It’s easy to look around at the stupid-seeming things that other people believe (e.g., people who join harmful cults, get scammed by a con artist, become vocal evangelists for a placebo treatment, or jump on the hype train of some outrageous new bubble) and wonder: “How on earth can they be so foolish?”
The answer, a lot of times, is simply the trust they have in someone else.
In other words, maybe if you were to evaluate an idea yourself, you would see it as foolish, false, or dangerous. But, instead, if someone you trust tells you that the idea is the next big thing, or that it will change your life, make you rich, or solve a problem that you desperately want solved, then you find yourself in a predicament. You can either believe:
- That this impressive person whom you deeply trust is deceiving you (whether accidentally or not), or
- That this impressive person whom you trust is right — and your life will be way better because of it!
What’s more, there are a lot of factors that can impact how much we trust someone that don’t always correlate with them actually being trustworthy, such as:
- Credentials — when relevant to the topic of discussion, credential can be helpful indicators, but just because someone has a Ph.D. in one field doesn’t mean you can trust them in other areas.
- How someone looks — if someone is immaculately dressed, imposingly tall, or unusually attractive, it can shape our view of what they tell us.
- Charisma — some people have a personality that makes us want to believe them, but this doesn’t mean that what they are saying is accurate.
- Liking — the more we like someone, the more amenable we may be to what they tell us.
- Authority — if someone appears to be an authority on a topic, or they seem to get respect from others we respect, we may assume that they must be giving us accurate information, even though this isn’t always the case.
- Persuasiveness — some people are simply good persuaders — and so we may believe them merely because of this ability, rather than because what they are saying is true.
- Ties — if someone is a family member, or part of our community, or a friend of a close friend, or simply similar to us, we may be more prone to believe what they tell us.
Although the effect of believing something due to trust often happens when just one person we trust causes us to believe in something, the effect is magnified when more people around us believe. Being recruited into a harmful cult by a trusted friend can be difficult, but leaving a cult — at which point all of our close friends are believers — is far more difficult. And growing up in an authoritarian regime, where everyone we’ve met seems to believe a certain thing, makes it that much more difficult to resist believing it too.
There are a great many foolish things that even smart people end up believing, simply because people believe people.
What can you do about it?
Other than trying to reflect on why you trust someone, one thing that may be helpful is to draw on a distinction made by philosophers who specialize in trust: the distinction between two-place and three-place trust. Imagine you’re talking about a friend named Erin:
Two-Place Trust: You might simply say “I trust Erin.” This means you generally believe Erin is a trustworthy person, but you haven’t specified what you trust her to do. This is a broad, generalized form of trust. It’s called two-place because it can be expressed as a schematic (“Person A trusts person B”) that has two variables in it.
Three-Place Trust: Or you might say “I trust Erin to feed my cat while I’m away.” Here, you’re clearly stating that your trust in Erin applies specifically to the task of feeding your cat, not necessarily to other aspects of her behavior. This is a specific form of trust that is context-dependent. It is called three-place because it can be expressed as a schematic (“Person A trusts person B to X”) that has three variables in it.
You can trust a person in one way or in one domain but not another. Or, put another way, earning trust is multi-dimensional. It requires demonstration of trustworthiness in several different ways, such as:
- You know they wouldn’t betray you and that they care a lot about you.
- You know that they vet evidence carefully, come to their beliefs in a rigorous way, and approach new information skeptically.
- You know that they are extremely knowledgeable about a specific topic area.
Being strong in one of these domains doesn’t automatically make someone strong in another. So, viewing someone as trustworthy in one of these domains shouldn’t cause you to view them as trustworthy in the other ones. And yet, because many people implicitly treat trust as two-place, that’s what they do.
If you treat all trust as two-place trust, it can put you at a lot of risk because someone you trust may have a very bad idea that they really want you to believe in. It may be hard to reject that idea because you trust them so much — and that may mean joining a harmful cult, buying into the peak of the next bubble, risking your health on an ineffective treatment, or being scammed.
The key takeaway is to move from blind, generalized trust to more nuanced, context-specific trust. By using three-place trust, you can preserve your relationships and respect for someone’s character while maintaining a rational approach to contexts that require more critical reflection — where their abilities, knowledge, or judgment might not be as strong.
We all have weaknesses — and this includes the people we feel trust towards — having deep personal connections does not require pretending that’s not true.
This piece also appears on ClearerThinking.org.