Trusting other people is a complex issue. Confidence in others is necessary for supportive relationships and overall emotional health. We all grapple with whether other people are trustworthy. We also must examine ourselves to gauge if we have too little or too much confidence in others. Let’s look at these issues in detail.
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How We Evaluate Trustworthiness
Several authors write about trust in the workplace. Patrick Sweeney, an Army colonel and social psychologist, examined how soldiers trust their leaders. He scrutinized the 3 C’s in evaluating military employers—competence, character, and caring.
Dean Crisp, in the “4 C’s of Creating Trust,” highlights the attributes of commitment, caring, consistency and competence. These are traits found in good employers and leaders that make soldiers and employees believe they can trust their bosses. People have to be trustworthy to invite trust from others.
Factors Within Ourselves Predicting Our Ability to Trust Others
Some people have trust issues. They cannot trust others, no matter how trustworthy others are. The problem is an interior one, residing within the person. The ability to trust and get our needs met is formed or not formed as infants and toddlers. If parents or caregivers do not meet a child’s needs, a child may not learn how to have faith in adults. This may carry over into adult life. Such people may not know how and when to trust others as adults.
On the other hand, children may also learn to trust too much when they are young, if they are neglected or abused, emotionally or physically. They are vulnerable in early life and must rely on adults, even those adults who abuse them and who cannot be trusted to care for them. This can lead to an adult pattern of placing too much trust in untrustworthy people.
Trust and Relationships
Sutherland et al. find trust to be shaped by people’s “unique environments,” not shaped genetically. The ability to trust others is a variable in life’s relationships and has different outcomes. People with overly trusting personalities may suffer disappointments. They may feel betrayed when they discover a person they had confidence in can no longer be trusted. People overly trusting of reliable, kind people may reap the benefits of good, high-quality relationships.
People who trust too little may avoid untrustworthy people by not engaging with them. But they also miss out on great relationships with very trustworthy people who won’t harm or exploit them. O’Doherty finds trust to be “intersubjective’ related to the relationship between people, not what is in their minds.
How To Tell the Differences in Trustworthiness Among Personalities
Homer Martin, MD and I discovered in our clinical work that different personalities handle trust distinctly. Selfish, self-centered personalities, who Dr. Martin and I term impotent personalities, will rarely be trustworthy. They may make a great display of how good they are at promising helpful follow-through in their relationships. But close examination of their actions reveals they may drop the ball at work, with family, and with friends. They cannot be counted on or be trusted to do what they promise.
Other-focused people, whom we refer to as omnipotent personalities, are super-trustworthy. Their word on a promise is beyond reproach. They do what they say they will, often to their own detriment. They may work all weekend on a project for work rather than request an extension of time to complete the task during work hours. By so doing, they may harm themselves with fatigue, loss of sleep, and loss of usual weekend relaxation. They lack trustworthiness to their own well-being, but not to others.
With two prominent personality types it is important for us to understand the differences between them when it comes to trust concerns. Only by doing this can we discern trustworthy people from those we should not have confidence in, and avoid the pitfalls of misplaced trust, disappointments, and ruptured relationships.
We must also examine what lies inside of us from our early life experience with regard to trusting or not gaining confidence in others who raised us. Only by looking within and closely observing others can we fit the pieces of the puzzle together and grasp when and how to trust ourselves and others.
