intrust

It is not easy to find an uncontentious definition of trust. Here is a very short one: Trust is risk upon belief. To trust, is to believe in some outcome of events, and having dependence upon that outcome. You may believe that your waiter has washed his hands recently, your bank is solvent, the bridge you’re crossing wont crumble, or that the sun will also rise tomorrow, and in each case your belief belays your actions: You trust in order to do.

You may also believe that Shakespeare was a woman, that there are many Chinese in China, or that James likes oysters, but unless you are taking some sort of stake dependent on the validity of these statements, you would not use the word “trust” when making them.

Neither do you say “I trust” the dice will come up bull eyes or France win the World Cup, because, even if you are betting something on these outcomes, they are considered within the realm of chance. The risk taken in trusting is due to incomplete knowledge of the true outcome of past and future causal events: Gambling on luck and good fortune, fall outside this categorization.

At least semantically. In truth, we readily include fact, probability and randomness in our risk taking assessments – in a, often, hopelessly inseparable mix. But when it comes to choice of words, we say we trust our husbands to be faithful, while we don’t say we trust our lottery tickets to be winners.

Grossly understated trust makes life easier. Without the ability to make absolute full-turn decisions based on incomplete knowledge, the human race would have evolved no further than potatoes. "No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty," wrote George Eliot. The necessary incompleteness of knowledge can only be navigated by an exposure to risk and the quantification of factual uncertainty into semi-fictional truths.

Trust gives us leverage. Knowing a little, we risk even more: Or, knowing much, we risk less. As knowledge comes at a cost, trusting someone or something with scant grounds for doing so, is a cheap proposition with unlikely prospects for success, albeit high returns when the gods do smile. Inversely, while maximizing our trust of someone or something might increase the odds for a positive outcome for some transaction, it could mean a poor return on our investment. Any speculator looking simultaneously for a safe ride and high dividends will soon learn that there is no such animal. Trust based on knowledge comes at a premium. In the words of Oliver Williamson: Trust is a benefits / risks balance. The goal is to maximize profits and to minimize costs. And trust comes at a cost.

Is all trust knowledge based? Absolutely not – a great deal of trust is flippant, quite irrational, with little knowledge to back it up at all. But that doesn’t mean it don’t work – on the contrary, that which we sometimes call emotional or psychological trust is a cornerstone of society.

The sociologist Gregory Bateson has written “No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.” But just how does this relegation of that which can be dealt with at unconscious levels occur? On a physiological level, a great deal of our bodily functions are removed from our sphere of conciousness, we don’t have to consciously make our hearts beat or our kidneys do whatever it is that kidneys do. Further, we learn skills that becomes second-nature to us , such as walking and chewing gum. We categorize relations and concepts. Herbert Simon first advanced the concept of ’bounded’ or limited rationality.

Because of limits in human mental capacity, the mind cannot cope directly with the complexity of the world. Rather, we construct a simplified mental model of reality and then work with this model.¹

But what about larger organisms such as societies? Does society construct a mental model of reality in order to cope with complexity? Society does create libraries of objectified knowledge – facts, and we formulate laws, and institutionalize the ownership of property, but further along side our facts and laws, we accumulate an informal culture of morals, norms and customs, a simplification of life which facilitates trust.

// posted by Greg FitzPatrick @ 11:32