By: MSGL

MSGL — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:06:42 +0000

Siddhartha You bring up several interesting points that occur to me. The first part of your comment argues for the subjectivity of our interpretation of reality. This was a fundamental aspect of Nietzsche's metaphysics, and he once famously said that in order to understand the philosophy, you have to know the philosopher. In other words, one's philosophy cannot stand alone apart from the uniqueness of one's own life experiences. And the corollary to that is obviously that our own experience is understood and interpreted through the lens of our own culture, past, traditions and expereince. Your comments address the implication of that observation to the idea of trust. Your last point is indeed intriquing – can we 'trust' someone we don't understand? I wonder. I think on some basic human level we can 'understand' everyone, or at least most people. We all have some basic fundamental human needs that drive all of us. This was one of the points of the Rachels article where he sought a couple of universal ethical principles that would address these needs. I feel like I've found a bond with people with whom I could barely communicate verbally, but with whom I was able to communicate or trust on some other level. We didn't really 'understand' one another but were able to trust one another nonetheless. (I might even say that that may characterize my marriage). I think the connection of trust with communication would also be fun to explore. I realized as I wrote that post on Trust that it would beg a lot of questions, and I resisted the temptation to build in too many caveats. I did and still do like the simplicity of the simple diad of "Be Trustworthy – Be careful – but not TOO careful." Thanks for your comments – I'm excited to see that at least one person read my thoughts! Bob

By: Siddhartha Herdegen

Siddhartha Herdegen — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:03:52 +0000

Bob,Great post; really gets you thinking.Trust is one of those concepts that by our initial, intuitive definition appears clear enough but under analysis reveals itself to be much more complex.Off the top of my head for example I can think of two distinct definitions for trust: 1. trust a person will be honest, that is, what they say is true, and 2. trust a person will have integrity, that is, do what is right.The accuracy of definition 1 is obscured by differing perceptions. We have all had the experience of going to dinner with someone and later finding they had a completely different perception of the experience.Some differences are to be expected; you thought the food was okay, they thought it was delectable. We all recognize variation in taste. But what about more objective things? Was the wait staff pleasant or rude, the service timely or slow, the bill reasonable or outrageous?You may even disagree on things that can be measured. How long did it take to get the food, was it fifteen minutes or forty-five? What was the bill, seventy-five dollars or ninety-five?When your dining companion later recounts how the food was delicious, but the service slow and the waiter rude it may cause us to distrust them. We have a tendency to see people as dishonest when their description differs from our own perceptions?Clearly it is a trivial example but the point is this; every interaction is mentally recorded based on our perceptions and those perceptions differ from person to person. It’s true of a dining experience and it’s true of a business meeting. When we trust others it is usually because we have had experiences in which our perceptions coincidently turned out to be the same.So really, all definition 1 says is we subjectively interpret situations the same way as the person we “trust”.Pretty straightforward. I think the more difficult question is definition 2.A working definition of integrity is that a person will do what they said they’d do, or what we expect them to do, unless circumstance arise which preclude it. But here again there is a perception problem. Not in interpreting what happened, but in our expectations of what will happen.Do we trust they will do what we think they should do or what they think they should do? Put another way, do we think they will act according to our principles or their own?Most instances of mistrust concerning behavior are due to assuming the other person would act according to our principles and when they don’t we think they can’t be trusted. In reality, if we understood their values we would see they were being true to their own moral compass.If we look at these two values, honesty and integrity, we can say the following:1. a person’s apparent honesty increases with their predisposition to perceive things the same way we do, and,2. a person’s apparent integrity increases with their natural ability to live up to our expectations.This leads me to conclude we will generally have more trust in people with similar cultural, social and religious backgrounds or people whose perceptions and values are similar to our own.We can probably all think of examples that defy this rather pedestrian observation; a person from a dissimilar culture with whom we shared a close bond of trust perhaps, or a person we initially distrusted who later gained our trust. I would argue this is the exception rather than the norm and most likely to happen after a period of shared experiences revealed a similarity of perception and revealed similar moral values.Still, it will be the coincidental convergence of perceptions and values that determine our level of trust. So in the end the term trust is simply a proxy for understanding. It is in understanding others we feel comfortable with them.If we don’t understand someone we can’t trust them.Siddhartha

Comments on: TRUST – Mother Theresa and Machiavelli

By: MSGL

By: Siddhartha Herdegen