The Personality Trait That Tells You If Someone Is Trustworthy Or Not
Think of the person that you trust the most. Was there a moment where you knew you could trust them? A defining decision or reaction that solidified your view of them? Or was it slowly built over time, something that developed and grew the more you got to know them?
Trust is complicated, it's intimate, and it's slow. But it can be faster.
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Building Trust
It's impossible to know if you can trust someone you just met. That type of belief, that confidence that someone would never do you wrong, comes with time. Often lots of time, it can take years before someone feels fully ready and willing to trust someone in their life!
However, one study might have just proven that there's an easier way to know if someone's trustworthy or not. You just have to look at their relationship with guilt.
Give Or Take?
A 2018 study, well, a series of six studies compiled into one analysis rather, had participants playing different types of economic games that tested their behavior and measured certain personality traits. These traits included things like openness, neuroticism, and extroversion.
Part of the games involved a choice between keeping or returning lost money to someone. This became one of the imperative actions that helped researchers reach their conclusions about precursors to trustworthiness.
Future Feelings
For a certain group, when they were given that choice, they knew they could get away with keeping the lost money without the person knowing, but they chose to return it anyway. Some people would do this for honor's sake, yes, but many did so because they anticipated the guilt they would feel if they chose to keep it. That anticipatory guilt is exactly how you can identify if someone's trustworthy or not.
When someone analyzes a situation and comes to the conclusion that they'd feel guilty in the future for doing a certain action, that potential for guilt stops them from doing the wrong thing.
The Cost Of Trust
"Trust and trustworthiness are critical for effective relationships and effective organizations.," wrote the study's authors. "Individuals and institutions incur high costs when trust is misplaced, but people can mitigate these costs by engaging in relationships with individuals who are trustworthy."
"Our findings extend the substantial literature on trust by deepening our understanding of trustworthiness: When deciding in whom to place trust, trust the guilt-prone."
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Keep Good Folk
They frame this in a workplace context, saying that employees who are prone to feeling guilty should be the ones you trust with sensitive matters, but this goes for any kind of relationship, too. Someone who's heavily emotionally impacted by any wrongdoing they partake in is simply far less likely to partake at all!
As the study's first author, Dr. Emma Levine, wrote, "Our research suggests that if you want your employees to be worthy of trust, make sure they feel personally responsible for their behavior and that they expect to feel guilty about wrongdoing."
Starting Trust Early
How can you actually use this to identify trustworthy people? Hypothetical questions or situations can always draw out a good answer, even if you just tell them a story from your life about someone doing something wrong and see how they react.
Some may consider this overly cautious or strange, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to be extra sure you can trust someone. There are snakes in the grass everywhere you look these days. Ensuring that trust early can save you a lot of heartache later.
