The basic idea is that your trust battery is pre-charged at 50% when you’re first hired or start working with someone for the first time. Every interaction you have with your colleagues from that point on then either charges, discharges, or maintains the battery—and as a result, affects how much you enjoy working with them and trust them to do a good job.
The things that influence your trust battery charge vary wildly—whether the other person has done what they said they’ll do, how well you get on with that person, whether your opinions of that person are biased by others you have a high-trust relationship with, and lots more.
I think it’s important to note that trust batteries don’t always start off at 50%. In fact, starting at 50% is probably pretty rare.
Consider this example: you begin working at a new company, Widget Corp. Widget Corp says that they treat all of their employees as if they were family. That is a very common thing for companies to claim, and yet very few of them actually mean it or anything close to it.
So then, at least in this context, I don’t think the trust battery starts off at 50%. I think it starts off at something more like 1%. And when trust batteries are low, you have to do more to persuade, just like how strong priors take more evidence to move.
I feel like this isn’t well understood though. I observe a lot of statements similar to “we treat all of our employees like family” without follow-up statements like “we also know that you don’t have reason to believe us, and so here is an attempt to provide more evidence and actually be a little bit convincing”. Some of the time it’s surely because the former statement is some sort of weird simulacra level 3⁄4 type of thing, but a decent chunk of the time I think it’s at level 1⁄2 and there is a genuine failure to recognize that latter follow-up statement is very much needed.
Notice when trust batteries start off low
I think it’s important to note that trust batteries don’t always start off at 50%. In fact, starting at 50% is probably pretty rare.
Consider this example: you begin working at a new company, Widget Corp. Widget Corp says that they treat all of their employees as if they were family. That is a very common thing for companies to claim, and yet very few of them actually mean it or anything close to it.
So then, at least in this context, I don’t think the trust battery starts off at 50%. I think it starts off at something more like 1%. And when trust batteries are low, you have to do more to persuade, just like how strong priors take more evidence to move.
I feel like this isn’t well understood though. I observe a lot of statements similar to “we treat all of our employees like family” without follow-up statements like “we also know that you don’t have reason to believe us, and so here is an attempt to provide more evidence and actually be a little bit convincing”. Some of the time it’s surely because the former statement is some sort of weird simulacra level 3⁄4 type of thing, but a decent chunk of the time I think it’s at level 1⁄2 and there is a genuine failure to recognize that latter follow-up statement is very much needed.