Trust and persuasion

We know very little from direct experience or observation. In fact, the overwhelming majority of what we thinkwe know, we know only because somebody we trust has told us it’s true.

How do you know the Earth goes round the sun?  Well, everybody knows it does, right?  But history is littered with things that everybody knows that turn out to be wrong.  500 years ago everybody knew the sun went round the earth.

I have a friend Tim who is an astronomer. He has spent his career looking through telescopes and doing the maths and he genuinely does know, from direct observation, that it’s the Earth that orbits the sun.  Whereas I only know because institutions, textbooks, and people I trust – like NASA, like Tim – tell me so.

Trust is at the heart of persuasion. You can only persuade me of something if I decide you are trust-worthy.

And trust is even more important if you want my money.  As Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, puts it: “When you try to get money from investors, the biggest issue is always trust”

Generally speaking we make an assessment of whether we trust someone in the first few seconds of meeting.  One experiment suggested it takes even less than a second (Willis and Todorov 2006).

This explains why most of us regularly fail to register someone’s name on first meeting: most of our senses are busy, unconsciously assessing what they’re like – friend/foe? smart/stupid? trustworthy/untrustworthy? etc.

And when someone we already know tells us something, we unconsciously assess whether we should trust them on this particular subject.  My astronomer friend Tim knows very little about horseracing, so if he told me to all my put money on Dashing Boy in the 3.45 at Kempton Park, I would probably ignore him.

What makes us trust someone?

The first thing to recognise is that trust is an emotion, not a thought.  A feeling, not a deduction.  And this feeling is created not only by what you say, but also by how you say it. 

So if your handshake is too weak or too strong or you break eye contact at the wrong moment, I won’t trust you 

If you speak too quickly for me to follow what you’re saying, bombard me with data or use jargon I don’t understand, I won’t trust you.

If you speak words of enthusiasm but your body language doesn’t match, I won’t trust you.

However, avoiding these pitfalls does not automatically mean I will trust you.  To establish trust you must talk with me, not at me.  You must create a relationship, listen with empathy, and then speak with conviction and authority.

If you are pitching me something, I need to know you will deal honestly with me; that you will return my call when there is a problem or if I have a question.  These are things I intuit from your behaviour as much as your words.  Because we are all acutely sensitive to the meaning of micro-behaviours.  (If you’re familiar with the work of Daniel Kahneman - author of Thinking, Fast and Slow - it’s System 1 at work).

Tiny adjustments can often have a huge impact on how trustworthy someone seems.  Two small examples:

I worked with a very experienced investment fund Portfolio Manager who was frustrated that investors were not clamouring to put their money into a fund he wholeheartedly believed in.  His habit of interrupting questions came from a sincere desire to give a comprehensive answer, but unfortunately it suggested he wasn’t really listening and therefore didn’t care about the questioner.  Simply by allowing the question to finish and taking a moment before replying, he radically changed this perception, as well as giving himself a moment to think.

And I coached a highly intelligent woman whose boss was not inviting her to important meetings. When I pointed out her tendency to wave her hands around as she spoke, she could see that this was undermining her credibility, no matter how smart her words.  Being as capable as she was, by the time I next saw her she had adopted a much more focused body language and her boss had already included her in a new project team.

What we make of you as you - not just you as a job title or representative of an organisation – determines whether we feel we can trust you and your judgement, and therefore massively influences what we make of your offering, whether it’s a product or an idea. 

“What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson