Skip to content
Login

Grown Up Trust

A scene-setting paper for the Demos/Nationwide seminar series on trust

Authors:
Perri 6, James Harkin, Paul Skidmore,
Publication Type:
Pamphlet
Publication Date:
1st November 2003
ISBN:
n/a
Cost:
Free


 

Read Demos 'Open Access' licence terms
Download full text of 'Grown Up Trust' under licence

"It is...happier to be sometimes cheated," wrote Samuel Johnson, "than not to trust". Yet fewer and fewer of us seem to agree. "Who do you trust?" the opinion pollsters routinely ask, but our answers are increasingly hesitant. In survey data for the 1950s, more than two-thirds of British people felt that most of their fellow citizens could be trusted. When the question was asked in the late 1990s, the ‘trusters’ had fallen to just 29 per cent of the population.

The erosion of trust, and the urgency of its restoration, has become a familiar lament of politicians and business leaders. Yet getting any analytical purchase on trust – how it arises, how it functions, and how it can meaningfully be measured – remains very difficult.

Arriving at a more robust understanding of trust has become a central problem for politics, as Onora O’Neill argued in her BBC Reith Lectures of 2002:

"Mistrust and suspicion", said Professor O’Neill, "have spread across all areas of life, and supposedly with good reason. Citizens, it is said, no longer trust governments, or politicians, or ministers, or the police, or the courts, or the prison service. Consumers, it is said, no longer trust business, especially big business, or their products. None of us, it is said, trusts banks, or insurers, or pension providers. Patients, it is said, no longer trust doctors, and in particular no longer trust hospitals or hospital consultants."

In a series of three seminars, Demos in partnership with Nationwide will explore the changing nature of trust in politics, business and society. The first will seek to chart the growth of the trust deficit and its implications for large organisations. The second will look at the rise of the ‘audit society’, and whether more rigorous forms of inspection and accountability have repaired or actually damaged trust. The third will ask how we should properly understand trust as a business asset across the public and private sector, and how it can best be cultivated and preserved.

In this paper, the authors take stock of the debate about trust in order to frame the context for the series as a whole. What is the evidence for a trust deficit? What are its causes? How should it be interpreted? And what can we do about it?

Comments

1
Trust ... is the key to all human activity.But what does it mean? www.dictionary.com has 18 meanings.If trust means that a person or organisation behaves in a predictable way - then I would disagree with what is written above. If the meaning of "trust" contains an element of sympathy - which is how trust is generally built between our "animal" selves - the writer is right.Historically we were more ignorant and trusted blindly - moral codes were strictly applied across whole groups. The "breakdown" has many causes - but a lot of them are good. For instance we all have access to a lot more information - and we are getting better at making our own decisions - we do not "blindly" trust as we did a generation or two ago.A powerful reason for the breakdown of a variety of trustful relationships has been the tendency of the modern press to agressively criticise anything human - almost a journalistic sport. The "free" press is a funny creature. Where does one start? .. Fear certainly sells newspapers, and finding fault with others is a well known human pastime, particularly of people sitting on the sidelines. It does not make for trust.A generation or two ago people had less access to outside opinion - for all the obvious reasons - no TV or Radio, less money, less time, less travel. They talked to each other more. Recent brain research is cheering stuff - for people like me who want to know what is really going on. Like the research on famous brands - they fill a pleasure centre in the brain with dopamine - a "trust" hit. Unknown brands cause anxiety.In modern Britain people talk a lot less to the people who live with 50 yards of themselves than they did 50 years ago. The people in my village in Oxfordshire, Sutton Courtenay, where Orwell is buried, send their children to 20 different schools. The recent freedom to choose is fragmenting my local society at quite a rate. Little clumps of people, not necessarily living next to each other, trust each other, but nobody else, because they have no reason to do so. Self imposed segregation through choice, age, "class" and financial circumstances is where we are now. I am a firm believer in forcing everybody in a given area to go to one school. So that they SHARE being alive together. So that they can work together to make their particular bit of the planet better.Choice is a good thing. But endless choice? The choice to do better than others, at their expense? Vast differences in life chances do not build trust - the differences breed suspicion. I do not want a homogenous society. I want people to be different, I want variety - but I want fair variety, based on a genuine equality of opportunity. Which would bring a great deal more trust between people and organisations.
Posted by George Taylor  at 9:19pm on Friday, 8th December 2006

LOGIN to add comments