In this discussion, Jon Levy and Dave explore why trust is essential for human relationships and survival, tracing its roots to evolutionary pressures that required cooperation for child-rearing. They break down trust into three core components—competence (ability to perform), honesty/integrity (truthfulness), and benevolence (having others' best interests at heart). While all three are important, the conversation highlights that breaches in honesty are far more damaging than lapses in competence, and that benevolent deception can often be forgiven. The dialogue also notes that people tend to emphasize competence when presenting themselves, but emphasizing benevolence may be more effective for building lasting trust in communities and influencing others.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. The issue that we have though is if you want to create connection with someone or with a group, first they have to trust you and you have to trust them. So how do you go about building trust?
So this is super interesting, and I'll be honest, this wasn't stuff that I knew before I started researching the book. But we all say, as you point out, like, trust is really important. It's the basis of relationships, all that. And if you ask people, great, what is it made out of? Like, why do we even have it? Because the fact is that, and you pointed to this a little, that trust is the willingness to be vulnerable, right? And if I'm willing to trust you, you could steal my money, you could hurt me, and so on. So trust doesn't actually make any sense to have, except for one problem. From an anthropological perspective, I came across some research that suggests that a single mother with a child can't collect enough calories in a day to support her and her offspring and protect it. Meaning that without trust, without knowing, okay, this person can care for the child while I collect food, or this person can go get me food so that the child can survive, we would have gone extinct. Trust is necessity from an evolutionary perspective. The problem is that doesn't answer the question of what is it made out of. For the most part, researchers agree that it's made out of three things. Some argue four. But for the purposes of anything we actually care about, three is fine. And that's competence, your ability to do something, honesty or integrity, if you're truthful. And then the third is benevolence, that you have my best interests at heart. And here's what's really interesting. Three pillars, all really important, but they're not equally important. So if I came to you one day and I, I shared something and I, the next day I was like, oh, I found out that study was wrong. You wouldn't say, oh, John is incompetent. He, he got something wrong. I can't trust him anymore. You'd say if you were a YouTube.
Commenter, you would.
For sure, because of cancel culture. So the, so you can see that you can have a screw up in competence and you're still in the clear, right? As long as you have a decent track record. But if you found out somebody lied to you, you then doubt everything they have said and everything they say moving forward. So you can see that a breach in honesty is a much bigger deal than a breach in competence. And then the third thing is there's actually this weird loophole in it. And so if the two of us are walking down the street and I say, hey, Dave, I just forgot something at a friend's house, do you mind if we quickly pick it up? And you're like, yeah, yeah, sure, no problem. And when we walk in, 40 of your closest friends jump out and scream, surprise. It would be very, very strange if you turned to me and said, john, you just lied to me. We can't be friends anymore. And that's because, you know, I lied to you for benevolent reasons, which is I had your best interests at heart. And so we're more willing to forgive that, especially if it's for, like, a temporary kind of joke or something like that, right? And here's what's interesting about it. Everybody tends to lead with competence, like he's capable or she's capable of whatever it is. But really, it seems that human beings care about benevolence more than honesty. So what we should be leading with is that we have other people's best interest at heart.
