Trust below zero: Why it's easier to maintain trust than fix it
Trust as a survival tactic
“I trusted her, Mommy. She broke my trust.” These words, spoken by my 9-year-old, were inevitable … and they still broke my heart.
At some point in childhood, an adult breaks our trust. It happens to us all. But even though it’s a natural part of our development to realize that grownups aren’t perfect, it still hurts.
In the conversation that followed, I pointed out to my daughter that this is why trust is so important to me, and why our family motto is “We do the right thing, even when it’s hard.” Trust is how we survive. We humans are communal creatures, and we need to know our people have our backs. When trust is broken, it’s more than an inconvenience, it puts us at risk. Even today, when we are no longer hunter-gatherers, trusting each other is how we stay safe.
My daughter didn’t feel safe anymore in that environment — and I couldn’t fix it.
In the research I’ve done into trust, I’ve found that it breaks down into three elements: competence, integrity and connection.
When one of those three elements is missing or broken, trust cannot happen.
And breaking one of those elements can break the others.
In the case of the adult who broke my daughter’s trust, it was an integrity violation, which subsequently broke the connection she had with this person.
Have you ever had a friendship end for no good reason? Connection is broken, and it affects how you perceive the ex-friend’s integrity.
Have you ever bought a product from a really clever salesperson, only to have it not work right — and you can’t get any kind of customer support? Competence is broken, and integrity instantly follows.
We’re human, though, right? We make mistakes. Yes, but, once trust is broken, it’s incredibly hard to fix. And for an individual or organization who is communicating with an audience, broken trust has a ripple effect. When you break one audience member’s trust, they share that experience with others — and the trust violation ripples outward. Now you have to repair trust with not just the one person, but everyone who has heard their story.
Frankly, it’s easier just to maintain trust.
As trust researchers frequently find in their studies, when trust is broken, we don’t start over at zero. When trust is broken, we’re starting from below-zero trust. Whatever you did to build trust with your audience before the violation, it’s going to take a lot more to repair it. And sometimes repair is impossible.
Sharing your knowledge, keeping your word, putting effort into building relationships with the people you want to reach — it takes work. Yet it’s effort that will save you pain and much more effort in the future.