Trust

When Tory MP Peter Goldring confessed that he wore a body camera when he visited his lady friends for a game of Scrabble long about 2 a.m.--a camera that would prove he hadn't behaved inappropriately--I knew that our culture  had hit a crisis.  Mind you, I'd had a couple of lessons over my last year in the academy, examples of an administration that didn't trust its faculty and of faculty that didn't trust administration.  Lack of trust is corrosive.  Because how things come out depends altogether too much on who blinks first or who has the most power, not who's considered opinion is the right one.

There are some very good reasons why we trust people less.  Most of these involve our relationships to people in power, as Peter Goldring inadvertently reveals:  “MPs must learn, as I have from encounters with authority figures in the past, that all do not tell the truth." Here in Canada, beset by government by ideology rather than by evidence,  we are right not to trust the advertisements vaunting the Conservatives' environmental record or believe their reasons for building more prisons and being tougher on crime. Until we're given any evidence, why should we give our trust?  In the past year, we've been given reason not to trust our Senators to turn in accurate expense claims or not to trust Members of Parliament to behave appropriately toward their female colleagues.  (This case is messy, I admit, given that there has been no formal complaint--which only increases our distrust.)   We don't trust Bill Cosby, who used to be known as America's dad, nor do we trust CBC celebrity hosts to have charming off-air personalities like those carried by the airwaves.

People in Ferguson Missouri and New York City don't trust cops to use force in a way that is measured and reasonable.  In the United States,  "the Justice Policy Institute has estimated that police officers in the U.S. killed 587 people in 2012 alone. Over the course of a decade, they’ve tallied more than 5,000 people in the U.S. during that period" observes Dave Lindorff on AlterNet.  Quite likely, the majority of those people are black.  It makes absolute sense, given the failure of the justice system to even indict cops who kill unarmed people, that African Americans do not trust the police.  Police killing suspects, many of them racially profiled, in the interests of police safety, trumps citizen safety; this is a sure recipe for distrust.

But there's something else going on here:  a rotten game of in-group vs. out-group.  As Jonathan Haidt reveals, when times are difficult, one of the first things humans do is to take stock of who belongs in their group and who doesn't.  Think of Neanderthal man around the campfire during a famine year:  the way you decide who is going to get fed is to make that basic distinction between who really belongs and who doesn't.  My guess is that inside those courtrooms where juries decide to indict or not, in proceedings (at least in Ferguson) they can never talk about, the in-group card is played, subtly or overtly.  "We have to hold together, those of us who know ourselves to be law-abiding citizens, or chaos will be loosed.  The cop is one of us; the young black boy on his knees or the black man the cops are trying to arrest for selling illegal cigarettes are not one of us. So who are you going to choose to believe?"  
 
But something else is at play here.  Certainly there are legitimate reasons for some of the distrust we feel.  At the same time, however, distrust is often being used to keep us passive and uncritical.  Such distrust erodes our sense of community, our sense that we can change aspects of our society that we find troubling.

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman would point to what he calls "the availability heuristic."  When we're told something again and again, we come to believe it.  I don't know how many times it can be said to either parents or city governments or police departments:  crime has dropped and continues to drop.  Plans to get tough on crime and to give more munitions and powers to police are out of touch with this reality. But when every newscast leads with the most recent disturbing/colourful/weird crime, we are all--police and citizens alike--being primed to believe that our world is less safe.  Similarly, newscasts that focus on war sometimes make us feel that we are living in very violent times, whereas there is less conflict than ever--in spite of politicians' attempts to threaten us with that crime, committed perhaps by ISIL, is coming to Canadian shores near you.  Michael Zehaf-Bibeau's attack was framed as a terrorist act, and as grounds for giving more powers to security institutions, whereas perhaps the radicalization of young men might be seen as a one of the routes mental illness takes in the twenty-first century.  If you are living in North America and feel like an outsider, how can you understand your feelings of marginalization? Perhaps exploring the beliefs and actions of other groups that have been marginalized will give meaning to your feelings.

So the other side of the trust issue is that we believe that mistrust makes us safe.  And in many cases, it's that appeal to our safety that governments use to convince us to give up our civil liberties or to reassure us that they know how to be tough on crime, though it costs money that is syphoned away from health and education--areas of spending that might improve people's lives, money that might have helped Michael Zehaf-Bibeau deal with his sense or marginalization in a different way.  Similarly, news organizations, whose very survival is threatened in a variety of ways by the openness of the internet, need to grab our attention, and there's nothing like a manhunt or the word "terrorist" to do that.

But as Daniel Kahneman points out, the "availability heuristic" come an "availability cascade."  Here's what he has to say in Thinking, Fast and Slow:

"An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action.  On some occasions, a media story catches the attention of the public, which becomes aroused and worried.  This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement.  The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by 'availability entrepreneurs,' individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news.  The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines" (142).

Availability cascades create unintended consequences.  One of these is the various costs of distrust.  Dean Richard Kleer told me today that economists actually talk about the "extrinsic costs" of distrust, which across the economy are enormous.  How many (unnecessary) forms did you fill out this year to prove you weren't doing something reprehensible?  How many reports did you write to prove you were doing your job, and what actually happened to those reports and the time that went into writing them?  How many children walk to school or go with a group of friends to the nearest schoolyard or park just simply to hang out and perhaps climb a tree or two?  What effect will this have on our effort to address climate change--if nature becomes nothing more than annoying or violent weather? 

But there are two other, larger unintended consequences.  Distrust tends to lead to a focus on standard operating procedures that will catch the "free riders," and from there to a managerial style of "leadership" that focuses on SOPs, to the exclusion of the real problems that face us.  Real leadership deals with complex problems, often in messy ways, by gathering together creative teams of people who work collectively to understand the complexity and find creative, perhaps unanticipated solutions.  Distrust has no place here.

Distrust may also, at the ballot box, prompt us to vote for the people who scare us the most and promise to keep fear at bay.  Are you worried about higher taxes, terrorism, drugs on city streets?  These worries, whether reasonable or not, might prompt you to vote in ways that are actually against society's best long-term interest--for the tough-on-crime bunch rather than the tough-on-climate change advocates, since crime is feared here and now, whereas climate change is feared elsewhere and later--though the United Nations declares it is the biggest challenge facing the human race.

Distrust also leads to a kind of individualistic bunker mentality that actually works against the sense of community that might lead to solutions. If you are standing on the street waiting for a bus that is late again, but are distrustful, are you likely to talk to the other people who are waiting about how this bus works for them, to see if you can work together to convince the city to make some changes?  Or are you likely to remain silent?  Even if you talk to them but distrust the city to be responsive to your concerns, are you convinced you can do something?

Several social movements have been working lately to counteract our sense of distrust, to connect a variety of people together to effect social change:  Idle No More, the Occupy Movement, and Saskatchewan's own Prairie Pastures Public Interest group.  Such change works very slowly, partly because it eschews the kinds of top-down "leadership" that has gotten us in trouble, because power and wealth all too often turn people who once wanted to serve into people who want more power and wealth.  (And yes, there's some shocking psychological research on this.)  Rather, these grass roots movements often begin by educating people who are sympathetic to their goals and beliefs, and education takes a while to trickle down into the ballot box.  Occupy has recently influenced the Bank of England's position on wealth, and the Los Angeles City Council has passed a resolution indicating its informal support.  Prairie Pastures Public Interest brought together Chiefs, ranchers, farmers, academics, and poets (there were two of us!) to consider how we can respond to the province's decision to sell off the public pastures that protected vulnerable species of plants, birds, and animals, while providing grazing land for ranchers and small farmers.  We're working behind the scenes and are gaining some traction.  Idle No More goes from strength to strength.

Organizations which want to gain people's trust need to turn to transparency and fairness.  And when we're faced with the lack of transparency and fairness, we need to be noisy, like the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, who demonstrated against police treatment of African Americans yesterday in Washington.  In contrast, those who seek to effect meaningful change must foster dialogue and the trust that comes from honest speaking and listening.  We must all resist the availability heuristic that distorts our sense of reality because lacking trust, we vote for the status quo, become more frightened, less visionary, less open to change that is desperately needed in Canada and the United States.

I could not have written this post without the help of Katherine Arbunott, who helped me think about things like leadership and community.  Here's to breakfast at 7:30 a.m. with a smart woman!