What determines differences in general trust levels between individuals? The answer to this question has been something of a mystery to psychologists. There is growing evidence that trust levels are largely determined by intelligence levels.
What is trust and why is it valuable?
Trust is essential to the effective functioning of many social, political and financial systems. We trust the baby-sitter to look after our children, the scientist to develop safe technologies, and we trust banks and investors to take care of our deposits. Trust is the belief that others will not knowingly act in a way that is damaging to our interests, or better still, the belief that others will act in a way that serves to benefit our interests. Trust can bring many payoffs — we can be at work while someone else looks after our children, get the benefits of new medicines and technologies, and get interest payments on our savings.
Thus trust can be seen as a great asset in our personal lives and our careers. Win-win situations involving give and take are often at the heart of smart ‘80-20′ productivity moves, such as when work you need to do is entrusted to someone else who has the expertise to do the job efficiently in a way you cannot. Building an extended ’support network’ of this kind of expertise can save you time and greatly increase your productivity.
The risk in trusting
While there can be ‘win-win’ benefits to trust, trust is also risky. If our trust is betrayed, we would have been better off not trusting in the first place. Entrusting can result in significant personal losses. Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of investors of billions of dollars is a dramatic example of widespread loss through misplaced trust.
Trust and intelligence
According to one influential view, who to trust is seen as a problem solving issue related to benefiting from the norm of give-and-take and ‘win win’ payoffs. Trust is required for the benefits of cooperative reciprocation, and it takes intelligence to figure out whether someone is trustworthy to play by the rules of give and take. Problem solving ability is what we mean by intelligence at its broadest level. So a prediction would be that those with higher intelligence are better able to solve the ‘who to trust’ problem, and are therefore more likely to benefit from the win-win payoffs that trust affords while avoiding the losses that come with betrayals of trust.
A 2010 study investigating the intelligence-trust link
A study published in the latest issue of the journal Intelligence by Patrick Sturges and colleagues has investigated the question of whether IQ levels increase trust levels.
Using British birth cohort studies from 1958 and 1970, in which individuals psychometric abilities and attitudes are tracked from birth throughout the lifespan, the researchers found clear evidence that general intelligence levels measured at 10 and 11 years of age can predict trust levels at 34 and 46 years of age using a broad range of measures.
Why does intelligence result in more trust?
Sturges argues that more intelligent individuals trust their fellow citizens more because due to their intelligence they are more accurate in their assessments of the trustworthiness of others. This means that over the life-course their trust is less often betrayed and they are able to benefit more from norms of reciprocity – i.e. you rub my back and I’ll rub yours.
Those with less intelligence in social interactions are frequently betrayed in trust relations. This results in a vicious cycle of distrust. The frequent experience of misplaced trust leads to a progressive withdrawal from potentially gainful interactions in the future, and over time more biased negative judgements about how trustworthy people are.
Intelligence-trust take home
This study demonstrates an intelligence-trust link, and supports the idea that the more intelligent we are the better able we are to benefit from win-win payoffs in exchanges with others involving give and take.
The article can be found here
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