Trust and distrust
Opposites or something else?
When you meet someone for the first time, do you trust them straightaway? Think about it carefully. Suppose that you’re being introduced to a new colleague at work or school. We’ll call them ‘Bob’. Bob looks normal. They don’t look especially interesting or dull. They’ve yet to say anything — you are right at the point of being introduced. The person doing the introducing hasn’t signaled anything good or bad about Bob. Do you trust Bob?
Plausibly, in that moment, no. You don’t trust Bob. After all, Bob has done nothing to win you over. Although they seem pretty normal — they present as ordinary — you certainly wouldn’t be thinking about inviting them into your home just yet, and you wouldn’t be about to ask them to care for your children or pets. Bob may be a perfectly nice person, but for all you know at this point, Bob could in fact be an awful individual; exploitative, manipulative, a liar and a thief. So, trusting Bob right away, before Bob has even said a word, well, that feels like it’s a bit too much.
However, it would also seem a bit odd to say that you distrust Bob. For, just as Bob has done nothing to win you over, Bob also hasn’t given you any reason to suspect them of nefarious behaviour. They haven’t said anything at all, yet, and we haven’t been told anything about them; we can’t know whether they’re a lovely and upstanding member of the community, or a scoundrel — the kind of person to take the last chocolate from the Christmas selection box without telling anyone (I’m naming no names). So although we don’t trust Bob, we also probably don’t distrust them, either.
It would certainly seem pretty sensible for us to take the position, on meeting them, that we neither trust nor distrust Bob.
Trust and Distrust unpacked
Now it’s sometimes tempting to think of distrust as being the absence of trust. Indeed, when writing this I had a look at some dictionary definitions to get a feel for what they say. As I suspected, the Cambridge Dictionarytreats distrust as, ‘the feeling of not trusting someone or something’. But, as we’ve just seen with our discussion of Bob, that can’t be quite right. The concept of distrust isn’t just the same thing as the concept of there not being trust. We said that when we first meet Bob we don’t trust Bob, but that this didn’t mean that we automatically distrusted him, either.
Drawing on some of the philosophical literature, the way that we might try to think of trust and distrust is, not as opposites, but as related but different concepts — as contraries rather than opposites (Jones, 1995: 15). To illustrate, we can think of opposites being two sides of a binary — like two sides of a coin — where contraries are a bit more complex. In the case of trust, some researchers have instead claimed that we might instead see trust as akin to a different place on the same spectrum of ideas. For instance, we might have trust on the left of the spectrum, an absence of both trust and distrust in the middle, and active distrust away to the right of the spectrum. For those interested, this ‘spectrum’ presentation is used in papers like this one, by Abiodun (2024).
If that’s right, then clearly trust cannot be the opposite of distrust. An opposite here is just the other option in a binary choice. Here, we don’t have a binary choice. Instead, we have three options: trust, distrust and neither.
So how should we understand trust and distrust?
If we’re then interested in understanding the nature of trust, distrust and this middle category of ‘neither’, then we can start to dig into the philosophy. There’s a fantastic (2014) paper by Katherine Hawley that I really recommend for those of you wanting to take this further.
Hawley’s (2014: 10) position is that trust and distrust come to this:
To trust someone to do something is to believe that she has a commitment to doing it, and to rely upon her to meet that commitment.
To distrust someone to do something is to believe that she has a commitment to doing it, and yet not rely upon her to meet that commitment.
We can illustrate.
Suppose that I trust my wife to leave me the last of the Christmas chocolates (I know, I know — but stick with me). On Hawley’s account, that means that I believe that my wife has a commitment to saving me the last of the Christmas chocolates (perhaps she promised to) and I also rely upon her to save them for me — I don’t go and purchase any other chocolates, I might pass up other festive snacks that are offered to me, and so on.
Similarly, if I make the (far more sensible) decision to distrust my wife to save me the last of the Christmas chocolates, then I still believe that she has the commitment to me to save those chocolates — she’s still made the promise — but I don’t rely upon her to meet that promise. Because I think she’s an unreliable chocolate-saver, I decide to make other plans. If only…
And, of course, if I don’t believe that my wife has any commitments to me, then I can’t be said to either trust or to distrust her. At least, so goes Hawley’s account.
How does this help us with Bob?
If we think back to our earlier example, involving Bob, we wanted to say that on meeting Bob, we neither trusted nor distrusted them. According to Hawley’s account, it’s now easy to see why that would be. On first meeting someone, we don’t normally think that they’ve made any commitments to us.
For instance, Bob hasn’t promised to care for our children, look after our pets, or even to just be kind to us. No commitments have been made. And if there are no commitments, then there is no trust and no distrust. Hawley’s account of trust and distrust thus gives us a useful insight into the case of Bob.
But whilst that’s all very well, it only shows us so much. After all, this is just a little thought experiment involving a made up character I called Bob. It isn’t immediately obvious how we can use this to help us to navigate the world around us.
How does this help beyond Bob?
The key thing to focus upon is the importance of commitments and our track record. For instance, if you intentionally or unintentionally give someone the impression that you’ll save them Christmas chocolates, then they will make a decision as to whether to trust you, or not. Your past behaviour here will probably determine what they decide. If you’ve typically saved chocolates, they’ll trust you — but likely not, if you haven’t.
And this generalises. If you take on commitments then people will take a position on whether to trust you. If you take on too many commitments, and thereby fail to meet them, people will likely form the view that you’re to be distrusted. After all, you’ve got a bad track record.
Equally, if you don’t take on any commitments, you don’t allow people to see whether or not you can be trusted. In this case, you’d have no kind of track record at all. What seems to be needed, then, is taking-on of appropriatecommitments and then ensuring that you have a good track record of carrying them out. That looks to be the route to avoiding distrust and a lack of trust, and building trust. And that was the desirable outcome we started with.
Conclusion
At the root of a lot of our thinking about trust is a desire to be trusted. Being trusted is a good thing to want and it’s a powerful tool once we have someone’s trust. We need to recognise that, by and large, we start from a position of neither trust nor distrust. What we need to do from there is take on the right commitments, and behave in the right kinds of way. That is our lesson from Bob and Hawley — though I’m still making plans for any upcoming Christmas chocolates.
References
Abiodun, N. (2024), “Trust and distrust in safety leadership: Qualities of importance.” Safety Science, 176, 106553.
Hawley, K. (2014), “Trust, Distrust and Commitment.” Noûs, 48: 1–20.
Jones, K. (1996), “Trust as an Affective Attitude.” Ethics, 107: 4–25.