There are two additional topics I want to think of with respect to trust. One is emotion and the second is feedback. Now, let me think about emotion. Suppose I ask you, how do you feel? And it turns out our feelings are pretty complicated. Often, when we're making judgments, we use our feelings as a summary statistic that integrates a lot of different dimensions. So if I were to ask you, how do you feel about this candidate? We're trying to integrate across a lot of different things. How competent are they? How much do we need their skill set? Would they get along with the people here? We're trying to integrate across a lot of different dimensions and we often summarize this with how do I feel about this? Or think about going out and you look at 20 different homes and you try to figure out which home you want to buy? How do you feel about this? Again, it's this summary statistic that integrates a lot of information and the trust decision is a lot like this. Do I trust this person is often predicated on a feeling. Do I feel like I can trust this person? We talk that way and it's absolutely how we behave, as well. In my own research, I've actually looked at the link between emotions and trust and one thing I've found that's particularly interesting is how our feelings can influence our trust. The idea here is that sometimes our feelings are really relevant. So you betrayed me, I'm upset. And so, I don't trust you. That's a directed emotion that makes a lot of sense for influencing trust. But what's interesting is that our incidental emotions, emotions that are unrelated to the situation at hand also matter. By incidental, what I mean is suppose you get a parking ticket or suppose you get into an argument with your spouse and then you come into work and you deal with somebody who's totally unrelated to that other experience. The question is does that emotion bleed into your new interaction? And the answer is yes. So how we feel in the moment is influenced not just by what's happening in this exact moment, but it's also influenced by what's happened before. And so these incidental emotions, these unrelated emotions from some other experience can influence our judgements. So, here's the idea. If we're angry about something else and that bleeds into our judgement, it'll make us less trusting. If we're happy about something else, so we just found out some great news unrelated to the meeting that I'm currently having. That happiness can bleed in and boost my trust. So, I may be too trusting when I'm otherwise very happy and I may be not trusting enough when I'm a little bit angry from something else. I've documented this in my own research and the implication is that we should be careful to recognize that our trust judgements can move. They're relatively labile, particularly for people we don't know well. So, a new partner or a prospective client. We're making these trust judgements on the fly, it's a constructive judgment. Our incidental emotions don't really matter very much for people you know well. So how much you trust your mom isn't going to be influenced by how you're feeling, unless you're feeling pretty strongly about something. Now, it's not just our own judgments I'm worried about, I also worry about how much other people are likely to trust us. So when you go to the boss or you're meeting a new partner, if they're upset about something else and it could be almost anything, their favorite sports team lost, a political outcome, an argument they had with their spouse. If they're upset about something, you should recognize that those feelings may will bleed into their assessments of you. And you want to make sure that either you let time pass and come back at a different time, that's the first best option or the second best option is to make sure they're making the correct attribution. You might say, I know you're pretty upset about that other outcome, I'm hoping that doesn't influence this situation. By explicitly acknowledging and recognizing something, that does mitigate the influence of that incidental motion on the current judgment. Okay, now those are judgments that can influence our trust, but in whom should we place our trust and what do emotions have to say about that? And here, I'm going to switch to a very different kind of emotion and I'm going to talk about guilt. It turns out that when we're assessing in whom to place our trust, the people we should really trust are the guilt-prone people. And by guilt-prone, I mean, people who are likely to feel guilty should they fall short. Here's an example of how to assess that. Imagine you asked someone and it could be a prospective employee, you ask them something like the following. Describe a time when you made a mistake at work. How did you feel when this occurred? What did you do? What did you learn from this experience? When you listen to those responses, what you're listening to are answers to these questions. So how likely is this person to feel badly if they did something wrong even if nobody knew about it? Does this person have a strong sense of responsibility for others? And will this person feel bad about letting others down? Now, those are all guilt proneness questions. So, would they feel guilty if they did something bad even if nobody knew about it? It turns out the guilt prone people are exactly the same people we should trust. Those are the most trustworthy people around. People who are low in guilt proneness, we should be careful about. People high in guilt proneness are people we should trust the most. The last idea I want to suggest has to do with limited feedback. When we're trusting other people, we often face a challenge, because we can't monitor them all the time. Sometimes, we can check in and see what they're doing. Sometimes, we can't and the key idea here is you want to think about how anticipated that monitoring is. So can we observe occasions when they don't expect to be monitored? Or is it the case that they always know when we're coming? They always have time to prepare or they always know when they are going to be observed. It turns out people act pretty strategically. So they know that when they're being evaluated, they step up and they behave in an exemplary way. We also know when people know that they're not going to be observed, when things aren't going to be important that they slack off. Now again, the high guilt prone people are going to be pretty good even in those cases, but people who are low in guilt proneness are likely to behave very strategically. Demonstrating exemplary behavior when they're observed and then slacking off when they're not. Now, here's the problem. When we observe behavior and I've run a number of studies looking at this, when we observe behavior, the people who are observing others put too much weight in that observed period. So it's like the boss who comes back from vacation and sees the office staff working really hard, then goes back on vacation. And then when they return, again, sees the office staff working really hard. And the more observations the boss has, the more and more convinced the boss becomes these are really hard workers. That is they're relaying solely on what they can see and they're failing to imagine what happens when they're not around. So, we want to be careful about making inferences from limited feedback when the feedback that we get is constrained and it's anticipated. We want to make sure that we account for how strategic other people often act and recognize that the limited observations we have can actually send us off in the wrong course. We might actually build very high trust in sometimes very strategic people.
