Dr. Sarah Johnson introduces trust as a spectrum of belief in others’ decisions—ranging from neutral to beneficial—collapsing when behavior seems alien or harmful, like cultural taboos around sexuality. Conformity, or "tribalism," earns trust by aligning with norms, from Margaret Mead’s leg-bone evidence of civilization to Dan’s hockey-to-football pivot for client rapport. Broken window theory ties petty expectations (e.g., lawn care) to broader social decay, revealing trust as the invisible glue binding conformity and evolving standards—without it, even small changes risk rejection. [Automatically generated summary]
Okay, here we are back with Truth Unrestricted episode two.
Got my good friend Jeff here and we are ready to go.
Got a big episode of the day.
So yeah, let's get right into it.
So today we want to talk about three things and how they interrelate.
Trust, conformity, and a thing I call social expectation.
I think it kind of I'm really looking forward to learning more about that.
Yeah, okay, right.
So trust first, right?
So I have a, I have a, my own kind of cobbled definition of trust that hasn't caught on, obviously, but I still use it.
To me, it describes a lot of things that are happening with trust relationships that, you know, when I read other people's definitions, they don't really describe anything.
They don't help me understand what's happening and what to do about it.
So I came up with my own definition.
Here it is.
It's a what I call a two-part definition.
So trust is just a subjective experience.
It's just something that you or I experience.
It's just, it's just like any emotion, really.
It's an emotion that heavily affects your future decisions, but it's really just an experience.
And it has two parts.
The first is a belief, a subjective belief that you know something about another person, about, you know, what decisions they're likely to make.
And the second part, separate, is that you believe that you will get some kind of a benefit from those decisions.
Or at a bare minimum, no harm.
Well, yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, it degrees very widely as to what benefit is.
If your bar is set so low that you just need to not be harmed by another entity, bear, cougar, you know, the tiger is behind the cage, so I'm pretty sure it's not going to rip me to shreds.
I'll trust the tiger enough to go this close, right?
I mean, that's just how trust works.
And this, to me, this, this exactly describes why things are not trusted.
People are not trusted.
Animals are not trusted.
Dogs don't trust certain people or whatever, because one of these two things isn't in place.
And if either one is not in place, you're not trusting.
Or if, as is much, you know, like this isn't a binary thing either.
It's, it's all by degrees.
So if one of these things is not very strong, you're not going to trust very strongly.
Even with what I've cobbled together here and I've tried to explain it as well as I can, it's not that simple.
I mean, here's for you.
Does that make sense?
I believe so.
I mean, I think like at its root, it does actually seem rather binary because you sort of boiled the concept of trust down to being able to predict.
And again, let's keep it philosophically for the sake of argument now within the confines of interpersonal relationships.
Sure.
Rather than trusting factual things like trusting that the engineering of a steel bridge is going to hold up my car when I drive across it.
Like, just strictly, strictly person to person.
It's what you're saying is boiled down is it's me being confident for whatever reason, familiarity, having known them a really long time, sharing a common faith or some sort of common ground that gives you reason to feel that level of trust.
But it's believing that you can predict how another person is going to react to a given situation.
And then by extension, predicting that the actions that person's take, that person takes would either, you know, at least not make your life any worse and generally make your life better.
And if both those boxes get ticked, that's trust.
So that actually does seem fairly binary to me.
It's like, it's just, it's two logic gates that we're stepping through.
It's a pair of ones and we're good.
They have to both line up at the same time and then shoot through them.
Once I kind of defined it this way, a lot of things started to make sense to me in a lot of things.
I mean, I apply this every time I see two conscious creatures interacting with each other.
I compare this with it again.
And I haven't yet found any kind of serious flaw in my thinking here.
I mean, I even use this to show why some TV shows have characters that seem to be believable and other TV shows have characters that don't seem to be believable.
Because if we can't understand why one character is trusting another character, we find their relationship flawed in some way.
And it's just less believable for us.
It's like it's a loop of code that's happening in us and we understand it on a level that is so beyond our conscious thought that it takes this level of detail to even describe it, even though we all feel so familiar with it just in our everyday lives.
But the one thing that I point out is that, I mean, everyone thinks first about how they are trusting other people.
You know, when I'm talking about this, they think about how they are trusting other people.
You know, they're working through the definition I gave and I, you know, but the one way it's helped me a lot in my life, once I kind of really thought about it, was it really helped me to understand how it was that other people were coming to trust or to fail to trust me and how I could attempt to get them to experience some level of trust in me.
And that's where I feel that I really hit some level of usefulness here with this definition is that personally, I'm a kind of a person that is much different than other people.
I mean, I look the same as most other people I'm with, but almost immediately, I don't know if anyone who doesn't know me and listen to this podcast could tell, I don't think much like other people think.
And I don't express myself in a way that most other people express themselves.
It's a thing that I've never been able to disguise about myself.
I think differently than other people.
And this is a thing that I've come to understand is a thing that has caused some people to be not entirely sure that they trust me.
Or if they do, they trust me eventually and not as soon as they might have if I acted differently.
Does that make sense?
Yes, absolutely.
Right.
So what I began to do starting a couple of years ago, I guess, was, especially with some key people in my life, just try to demonstrate the way in which I make decisions.
You know, because I generally felt that the decisions I was making was going to be good for these people.
I didn't really feel that I needed to demonstrate that part, but I really felt like I needed to demonstrate or, you know, essentially teach some of the key people in my life how it was that I made decisions, because it wasn't a thing that they were looking at and recognizing on their own as a thing that they would have done or that they would have done it that particular way.
And because I seemed to think a lot like some kind of alien creature, you know, I needed to show some of these people that I was, yeah, I think differently, but it's still useful and good and you can trust it.
And that's, I think everyone can benefit from that sort of advice from looking at it from that angle, that idea that we all want other people in our lives to trust us and that being able to show everyone how it is that we come to our decisions greatly increases the level of trust that everyone has in us.
And it's not a thing you'd normally consciously do.
It is a thing that we sort of do intuitively, though.
Like we are already sort of doing that without knowing that we're doing it.
Yeah.
Which is when you when you talk about like demonstrating, like are you meaning uh like stringing the bread crumbs, like uh narrating your decision trees so that other people come to understand what motivates your decision-making process?
Yeah, sort of.
Because like for the for for the first part of your two logic gates on trust, like, you know, coming to believe that you can accurately predict, like we said, the outcome of someone's behavior.
Yeah.
Well, how does one reach the point where one feels they can confidently predict that?
Like what actually creates that baseline of trust?
Because it is, as a definition, a new angle, but one that still sort of rings true with the more common sense of the concept of trust.
But you're still left with the question of like, how do you get there?
How does one get to the point where they feel they can predict someone else's behavior or what they're going to do and that it's going to bring them no harm?
Typically, that comes from like repetition, familiarity, right?
Yeah.
Well, if someone is repeatedly doing something strangely, you're just going to get the opposite view.
You're going to get by repetition the idea that you won't know them.
You know what I mean?
Like one of the examples I use is if is if someone acts extraordinarily strangely in some way.
Let's say they just they don't know what a chair is for.
And you know, you'll immediately, what you first thought was that you would know more or less all the regular decisions this person makes.
But if they don't know what a chair is for, you're suddenly going to question every other ordinary thing that you wouldn't normally question.
Do they know what a table's for?
What about a pen?
Do they even write?
Like what, is this a caveman I'm dealing with?
Like what, what, you know, as soon as they get some kind of decision or reaction that's sufficiently foreign, you're going to question all the other stuff that you would never ordinarily question.
Which I guess is what you're talking about when we're talking social expectation.
Well, we'll get there.
So when we talk about like the idea that we aren't doing this consciously, we aren't attempting to consciously teach other people around us what our decisions are.
We are sort of doing it on an intuitive level.
I mean, we're social creatures.
We're always trying to sort of make friends and prove our worth to our allies.
And we do that mostly through sort of mimicry.
We are conforming to the people around us.
And that is a thing that is causing the people around us to believe that they know a great deal about what decisions we're going to make.
You know, we tend to dress like the people that we're with.
I mean, when you watch Greece, you're not the least bit surprised that all the friends of, you know, the main character are all wearing similar clothing to what he's wearing.
No one questions that.
Everyone thinks, well, of course they do, except that it's kind of a strange way to dress.
I mean, we think so now because it's no longer the 50s.
But, you know, if you're really thinking about how did they come to choose that as a way to dress, you know, the anthropologists will tell you that one of them did and that one was more popular and the other ones wanted to show that one that they were, and then they started to dress more like that one.
And then tribalism at its finest, buddy.
Well, tribalism has a root too.
I mean, you're trying to conform so that you can earn the trust of the other people.
And once you had several that were, once any new one joined the group, well, then they have to dress like them and do their hair in that way to show that they're part of the group too.
And not only are we doing, are we conforming ourselves to try to earn the trust of the people around us?
We're looking for signs of conformity in other people to know who to trust.
And that's happening on a base level that most of us are not consciously aware of.
But once you're consciously aware of it, it's kind of eerie.
It's like whenever, have you ever had someone who performed a card trick on camera in front of you and you didn't know how to do it and then they told you how they did it?
And then you rewind the camera and you look at it.
It's eerie.
It's there, it's right there in front of you, but you didn't see it and then then you can't unsee it all of a sudden.
There's no way you can go back to it being just magic.
But that's what we're doing with, with conformity is this, is that we're trying to earn the trust of the people around us.
That's anthropology, that's like first year anthropology right, and that's yeah, that's the basics of basics of herd mentality.
I saw a really neat uh a thing popped up on my social media thread today, uh, a blurb about uh, Margaret Mead.
Um, when queried about uh, you know what was the first uh discovered historical anthro, anthropological sign of civilization, like you know uh, the wheel or flyer or you know what, what discovery was it that really set us on the way of civilization?
And her answer was, um, evidence of a mended leg bulb, first age.
Yeah well, like her, her case was in the wild.
If you break a leg, that's it dead.
The herd leaves you, the predators get you, life is done, you become fertilizer, you get recycled um, but if you're a member of a society, a collective um, like if you broke a leg and that leg got bound, that means somebody uh, provided you physical aid to carry you someplace safe.
Someone took the time to bound that wound, someone took the time to feed you and care for you and keep predators away from you while you healed.
Um, all of these things are not necessarily things that would have any direct benefit to the person doing it.
It's just a contribution into a collective.
It's the first, in her opinion, signs of, of civilization, an ability to see beyond oneself like an animal and and serve, I don't know, like a greater organism, if you will, which I guess works well with within your theory of conformity yeah, as a tool of civilization.
One thing that first aid, a group that will perform first aid.
They, by doing so, they give those around them a great deal of trust.
I mean if, if you are, you know say, building collapses and you're trapped in the basement, are you going to immediately begin eating all the other people in the basement because you're sure that no one's going to come for you, or are you going to try to keep everyone alive because you're living in a society that you know they're going to dig you out?
There were times in our past, our human past, where we were in the first of those two.
And then we are in the Western world at the very least, and hopefully the rest of the world as well, in the second world.
And we make completely different decisions because of our level of trust in the people around us to want to save us.
A person who is sure that they're going to receive the aid of their peers if they get injured is going to make a different set of decisions when they go hunting.
They might take more chances.
They might get more game because they take more chances.
I mean, that's a thing that, you know, they might get injured more if they take more chances.
But I mean, that's part of the dice you're rolling, right?
One thing that I kind of, when I think about this, when I think about trust and conformity together, if you are conforming to the people around you to earn their trust, then if you lived in a society that was less trusting, does it make sense that you might conform harder, more thoroughly, to ensure that you have the trust of the people around you?
I think it would depend more on consequences of lack of conformity in that untrusting society than whether or not there's any trust there or not.
I mean, one of the key examples I can think of is that some societies even today are, they marginalize people because of their sexuality, for example.
And in those societies, people who are homosexual, they, you know, the consequences of being homosexual are dire often.
And, you know, so they work harder at, you know, appearing to be not homosexual.
And that's a thing that I think has happened in a lot of countries in history.
But like to explore that philosophical thread down another branch, like I would posit the theory that like American society, for example, is not particularly trusting because they as a people, as a culture, are very much into, you know, up by the bootstraps, I look out for myself and the billionaire philanthropists will take care of all of us.
And setting aside the socio-political rant, which I could get on very easily, that is an example of a society where there isn't a great deal of trust.
Like people, for example, don't have trust in their healthcare system.
The majority of the states, they don't trust their police force.
There are still significant consequences of lack of trust.
Many states, of course, still have high levels of bigotry and racism and all that stuff.
But again, keeping this purely in the philosophical bent, for the most part, the consequence of that lack of trust is just a society that's socially fractured and isolated.
Like I don't see people trying to conform harder.
What I see them doing more is getting ever more fractured and focused on extremes.
Well, maybe, I mean, maybe what I'm, the concept I'm thinking of is more about acceptance.
Because when you, I mean, one thing that the U.S. is pretty good at, I mean, we're pretty good at in Canada as well, is acceptance of people who are different.
Granted that there is a lot of, you know, racial tensions and whatnot, but that's a different issue.
And in the case of something like our racial difference, that's usually something that's not able to be hidden.
You know, so it's not a perfect mapping.
Whereas I use the example of like sexual orientation because it's the kind of thing that you can hide effectively.
can choose to act differently than what your sexual orientation would tend to lead you.
And it's also a thing that has been heavily marginalized in the past.
And they, at least in many parts of the US, they are, they tend to be much more accepting of those things now than they used to be.
And, you know, we are more accepting of them here in Canada now than we used to be.
And that's because we're more accepting.
I think we are seeing more people be confident in being open about their orientations.
This is, you know, what we're seeing in that arena is directly because of our level of acceptance of their difference.
And if we weren't as accepting, you know, we see examples of those cultures in our world right now that are less accepting and they're seeing fewer of those people show themselves.
That's, I mean, they're still there, but they don't talk about it.
They try to sweep it on the rug and hide it.
And the individuals who are that orientation, they, I mean, I don't know any of them, but they appear to be hiding it, you know, making the appearance of being just one of the others.
And that's kind of where I'm thinking with this conformity thing is that, is that if the entire society is less trusting of outsiders, that's a different situation than if the people themselves are looking to each other for difference.
And if it's a...
I don't, I don't think necessarily that people are looking to each other for difference.
Like, you know, far more educated psychologists and anthropologists than myself could give a more informed dissertation on this theory.
But like, I do believe that, like my little Margaret Mead story, one of the reasons why we've succeeded as a species and now exist basically at the tippy top of the chain, you know, all the way around the globe is because we are capable of functioning on a pack scale that dwarfs anything else in the animal kingdom.
And how we achieve that scale of PAC is of PAC behavior is through the concept of community and conformity and tribalism.
I think we're wired to, as social animals, we're naturally wired to want to seek affirmation that we are among our clan, whatever our clan is.
And thanks to the wonders of electronic communication, like we can now make contact to a clan and a tribe on a scale that we wouldn't even have dreamed of 100 years ago.
I think sort of like this drive that you're talking about about the drive to want to conform, to try and earn trust.
I almost see it as an instinctual part of human behavior.
Like we have, everybody has a drive from the time you're a teenager.
I'm seeing it with my own kids right now, right?
Like teenagers especially.
They are so desperately seeking a tribe to go belong to, whatever that tribe may look like for them, or whatever they find is familiar.
And yeah, generally they're looking to surround themselves with the familiar, people who act like them, behave like them, think like them, look like them.
Because what can you put more faith in than a mirror of yourself?
Yeah.
So we should probably get moving on to social expectation.
Yeah.
Because we need to include it.
We already talked about it.
And it is very relevant to these two both trust and conformity.
So what do I mean when I say social expectation?
When you're in a social situation, what do you expect from the people around you?
And what do they expect from you?
I mean, do they expect that you're showered?
They expect that you are dressed appropriately for the occasion.
Do they, you know, are you of a, they expect you to be a certain social status?
You know, you're.
Do they expect you to make eye contact and smile when you talk to them?
Yeah, but not just all those little things.
It's all kinds of other things.
What, what are you going to talk about?
Is it expected that you know about the latest hockey scores?
Is it expected that you know about what's going on in the current political situation in the world?
Is it like what other knowledge expectations are actually on that on that note?
I have, if you'll indulge me, I have a quick little story.
Another friend, another friend of mine, we'll call him Dan, is a successful businessman, works in contracting.
And we were just hanging out, shooting the breeze one day at his place, hanging out.
The families got together and he's got a football game on.
And I've personally never really followed football that much.
Like I'll watch, you know, the Super Bowl and the Grey Cup if there's a big get-together for it.
But like I need to be informed what the backstory is for everything because I don't follow it during the regular season.
I'm not, never have been like much of a sports guy.
And he fully admitted to me that he wasn't either.
Like it's not a football guy.
He loves hockey.
He grew up on hockey, but again, that's a family thing.
His dad and him played and it's got a whole personal ring for him.
And he's, you know, now playing it with his son.
But he was never really into football before.
And he got into football totally premeditated.
He started following American football and also got into two different fantasy football leagues with the express purpose of taking a crash course on American football so he could hold informed conversations with American clients.
Because when he was sitting in an office or on the golf course or in the boardroom or in a meeting or whatever with a customer or a sub trade, and he does a lot of work with the Americans, that is their absolute friggin go to small talk.
If you are two American working class or even executive class citizens and you don't know anything about each other, you don't discuss politics, you don't discuss religion, you discuss football.
And everybody is expected to know the roster of their home team and their success rate.
And everybody's supposed to have a favorite team and know absolutely everything about them.
And the chances of the one.
Yeah, and like, I think we talked about it in the last podcast about how like, you know, it's an example of the application of human intelligence, the ability of like the average, you know,
quote unquote beer swilling Johnny lunch bucket American to memorize all of these facts and statistics and information about their favorite pastime for no purpose other than to use it like like like a like a signal like a like a peacock fanning its feathers to advertise to its peers that it's one of them.
And like for him, it was entirely for Dan, it was entirely premeditated.
He learned to enjoy the game.
Like once he learned how it worked, he could appreciate the plays and stuff.
Because again, he's got a hockey background.
So he's not as, you know, disinterested in sports at face.
Yeah, not as sports, sports, well put, not as sports averse as I am.
His motivation for getting there was an absolutely premeditated decision to have something to talk about to kill dead space to try and put American clients at ease and build trust with them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's a perfect example of exactly this, right?
But I mean, when I talk about the level of expectation, I think of other things too.
Like, you know, if you let your grass in your lawn get too long, would you start to feel as if your neighbors are judging you for it?
Oh, 100%.
And that is not that is not a theoretical or philosophical point for me.
I have let my grass get long and I have felt bashful about it.
It felt that I was being judged by my neighbors for it.
Did they express their judgment to you or is it just imagined in your head that you didn't need to see their judgment?
You just imagined that they were feeling it and then felt that pressure.
Considering the likelihood of those particular neighbors ever hearing this podcast, I'm going to hazard a guess that the answer is no.
So I can be completely honest and say yes, no.
Like it was, this is something that was advertised.
It was not hoss on my part.
Like very early into my relationship with one of my neighbors in particular, they set very clear expectational boundaries, which they themselves, which they themselves live up to.
Their yard is immaculate.
They are always friendly, always chatty, always willing to help, always watchful, always in my business, always judgmental.
If my body is not worth it.
You have a neighbor that's attempting to set and maintain a fairly high social expectation in your neighborhood.
Yes.
Yeah.
100%.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
That's and I play ball with it, much like my friend Dan with his work scene.
I play ball with it entirely premeditatedly.
Like sometimes I roll my eyes about getting up to go tend to it.
But I participate in the process because, as I've spoken with my wife about before, as much as like that, it seems petty at times or controlling and your knee-jerk reaction is to push back against that.
I recognize that nothing he's asking of me is particularly unreasonable.
And what the end product is, is broken window theory.
You're familiar with the concept of broken window theory?
Yeah.
So we don't need to dive down that thing.
A quick little sidebar for anyone who isn't, it's used frequently in civil and social planning, the idea that one broken window in a building puts out the image of neglect, which would encourage perhaps graffiti.
And then if you leave the graffiti untouched, then people are going to start leaving more litter laying around because the area just has a general feel that nobody gives a crap.
And then, you know, and eventually you go far enough down that hole and you wind up with like crying.
And that's the same concept in reverse.
That's a lowering of the social expectation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the idea is tend to the broken window and you never get to the violent crime.
I mean, there's a reason why when you drive through different neighborhoods that aren't even necessarily that far away, the neighborhoods a lot of times will tend to look like not like each other, but like themselves.
You know, like a neighborhood is made up of separate housing units.
And coming from a construction background, I would have to caution you against going down that road as further justification for your thesis, because there's other reasons where you see that sort of homogeneity in residential construction.
And it's because it's cheaper for the building contractor.
It's far easier to train a crew of chimps to build one floor plan by rote and then rotate that floor plan 90 degrees every house they move up the street.
Sure.
So they're more efficient.
They get it knocked off at new construction.
That's how she goes 100%.
So you can roll through an old part of town and go from neighborhood to neighborhood and see sometimes wide disparity between them.
But in between the individual houses on each, you're not, you know, often not seeing that much of a difference.
So in summation, these kind of three ideas, I consider like the three tripods of my own personal anthropological study.
And I personally consider everyone to be an anthropologist because everyone is attempting to understand the humans around them at the end of the day.
True.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's trust, which will cause people to conform with each other.
The conformity sets the different avenues of social expectation within a group.
And then it's possible to set a new level of social expectation within your group, but only if the people in your group trust you.
That's an important point.
You can go ahead and be better than the other people in your neighborhood.
You might, you know, be in a rundown dilapidated neighborhood and you decide that you're going to mow your lawn and clean up your yard and everything else.
But if no one likes you, they're going to say that's the snooty guy down the street.
We do our own thing.
Well, and also like that might not be the culture of that community.
Like those might not be the feathers that Peacock needs to show in that particular market.
Yeah, maybe.
Right.
But that's the thing is that if the community feels that he needs to be the one that trusts them, they won't conform to him.
But if they all trust him and respect him, then the tendency will be for some at least and then eventually more to try to raise their level of expectation to meet him.