Hinge Moments: Making the Most of Life's Transitions by D. Michael Lindsay

Author:D. Michael Lindsay [Lindsay, D. Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Self-Help, Christian Living, Leadership, Personal Growth, Success, Leadership;Christian leadership;Gordon college;transition;life stage;vocation;Christian vocation;career;graduation;anxiety;pandemic;COVID-19;future;vision;goals;pivot;life plan;career change;vocation change;life transition;Platinum leadership;hinge moment;decision;make a change;change your life;success;Christian leader;leadership success;leadership stories;advice for leaders;decision making;god's will;god's plan for your life;leadership failure;important decision;life changing decision
ISBN: 9780830841790
Google: 1M8DEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2021-04-27T00:09:27.314523+00:00

Trust in Theory and Practice

Trustworthiness is a notoriously difficult virtue to nail down. Its scope ranges from the obvious—doing what we said we were going to do—to the nebulous (but ever-present) social “stickiness” that holds relationships and communities together. It’s vaguely related to loyalty, but it’s more of a character trait than a choice. Although trust is a slippery concept to define, we recognize it when we see it, and when it is lacking we do not function optimally.

The most basic instinct all animals share is the drive to survive. Animals have developed different strategies to do this and in doing so have produced the variety of life we see today. For us “moral, believing animals,” as sociologist Chris Smith puts it,2 otherwise known as humans, our competitive advantage is not wings, venom, or fangs, but cooperation. In fact, our ability to engage in symbolic communication (language) for the sake of cooperation is one of our most defining features as a species.3 This cooperation is the reason we can develop communities, and communities thrive on trust. In everyday life it’s easy for us to assess without thinking whether we trust someone or not, or whether we feel safe in a situation or not. So, although trust is difficult to define, evaluations of trustworthiness are second nature to us.

Furthermore, research suggests there is a complex but positively correlated relationship between levels of trust in a community and levels of health and wellbeing. A study of over twenty thousand Americans found that after controlling for income and education, individuals who lived in high-trust communities (where the respondents felt they could trust their neighbors) were more likely to report multiple indicators of health and wellbeing than were those who did not.4 However, this was only true for those people who were themselves highly trusted by others. This means that people in communities with high levels of social trust can benefit greatly but only if they themselves engender trust. So trust only works when it goes both ways. To want to be trusted by others and yet to trust no one—or the other way around—is pathological.

Trust is even more powerful than many of us realize. In low-income communities, it can work against certain social forces that keep people impoverished. It was once thought that people remain poor because of some individual deficiency (such as laziness or stupidity). More recently we have come to understand that the dominant factors are systemic rather than personal. One of the chief contributing factors of cyclical poverty is what social scientists refer to as “poverty-induced myopic decision-making.” In short, poverty affects people in such a way that they become less able to make decisions with long-term payoffs that would benefit them and more likely to make a worse decision that looks attractive in the short term (for instance, spending money on something they want now rather than saving for something better in the future, or taking a lower-paying job now rather than pursuing education for a higher-paying job later). Making the choice for a higher long-term payout requires trust in a system.

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