Quotes About Trust

We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.

power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect.

The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.

We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can't.

The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave. This is called the "principle

I define a moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.

We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.

But remember, doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion.

My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person—Jacob—who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life.

Default to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to choose between two alternatives, one of which is likely and the other of which is impossible to imagine.

The paradox of talking to strangers: we need to talk to them. But we're terrible at it (p. 166).

And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.6

The deceptions of Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff, the confusion over Amanda Knox, the plights of Graham Spanier and Emily Doe are all evidence of the underlying problem we have in making sense of people we do not know. Default to truth is a crucially important strategy that occasionally and unavoidably leads us astray. Transparency is a seemingly commonsense assumption that turns out to be an illusion. Both, however, raise the same question: once we accept our shortcomings, what should we do?

allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition.

You've got to let people work out the situation and work out what's happening. The danger in calling is that they'll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a mistake. Plus you are diverting them. Now they are looking upward instead of downward. You're preventing them from resolving the situation.

Markopolos sees his mistake now, with the benefit of over a decade of hindsight. But in the midst of things, the same brilliant mind that was capable of unraveling Madoff's deceptions was incapable of getting people in positions of responsibility to take him seriously. That's the consequence of not defaulting to truth. If you don't begin in a state of trust, you can't have meaningful social encounters.

when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.

Sometimes we're better off if the mind behind the locked door makes our decisions for us

We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger—even if you were in the room—that does not make you a bad parent. And if you are a university president and you do not jump to the worst-case scenario when given a murky report about one of your employees, that doesn't make you a criminal. To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society.

Aplicamos el sesgo de veracidad —aun cuando esa decisión acarrea riesgos terribles— porque no tenemos elección. La sociedad no puede funcionar de otra manera. Y en esos casos raros en los que la confianza termina en traición, aquellos que son victimizados por el sesgo de veracidad merecen nuestra simpatía, no nuestra censura.

point. You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them.

The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. In front that falls a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand the stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers's with caution and humility.

higher. If everyone on Wall Street behaved like Harry Markopolos, there would be no fraud on Wall Street—but the air would be so thick with suspicion and paranoia that there would also be no Wall Street.1