8

TRUST AND JUDGEMENT

As any thesaurus will tell you, trust and confidence are interchangeable words. Yet the trust we’re concerned with here deals with our relationships. It means having inner confidence with others. In this respect, trust is a vital building block for confidence – not least because distrust destroys our confidence more effectively than just about any other external consideration.

Trust is certainly a challenging area for me – at first being overly trustworthy (perhaps emotionally over-investing in a particular person) before swinging wildly towards distrust, almost as if their actions confirmed my unconscious conviction that betrayal was inevitable. Such volatility has been a feature of both my work and personal lives, and has destroyed many friendships and partnerships over the years: again, adding to those layers of confusion and isolation that constitute the under-confident person’s mental make-up.

Nonetheless, I’m right in one respect. Trust is important.

‘Trust is the glue of life,’ says Stephen Covey in The 8th Habit (2004). ‘It cannot be faked and [genuine trust] is rarely produced by a dramatic one-time effort.’

Covey talks of relationships as an emotional bank account that has both deposits and withdrawals, and has trust as its currency. If we try and understand someone we’re making a deposit, while seeking their understanding is a withdrawal. Apologizing (for anything) is a deposit, as is forgiveness. Pride, deceit and holding grudges are all withdrawals.

Make too many withdrawals and we go into overdraft. Keep withdrawing and the account may close, or our creditors may seek redress – perhaps by raiding our other relationship bank accounts (i.e. by undermining our standing within the group). We should therefore seek to remain in credit – adding to each relationship bank account so it flourishes, which will have a beneficial impact on our confidence.

The Scales of Trust

Covey’s analogy is not for everyone, but it makes an important point: trust from others requires that we are – first – trustworthy. We must behave in ways that generate trust before we expect others to trust us or be trustworthy themselves.

Potentially, this is a major barrier for the under-confident, not least due to their past, which is likely to be filled with examples of (often self-perceived) betrayed trust. Yet by changing our direction of travel – by offering trust and being trustworthy before asking for trust or expecting trustworthiness – we can start to undermine the contrary evidence caused by our negative experiences.

At least that’s Covey’s contention, although many under-confident people will remain sceptical – perhaps because the confident people they know are those that rarely deposit and constantly withdraw from their relationship bank accounts. Of course, we may not be witnessing confidence in the other person but a well-disguised under-confidence. And we may also be considering trust as an inelastic concept, and therefore one likely to snap at the first perceived betrayal. Certainly, that’s the view of ‘change consultants’ Dennis S. Reina and Michelle L. Reina. They take a more pragmatic approach in Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace (1999) – stating that our capacity to trust falls along four key scales:

From the dynamic above it’s easy to conclude where the under-confident person goes wrong with respect to trust. All too often we’re idealistic (investing too much in faith/trust), we seek concrete proof prior to trust, and we see things in black and white, and in undifferentiated – i.e. generalized – terms. Sustainable (and therefore confidence-building) trust, meanwhile, comes from being pragmatic, from accepting the ambiguities and complexity of trust, and from refusing the notion of generalizations.

Dealing with Betrayal

Of course, a major aspect of trust – certainly for me – is in rebuilding trust after a real or perceived betrayal. These are the moments that destroy our capacity for trust – undermining our confidence, not least because it’s external: it’s our trust in others that’s been destroyed, removing our autonomy and attacking our sense of security.

‘Betrayal, like a migraine headache, is energy-depleting and can shut down a whole system,’ write Reina and Reina.

Yet we’re not powerless. According to Reina and Reina there are seven steps to healing (again, with some thoughts of my own):

Yes, yes – all very well in theory. The reality may be too painful to contemplate, at least immediately. Yet there’s one golden rule we can apply when considering trust: communication. Nearly always, lost trust becomes a monster inside us – feeding us exaggerated information regarding the extent of the loss and the damage done to our well-being. It’s these messages that need to be challenged – not by refutation but through communication with the other party. If we shut down the channels, we’re confirming our worst fears: perhaps because that’s the view we want (making the resulting loss of confidence self-inflicted).

The Bias of Judgements

Of course, my problems with trust have had an impact on another part of the confidence puzzle: judgement. Lost trust can destroy our judgement, meaning we make potentially harmful but self-fulfilling decisions based on our insecurities and fears.

The concept of self-fulfilling judgements is what’s known as ‘confirmation bias’ – the tendency for people to favour information that confirms their preconceptions while potentially ignoring or discounting information that could challenge these assumptions.

Just about everyone indulges in confirmation bias, which for very confident people often leads to ‘wishful thinking’ – that they are luckier or more skilled than they are. This is at least a (mostly) beneficial self-deception, although may encourage self-harming behaviour such as an addiction to gambling or taking poorly-judged risks.

The under-confident, however, have the opposite problem – that confirmation bias wrecks our judgement and destroys our ability to act. This confirmation bias is at play in everything we do. Go into a shop with the self-belief we’re an unworthy customer, and the instant the assistant fails to show us strong-enough attention (perhaps due to being distracted) we judge them as having confirmed our low status.

Confirmation bias even harms our memories of past events, making us rewrite our own histories to conform to our potentially-negative self-view – even running old encounters through a new prism or bias fed to us by later conditioning.

Perhaps the most damaging use of confirmation bias (at least externally) is racial stereotyping – observing a particular ethnic group and only noticing those elements that confirm our preconceived ideas of that group. Yet such biases can also work within tight-knit groups and even within groups of friends, especially when someone within the group irritates (see Part Five for more on prejudice).

Heuristics in Decision-Making

Confirmation bias is what’s known as a ‘heuristic’. Otherwise called ‘rules of thumb’, these are mental short cuts everyone uses to speed up judgements. Yet they’re also where things potentially go wrong for the under-confident. As the confirmation-bias heuristic shows, we may use our negative self-beliefs to make decisions that confirm these poor convictions, although awareness is an important step towards preventing such biases disabling our judgement.

Another heuristic potentially skewering our judgement is the ‘representative heuristic’, which deals with biases when categorizing (perhaps random events or probabilities). Psychologist Scott Plous explains the ‘representative heuristic’ in his 1993 book The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making by using the example of Linda, who is ‘committed to social justice’. When a research group is asked to decide what’s more likely: ‘Linda is a bank teller’ or ‘Linda is a bank teller and an active feminist’ the majority pick the second option. While there are inevitably more bank tellers than there are feminist bank tellers, respondents have picked up on the words ‘social justice’ and ‘feminist’ and made an illogical connection.

A further example of the representative heuristic is a ‘gambler’s fallacy’ that past events change the probability of future results: a classic being the assumption that a run of roulette-wheel reds will continue (or be broken by a black) when the previous results have no influence on the next. Of course, while the confident may assume their luck will continue, the under-confident will use the representative heuristic to support their conviction of poor luck.

The third common heuristic, according to Plous, concerns ‘availability’ – i.e. the information we use to assess the probability of an eventuality. It’s the availability heuristic that keeps people buying lottery tickets because big wins are big news, so they incorrectly assess the likelihood of their own win. And it’s the availability heuristic that induces fear of flying, again because crashes are big news and therefore seem more frequent.

Developing Critical Thinking

Looking beyond heuristics is therefore an important part of developing strong judgement. Yet the world’s ever-growing complexity makes this increasingly difficult – leaving us more and more hostage to the knee-jerk (and usually negative) assessments that have been the under-confident person’s burden since early childhood. One way round this – at least according to educational psychologists Richard W. Paul and Linda Elder – is to develop the tools for ‘critical thinking’.

In Critical Thinking, their landmark 2002 book, Paul and Elder describe critical thinkers (i.e. those with strong judgement) as having ‘intellectual virtues’ that reinforce good decisions. These include humility, courage, empathy, integrity, perseverance, ability to reason, autonomy (i.e. being capable of independent thought) and fair-mindedness. And while this sounds like a tall order for the under-confident person – blighted as they are by a lifetime of poor self-reinforcing judgements – in reality it’s little more than the application of Dweck’s growth mindset. It’s the journey towards good judgement that matters. And this can be rationalized by exploding judgement into its components.

According to Paul and Elder these are:

• Purpose. What are you seeking to achieve from a judgement?
• Point of view. From what perspective are you currently thinking?
• Assumptions. What assumptions are within your current thinking, and should these be examined?
• Implications. What are the likely consequences of any judgement?
• Information. What information is required and is it at hand?
• Inferences. What can be deduced from the information you already have?
• Concepts. What ‘principles’ or ‘theories’ (or even heuristics) are at play here, and are they worth questioning?
• Questions. Indeed, what should you be asking yourself throughout the entire assessment process, and where will questions have to remain unanswered?

This looks like a lot to ask from anyone trying to improve their judgement. Yet critical thinking is in fact a natural process that, according to Paul and Elder, we develop from experience. By adopting the above rationalization we’re simply making ourselves aware of the process.

‘Critical thinking when applied to decision-making,’ say Paul and Elder, ‘enhances the rationality of decisions made by raising the pattern of decision-making to the level of conscious and deliberate choices.’

And if this sounds like a treatise for protracted decision-making, perhaps it should. Good decisions are made slowly – not least because rapid decisions are often fearful and reactive.

Judgement’s Key Ingredient: Experience

One last thing on judgement, and a saving grace for those feeling they lack it – it gets better with age. In her hit book The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain (2010), science writer Barbara Strauch cites judgement and wisdom as one of the key neurological gifts of aging.

For instance, in one passage she focuses on the work of Thomas Hess, a psychologist at North Carolina State University, who has undertaken dozens of studies into ‘social expertise’ and concludes that it peaks in midlife (45–60) when we’re ‘far better than those younger and older at judging the true character of others’.

According to Strauch, this is not just a function of experience, although that helps. It’s a function of the longevity of brain cells devoted to navigating the ‘human landscape’, as Strauch puts it. ‘Scanning studies show that parts of the frontal cortex that deal more with emotional regulation atrophy less quickly than other brain sections as we age,’ she writes.

This is reinforced by another midlife ‘sweet spot’ according to Strauch: wisdom. Yes, a cliché, but also a true one – and one vital for the judgement required to improve our confidence. Wisdom is that ‘special mix of heart and mind’ that – although viewed with suspicion by some neuroscientists – is nonetheless deeply rooted in most cultures. Through learning and experience, most seem to agree (even if anecdotally), our evaluations improve to an almost mystical level.

Strauch cites William James’ famous quote that wisdom is ‘the art of knowing what to overlook’, which I think has a direct link to confidence. By middle age we’ve learnt the negative consequences of using all the information we receive to try and gain an advantage – even if just through passing on negative gossip in order to undermine a colleague or friend. Yet not using such information is what psychologists such as Laura Carstensen and Mara Mather call ‘emotional regulation’, which – to me – sounds like a strong alternative description of both wisdom and good judgement; not least because gossiping and bitching are common traits for the under-confident.