Society has a persistent discrepancy that needs specific attention, specifically with how much we balance trust toward others.
About 3-10% of society makes it awful for the rest of us, so distrust is necessary.
However, distrust slows things down:
- “Hello, I’d like to perform a basic action.”
- “Certainly, what is your name?”
- “My name is Joan Sinkaboutit.”
- “And your social security number?”
- “867-53-0989”
- “And your mother’s maiden name?”
- “Piper Down”
- “And the first home you owned?”
- “A van, down by the river.”
- “And the second-from-the-rightmost book on your second husband’s favorite bookshelf?…”
This is a precarious balancing decision everyone must strike between implicit trust and perpetual distrust.
- With too much distrust, the work takes forever, conflicts are more likely, and delays may cause physical injury.
- With too much trust, there’s a higher chance of scams, exploitation, severe losses, and damage that ripples across institutions.
Variable distrust
Each industry’s domain has its own reason to distrust:
- Most low-cost retail must move fast, so there’s usually no time to verify things.
- Banks risk breaking laws and large losses, so they must be certain they’re interacting with only people they can verify.
- For actuarial purposes, insurance companies must find out someone’s risks before starting a policy.
- In judicial systems, “regular” clients mean every single thing requires a third party to validate almost any allegation or event.
Each industry has its own culture of trust, and they’re rarely the same. This trust culture’s effect isn’t minor.
If someone changes from one domain to another, they’ll often learn about the differences through disastrous cultural ripples:
- A 20-year cop becomes a warehouse security guard. This leads to punitive treatment of some warehouse workers who stayed late but forgot to notify anyone.
- A flight attendant works at a convenience store. Her generally pleasant and trusting disposition gives criminals an opportunity to rob the store.
- An experienced construction manager moves to hotel management. He takes the harshness necessary from construction and loses money and gains negative reviews for the hotel.
A spectrum of trust
The “Good Faith Spectrum” roughly summarizes how much people will act in good faith of others’ intentions.
It is generally wise to understand how much someone will trust someone else when provided with limited information:
- If you obscure your face, will anyone be concerned?
- What will an encounter be like if they don’t know your name?
- Will they trust anything you say, or will they need to validate that with documentation or someone else’s attestation?
- Will they trust any documentation you submit, only valid-looking documents, multiple documents, or will they confirm with a third party?
- Are you free to go anywhere, or can you only stay within a specific area?
- If you disclose any particular information to them, will they form a bias against you?
As a rough estimate, there’s a general 1-10 scale of what the Good Faith Spectrum looks like:
- Verify Everything: All actions a person takes are in bad faith.
- Distrust Heavily: Most actions are in bad faith.
- Be Paranoid: Some actions could be in bad faith.
- Be Cautious: There’s a chance an action is in bad faith.
- Stay Alert: Someone’s intentions are always unclear.
- Stay Attentive: Someone is likely acting in good faith.
- Be Slow to Act: It’s pretty likely someone is acting in good faith.
- Generally Trust: Most people will act in good faith.
- Don’t Worry Too Much: Someone almost always acts in good faith.
- Don’t Worry About It: Trust each person implicitly unless otherwise noted.
Lower on the spectrum means the more work to verify, so everything takes longer and more expensive. Higher on the spectrum means more exposure to risk, but everything is faster and cheaper.
Modifications to the spectrum
Across a person’s growth, they will learn who they can trust and when.
- Every child starts purely in good faith until they learn otherwise, typically before they learn to speak.
- The corruption from the minority of bad actors (e.g., social engineering, malicious neurodivergents) means most people skew downward over time.
- By the time someone is old, they’ll likely be much more distrusting, though dementia can force it upwards again.
Since forgiveness requires releasing at least some antagonism against someone, less good faith can have moral implications.
Since institutions have more to lose than individuals, they tend to be more distrustful. This means that groups move downward on the Good Faith Spectrum as they scale.
Individuals and institutions also tend to be more trusting toward institutions as well. Thus, individuals tend to become comparatively less trustworthy than institutions.
Most neurodivergents tend to veer into extremely far ends of the Spectrum:
- Autistics tend to be too high.
- Cluster B tends to be too low.
- Bipolar will often be too high, especially in their mania state.
- Avoidant personality will be too low.
- Dependent personality will be too high.
Lower-functioning people in society, such as dementia and low-functioning Down’s Syndrome, will be too high. This is simply because they must depend on other people.
The spectrum moves around
Behind the scenes, we assign the Good Faith Spectrum by how much damage we interpret someone can make.
This mechanism is why bureaucracy takes a long time, why scams work, and why talking with the police is dangerous.
Awareness of this spectrum also makes integrating into new cultures easier, especially when others have a different take on sincerity.