How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired

Some interesting nuggets here but little practical advice. Some of the conclusions the author drew from his examples didn't ring true for me.Would love to see a similar book on trust and interpersonal relationships such as families and intimate partnerships.I listened to the audio book and was surprised by the number of "moreovers", "therefores", which are just stylistic, but I felt unnecessary.I'm really glad someone is talking about trust. I think it is the glue that society has dissolved and we need it back.

“Regardless of who we are or where we were born, we all know what it means to have our trust broken.” - Peter KimThis is a wonderful book by my former USC professor, Peter Kim. The book explores the matters of trust-building and violation on individual, societal, cultural, and institutional levels. While I don’t love the design of the cover, this is one of those instances when you can't judge a book by its cover. It is well-written, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. I felt privileged to learn intimate details about Professor Kim’s upbringing as a child of immigrants who never lost trust in the American Dream despite the challenges that came their way time and time again.The book offers a comprehensive toolkit for those who have struggled with trust or mistrust, glimpsing how beliefs affecting those sentiments can be biased or entirely mistaken. It's for those who have faced the violation of trust as either an offender or a victim, and seek to understand how one might repair those relationships. It's also for those who seek to understand how trust can be established with new people or groups and ultimately strengthened. And finally, it's for those who seek some way to reconcile our increasingly difficult political divides and understand how we all can manage trust in society.Peter Kim’s storytelling reminds me of Adam Grant's. In his book, he demonstrates his points through various examples, including sex scandals, exploring why the public might have forgiven Arnold Schwarzenegger but not Bill Clinton. He examines Dolce & Gabbana’s struggle to overcome a racial controversy in China and discusses the Sackler family’s efforts to evade culpability for their role in the opioid crisis.The book builds on these insights to confront the challenges of mistrust at the societal level. Professor Kim discusses how poorly we deal with matters of justice and redemption in general through the experience of Father Greg, who founded Homeboy Industries in the most dangerous part of Los Angeles to rehabilitate gang members. He revisits the violent clashes of the 2017 Unite The Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, explores the divergent reactions to the police killings of Brianna Taylor and George Floyd, and looks at how our responses might be shaped by our group memberships. He also examines the bloody legacy of the great partition of India and compares the attempts of the Nuremberg trials in West Germany, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, and the Gacaca Courts in Rwanda to address gross human rights abuses and heal those divided nations. This will be useful for all future leaders, and you will find it valuable in both your personal and professional life. For those of you who have read the book, please don’t forget to leave a review, as everyone who’s ever ordered anything online knows the importance of reviews.

Trust is paramount for all successful and supportive human relationships. In love and in friendship, it is essential. In business, explicit contracts are often drafted so as to protect each party from violations of trust by the other despite the reality that the more trust there is without such binding contracts the better the relationship is for all parties. In politics, trust between the leaders and the people is necessary, and yet we seem to have less and less of it with each passing year. Our initial conclusion is obvious: the more trust we have with others, the better.Through the research and writing of this book, our author shares that there are two main ways that we determine (and violate) trust in another: “competence, or the belief that someone possesses the technical and interpersonal skills that are required for a task,” and “integrity, or the belief that someone will adhere to a set of principles one finds acceptable.”If a trust violation is one of competence, it can often be overcome, because while we need very little to establish that someone is competent, we are willing to “discount a single poor performance as a signal of incompetence, based on the assumption that even highly competent people can occasionally fall short of what they would normally be able to achieve.” If a trust violation is one of integrity, it is comparatively much harder to overcome because “we intuitively believe that those with high integrity would refrain from dishonest behavior in any situation, whereas those with low integrity will act either honestly or dishonestly depending on incentives.” Therefore, when we believe someone has acted dishonestly, we take it as “a reliable signal of low integrity, based on the assumption that only those with low integrity would ever act in dishonest ways.”Let’s say we hire an accountant to do our taxes and they do a fine job three years in a row. Then, on the fourth year, we get a measly return, and after investigation determine that our accountant failed to understand a change in the tax code that should have benefitted us. This violation of trust can be easily forgiven by most people because the accountant has done good work in the past and simply made a mistake. We might not hire them next year, but we can forgive them for their lack of competence.Alternatively, let’s say we discover that our spouse is cheating on us. This destroys our trust in the other, because we will now feel it necessary to re-examine many of their previous decisions and actions through a different lens. We may recalibrate our entire opinion of our spouse from a positive one to a negative one. We might choose to stay in the relationship, but this violation of trust is considerably harder to forgive.With this in mind, when trust is broken, an important part of our response should include consideration of why the offense occurred. Is it a breach of competence or integrity? The answer can help guide us toward the path of reconciliation (or further separation).The key to real trust is being willing to make ourselves vulnerable and is based on the belief that others won’t let us down, even though they could. We need to trust others and we need others to trust us because the more trust we have, the better our relationships will be. The relationships we share with others are one of the foundations of a good, happy, and prosperous life, which makes trust in others one of the highest virtues. We must always do our best to cultivate it responsibly.

You would think that a book about trust would define trust at least once. But it spent the first half of the book on examples of global trust(countries trusting countries) trust in media(TV shows), examples of trust being broken (in violent situations that involve the police!!) and then, roughly halfway, maybe 2/3 of the way through the book, it says "if you've made it this far, I bet you're wondering how to repair trust? Well, in my opinion. It usually isn't worth it"Like. Wtf. Horrible book.