitious questions, but there are people whose job it is to help you with those big, ambitious questions. Therapists. It's helpful for learning positive coping skills on how to set boundaries. It empowers you to be the best version of yourself. It isn't just for those who've experienced major trauma. BetterHelp is fully online, making therapy affordable and convenient, serving over 5 million people worldwide. Write your story with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com gladwell to get 10% off your first month. That's better. Help.com gladwell banking with capital One helps.

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

Chapter 1 How to give your trust to the right people.

[Rachel Botsman]

Have.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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 firsthand about bad trust decisions because when I was five years old, my parents put their trust in the wrong person. A nanny. Hello, dad.

[Rachel Botsman's Father]

Hi, Rach. Just a sec.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I called my dad to ask him.

[Rachel Botsman]

More about it, so I'm calling about the nanny.

[Rachel Botsman's Father]

Mm.

[Rachel Botsman]

You know which nanny?

[Rachel Botsman's Father]

I think I know which nanny and.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Nanny are called Doris. It's hard to ever forget Doris.

[Rachel Botsman]

What was your first impression of her? What do you remember when she came into the house?

[Rachel Botsman's Father]

She was very unimpressive, which is quite a good feature in an au pair.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Unimpressive?

[Rachel Botsman]

What do you mean by that?

[Rachel Botsman's Father]

Well, she was a bland person. It was just inconceivable that somebody like that could do those sorts of things.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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.

[Rachel Botsman]

Really.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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 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 10 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 the trust giver and the trust receiver. Lets 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, trusted 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 demeanour, 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 behavior 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.

[Maria Kournikova]

When you're about three months old, you start trusting people who look like your parents more than other people.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Maria Kournikova 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.

[Maria Kournikova]

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. Time as well. Oh, you know, you're. 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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There's a fascinating study on the link between trust and familiarity. The study, done by a professor named Lisa D. Bryan 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 coloured 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. Be. And even when some major red flags started popping up, my parents let the familiar trust signals override their better judgment. 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.

[Rachel Botsman]

And.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And Doris's mum said, but Uncle Charlie is just fine. Doris must be confused.

[Rachel Botsman's Father]

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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But you know, even after Uncle Charlie.

[Rachel Botsman]

She came with us on a holiday to Marbella.

[Rachel Botsman's Father]

Well, that was very convenient. Yes.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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.

[Rachel Botsman's Father]

I did question her and she told me that she'd found the money under a tree in the park.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And we still didn't get rid of her.

[Rachel Botsman's Father]

No. And when I found more money in her room, she said she'd gone back to the same tree.

[Rachel Botsman]

Same tree.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I want to know where this tree is. Dead 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.

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[Rachel Botsman]

You're in the garage, hands covered in grease, just finished tuning up your engine with a part you found on ebay, and you realize, you know what? I could also use some new brakes. So where do you go next? Back to ebay. You can find anything there. It's unreal. Wipers, headlights, even cold air intakes. It's all there. And you've got ebay guaranteed fit. You order a part and if it doesn't fit, send it back. Simple as that. Look, DIY fixes can be major. Doesn't matter if it's just maintenance or a major mod, you got it. Especially when things are guaranteed to fit. So when you dive into your next car project, start with ebay. All the parts you need at prices you'll love. Guaranteed to fit every time. Ebay Things People Love I imagine the.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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 into? Two, am I trusting this person out of convenience? And three, am I making this trust as 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 Kournikova, the expert in distrust, there's a common saying about this that's a real pet peeve, trusting your gut.

[Maria Kournikova]

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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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 maker, 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 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.

[Maria Kournikova]

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 2 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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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.

[Maria Kournikova]

Our default has to be trust, right? 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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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 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 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 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.

[Rachel Botsman's Father]

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?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

A bit.

[Rachel Botsman's Father]

But I think that what I've gained from trusting people is more than if I've been constantly looking over my shoulder or not trusting people. And by and large, that worked out okay.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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.

[Maria Kournikova]

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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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 J. 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.

[Maria Kournikova]

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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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. One, be aware of the trust signals you're tuning into by remembering that we tend to trust what's familiar. Two, recognize when you're allowing convenience to trump trust. Three, reframe your gap 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 two. How do you get someone else to trust you?

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[Rachel Botsman]

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