Trust involves making a ongoing series of Assessment that you will take action which takes care of me, including not taking action to harm me.
That someone “can be trusted” is not a matter of fact. Otherwise we would not have the situation where I believe someone is trustworthy, but you don’t. If trust were fact, this situation could not exist. Nor could my trust in someone wax and wane over time.
Trust is reducible into four interwoven components.1
- Sincerity: the belief that someone is being genuine in their intentions when they say they will take action that cares for something important to us (or refrains from taking action that will damage us). Of the four components, this is the easiest to damage when we find out there was incongruity between what was said and the other person’s internal dialogue.
- Reliability: an assessment that someone will take action when they said they would, and to the standard they said they would.
- Competence: my judgement the person is also capable of performing the task they have said they would.
- Involvement: an Assessment the person is helping me out of a genuine understanding of what is important to me.
My Trust of one person lives in me as a series of Assessments as trust is not something endemic to the other person. This explains why I can so clearly distrust someone which a third person trusts implicitly.
A “failure” to meet my Assessment in any of the components above (which remember is not The truth) can lead to an overall negative assessment of Trust that is unjustified and carried into other, unrelated situations. Likewise, repeated “success” in living up to my assessments can leave me exposed to non-delivery and even betrayal.