Truth / Trust

A few evenings ago, I was reviewing my black book – a practice that has become increasingly frequent in my quest for insight. From the myriad entries that have been appended over the years, a striking pattern emerges: virtually all the records follow one of two central threads. Breaches of trust and obfuscation of truth. With respect to qualities that separate wheat from chaff, there is nothing of more critical importance than integrity and fidelity.

The ensuing analysis will present something of a brief historical perspective on truth and trust, interspersed with modern comparisons and a reflective appraisal of why they are becoming increasingly scarce qualities to find.

Trust: A Crisis of Confidence

Historically, there was once a time when an utterance could be made “in confidence” to a close acquaintance without fear the words would somehow escape beyond that person. The premise was that to offer something “in confidence” was akin to the bestowing of great privilege because it explicitly involves a placement of trust and the divulger is willingly placing themselves in a vulnerable position. Should the person exploit this vulnerability by sharing the information, the divulger stands to be wounded.

Trust once held enormous weight in all types of dealings, and the maintenance of confidence was seen as a virtuous quality – so much so that breaching confidence was quite uncommon for it looked bad on the informant who would be labelled a traitor and his ability to garner favour and trust in the future hindered. In the ages of courts and conquerors, reputational damage was an overriding consideration. Breaching the wrong person’s trust would put one at significant risk of casualty and was often adequate grounds for execution, be it fairly or otherwise.

In contemporary society however, it is no longer possible to selectively divulge information as the institution of confidence has since lost much of its bindingness. Should you reveal something sensitive, about yourself: your situation, your aspirations, your private thoughts, et cetera, there is almost a guarantee that the information will be transmitted in breach of confidence in some form; almost routinely. This is precisely why it is unwise to share anything that one wouldn’t hire someone on a soapbox to promulgate in the public domain. Breaches of trust are an exceedingly common prevalence.

Ostensibly, there are two reasons for this, the first being the ease of propagation. Given the speed, reach, frequency and depth of modern channels of communication, an email can be distributed to a thousand recipients in the blink of an eye and a photograph made accessible to anyone connected to its subject on a social networking site. As uptake of these channels has risen dramatically, people are paying progressively less attention to what they are utilising them for, and as a direct consequence, the line between private and public information is rapidly blurring.

By far the more influential reason however, is the status imperative. In our unrelenting quest for status, information is currency, and we are all in the business of money laundering. Conceivably, we can liken the concept to a bank. Each person we are connected with holds a deposit account with us. Every time a person trusts us with information – be it a secret, or some private pejorative opinion about someone else, they are placing a deposit in their account. Being a bank however, we seek to accumulate profit, so we siphon from these accounts to fund our status-garnering operation, which often involves transferring it to another account, one belonging to a ‘customer’ who’s more ‘valuable’ to us. Let’s take a hypothetical example. You’ve just had a colleague at work confide in you that they’d been appropriating stationery. Further, you know that (a) your boss is borderline fanatic about office supply expenditure and (b) there is a promotion coming up. Putting two and two together, the course of action is obvious. Self-interest dictates you breach your colleagues trust, reveal the petty thievery, and gain status points with the boss in doing so, increasing the probability that you’ll be promoted. Note the skewness between what the colleague stands to lose and what you stand to gain via your decision to rat them out. Self-interest is a motivation so powerful it begets astronomical decisional bias.

What is effectively happening in the example is a Gerrymandering of sorts, taking from one account and putting it in another account you stand to gain more from. Setting the obvious morality issue aside; as far as trust goes, we have willingly breached it for our own selfish purposes. Had we valued our colleague’s job more than a better prospect for promotion, trust would not have been breached, again, ex-morality and ceteris paribus.

In the context of human interaction, this common practice is effectively a play for social power, though we, its practitioners, are rarely aware of the fact. One of the ways people ingratiate is by revealing information. Think back to the last time someone shared some delicate opinion regarding a third person with you. Immediately, your reaction is to warm toward them because they have just told you something in confidence and taken a risk by placing their trust in you. As the law of reciprocal action necessitates: they have trusted you, thus you are more likely to trust them.

Feeling trusted by the people around us is positive to our esteem, and this often obscures the reality. If Brutus secretly confides in you something about Caesar at personal risk to his own reputation, you automatically connect this to Brutus being open with you, let your guard down and your suspicion of Brutus diminishes.

Now, the reversal is that the phenomenon of information sharing is iterative in nature. To illustrate, let’s say one slightly overcast day you’re having a conversation with your acquaintance, Brutus. If during this exchange, Brutus makes covert remarks about other people to you, what’s to say he doesn’t make covert remarks about you to other people? Exactly. Logically, this is the only possible conclusion to be drawn as it runs parallel to the imperative of accumulating social power. Where it suits one’s purpose or self-interest, they will use information indiscriminately to garner trust and affinity, even at cost to their own integrity.

Simplified, the key takeaway is that anyone who bitches about their friends to you probably bitches about you to their friends. Anyone who divulges someone else’s secrets to you probably divulges your secrets to someone else. Such is the duplicitously circuitous nature of trust.

Truth: An Unobserved Virtue

Closely related to trust is the notion of truth. In a sense, truth is one of the pillars upon which trust is built. Theoretically, truth should be a binary concept, as its definitional absolutes are as clear as black and white: to one side there is truth, and to the other, lies.

But this is the real world, and carrying the concept to humanity necessitates the full tonal gamut of grey. As surely as the sun rises in the East, people lie – no human is immune to the propensity. At this point we must make a distinction between the shades of grey or differing degrees of truth. Truth, partial truth, hiding the truth, bending truth, and outright lying, with integrity successively deteriorating.

The inherent difficulty with truth is that there is no way to implicitly identify it – empirical evidence pegs both CIA interrogators and psychologists with a circa 67% hit-rate at picking up fabrications; not definitive by any stretch of the imagination. Sometimes it is quite easy to tell if someone is lying by reading subtle cues in body language, expression and voice, though more often than not, it’s a flip of the coin at best. Given truthfulness is a direct measure of integrity, perhaps the central measure of a person’s worth, the question of how to measure it goes begging.

All is not lost, as truth can be tested horizontally and retrospectively. In the first sense, we can simply enquire with a second person party to the information in question. Let’s say I walk into a bar and attempt to chat-up a lady. She responds to my advances with a “sorry, I’ve got a boyfriend.”

Later that evening, I spot her (less defensive) friend sitting at the bar, buy her a glass of expensive champagne and start engaging in casual conversation. During the course of the conversation, after demonstrating some measure of high value, and directing clear interest at her, I then innocently prompt with “my colleague over there [gesture at wingman] wants to introduce himself to your friend, but he’s too shy…is she single?” Evidently, this eliminates my chances with the first lady, but it there is a high likelihood it will confirm the veracity of whether or not she has a boyfriend. In addendum, if she were telling the truth, there would be no loss, and if she were lying, any self-respecting gentleman wouldn’t want anything to do with her in any case, so the outcome is positive either way.

With respect to the second method, retrospective testing; a fitting example is a question asked at two different points in time, perhaps in a slightly different way or context, but to which a truthful answer should be consistent. False excuses for a letdown are often presented with a snap fabrication, requiring little or no cognitive effort. Weeks, even days later, a well camouflaged query about the reason for the letdown will often effect an inconsistent answer (different excuse) or a discernible response latency (reflecting the cognitive effort required to recall the lie). In both cases a lie is evident. A response consistent with the previous made without hesitation or signal indicates truth or exceptional deceptive ability. Other methods of differentiating truth from lie operate on a similar premise: the liar must possess impeccable memory to keep track of their lies.

Where the truth in question has potentially adverse consequences, people will tend to dodge around it. In the case of the bar anecdote above, the lady’s lie about her having a boyfriend is incentivised by the expected adverse outcome if she tells the truth – that is, enduring an insufferable deluge of jibber-jabber from another chump who’s probably just trying to get into her pants. In this case self-interest is the overarching factor behind the lie, but where the adverse consequence is hurting someone we care about, the motivation can also be considerate in something of a roundabout and paradoxical way.

Integrity in the form of truthfulness is becoming scarcer because we live in a suspicious and surreptitious world where lying and cheating are the dominant strategies, casting long shadows over truth and honesty. The inherent dominance exists as lying is more conducive to manipulation with the end of self-interest in mind. Put simply, the truth is explicit and will thus tend to have one, often consistent effect/reaction, be it favourable or otherwise. By contrast, a lie can be sculpted to achieve any number of desired effects/reactions. A lie gives us bountiful scope to further our own self interest, whereas the truth does not. The self-serving nature of the human beast is what compels people to lie.

What often amuses me is the propensity of intelligent people to believe other people do not notice subtle inconsistencies and small flaws in patterns of logic that bear minute yet observable revelation to a lie. In such cases an inversion can be put into effect by appearing to believe the lie. Just as when a person breaches trust; without even realising it, they are in fact making a relative value judgement. With trust, this is between the subject (lower value) of the information and the recipient (higher value), and with truth it is between you (lower value) and their self-interest (higher value).

Appearing to believe the lie has two key benefits: it allays the risk of a confrontation, and affords a valuable insight into the person’s character – knowing their nature, and that they value their self-interest over their integrity makes it less likely you’ll trust them unwittingly and so offers a measure of protection from appropriation. Lying is a calculated risk where one trades off the benefit of being believed against putting one’s reputation and integrity in jeopardy. Play with fire and you are liable to get burned.

*

There is no such thing as a lie issued obsequiously, to believe otherwise is a delusion. A matter of personal opinion, I maintain that being beneficiary of a truth, irrespective of how damaging it may be, is always better than to be lied to. Feigned truth is one of the most pervasive conceivable insults to intelligence. By the same token, breaches of trust with even the slightest of oblique intents are not tolerable acts. Iniquity is the same from all angles.

We assess the people around us on innumerable metrics, often based on external and surface characteristics and appearances that can be manufactured. In the long term, a reliance upon such measure will lead to incorrect conclusions and the adverse consequences that entail them.

Truth and trust, the respective modi operandi of integrity and fidelity are among the most accurate indications of worth when it comes to evaluating a person’s value. Where they can be calculated correctly, their accuracy is almost unwavering. Perusing the pages of the black book thus far, I have yet to find evidence proving otherwise.

~ by X on January 23, 2008.