Why Trust Matters by Benjamin Ho

Author:Benjamin Ho [Ho, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

4

Trusting Institutions with Expertise

Maybe the most crucial test for modern civilization is whether we can adapt our biological and cultural instincts, developed for small tribes and communities of 150 members, to a global community of billions. For the first time in human history, we have technologies that, if used poorly, can have devastating consequences not just for all of humanity, but for the entire planet. Addressing these challenges will require all of humanity to work together cooperatively, and to do that will require trust on a global scale.

I wrote this book in part because the story of trust in human civilization has given me hope. We were born to trust, but we were also born with the instincts to trust only a few. Over the centuries, we have developed the instincts and tools and institutions to expand our circle of trust to millions—to the point where we barely notice how weird it is that when we click something on a computer screen, we trust an anonymous seller on the other side of the planet to mail us some toy or knickknack. We trust the transport system to deliver that toy in a matter of days, and we trust our bank to handle the payments. We trust the toy itself will be high-quality, nontoxic, and otherwise safe. And all of that is enabled by a combination of trust in the rule of law (to enforce contracts and regulations), trust in brands, trust in online reputation systems, and trust in markets to regulate all those transactions.

History suggests that just as we have gotten better and better at producing food (and medicine, and all sorts of tools and technologies), we have also gotten better and better at producing trust. However, as I began work on this project, another pattern was emerging: a growing distrust of expertise. We may trust each other more, but it feels like we are trusting experts less.

The data, however, paint a more complicated story. Since the 1970s, the Pew Research Center has been polling Americans on the confidence they have in the people running various institutions. Between 1973 and 2018, the proportion of people who say they have a great deal of confidence in the media has declined from over 20 percent to 13 percent, and trust in medicine has declined from almost 60 percent to 37 percent. Trust in the federal government has declined from almost 80 percent at the beginning of the 1960s to under 20 percent in 2018, although trust in government has had many ups and downs, with trust around 30 percent during the 1970s, trust under 20 percent in the 1990s, and some periods of recovery in between.

On the other hand, trust in some institutions has increased. Trust in the military has increased from under 40 percent in the 1970s to 60 percent in 2018, while trust in the scientific community has been relatively stable moving between 40 percent to 44 percent in the same time period (see Figure 4.1).1

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