January 22, 2009

If you mistrust everyone and everything, you’ll be constantly bitter and miserable, and you might as well stop living, writes Saad Shafqat

There is a very short distance between trust and mistrust, yet they are also worlds apart. Trusting is difficult. It requires taking a chance, because there is always a risk that your trust will be betrayed. Mistrust, on the other hand, comes easily, because it is risk-free.

The problem, of course, is that while mistrust ensures you will never get betrayed, it offers no other rewards. If you mistrust everyone and everything, you’ll be constantly bitter and miserable, and you might as well stop living. Trust, in contrast, is full of possibilities, opening the door to happiness and fulfilment. You could even say that trust is the basic ingredient that has made human civilisation possible.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to appreciate that, as with any successful relationship, trust is the core currency of a happy marriage. Mutual respect and an instinctive appreciation of your partner’s needs and desires help build trust. What makes trust ever so precious is that it is fragile. Trust developed over years can be shattered in a minute. It happens all the time, and not just in marriage but in any cooperative arrangement — friendship, social setting, diplomacy among a bloc of nations.

There is a saying that all trust is blind trust. A thought experiment called the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ illustrates this particularly well. The problem was conceived in 1950 by two American theorists who were studying superpower relationships in the nuclear age, but it has wide applicability in many other areas of life, too. It goes as follows: Two robbery suspects are arrested and placed in separate jails. They are offered an identical deal by the police — betray your accomplice and you go free, but if your accomplice has also betrayed you, then both will get the maximum punishment. If neither you nor your accomplice say anything, then you both still get punished, but the sentence will be very mild.

It’s a dilemma, because if you trust your partner but your partner decides to betray that trust, you end up losing badly, while your partner gets rewarded for the betrayal by walking away free. But mistrust is not an easy option either, because if both of you betray each other’s trust, both lose badly. The best collective option for both partners is to say nothing, in which case you must have faith that your partner won’t say anything either. This conundrum has parallels in any cooperative human relationship. It’s a clever demonstration that the optimal way forward is to trust your partner and have faith that your partner will do the same.

If trusting is hard, trusting after getting betrayed is much, much harder. Nobody wants to keep getting hurt, and you have to protect yourself by looking for clues and signs that suggest your trust will not be betrayed yet again. What these confidence-building signs are will depend on the particular contours of your relationship, but the main idea is that your partner should be making an effort to win back your trust. Trusting again is a greater risk, but trust is better than mistrust, and greater risk also brings with it the possibility of greater rewards.