We Want to Trust – Sometimes Too Easily

Trust is an essential element in all good relationships, both personal and business. But, sometimes we are too willing to do so. From a post on The Baseline Scenario:

Free Exchange has Anthony Gottlieb’s recollections of interviewing Bernie Madoff about financial regulation:

“At the time he came across merely as calm, strikingly rational, devoid of ego, and the last person you would expect to make your wealth vanish. I certainly would have trusted him with my money. I cannot say the same of other financial superstars I interviewed. . . . Perhaps it is the most confidence-inspiring ones that you have to look out for.”

I couldn’t agree more. We human beings have this completely misplaced confidence in our ability to judge people by “looking them in the eye.” I recall reading about one study (sorry, I don’t remember anything else about it) which showed that hiring managers were more likely to make good hires by selecting solely on the basis of resumes than by interviewing people - because using resumes is completely objective, while interviews allow you to interject your own erroneous beliefs. (I do believe that if you use interviews well - that is, to obtain factual information, like how well someone can actually write a computer program - you can do better than just using resumes; but maybe I’m just fooling myself.)

I think differentiating “strong situations” and “weak situations” sheds some light on where we go wrong. A strong situation is one in which environmental cues are so strong and widely known that everyone behaves in a consistent way (for example, members of a particular faith know how to act at a wedding or funeral conducted at their house of worship). Weak situations are situations with weak environmental cues which are not widely known (for example, a new employee will probably not know the expected behavior at the company Christmas party).

To loop back to the excerpt above, interviews with a journalist or for a job are about as strong a situation as you can get. You are kidding yourself if you think conduct in such situations is representative of how a person might act in a less structured situation.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The ultimate measure of a person is not where they stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where they stand in times of challenge and controversy.” Until you have witnessed someone’s behavior in a difficult or ambiguous situation you don’t have a good basis for a decision to trust them.

You can find a further discussion of strong and weak situations in Personality and Organizations by Benjamin Schneider et. al. A less academic discussion of how situations influence personality is in The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo.