The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More by David DeSteno

Author:David DeSteno [DeSteno, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-01-29T14:00:00+00:00

Get Out of My Way

Most of us don’t usually stop to think about it, but the simple act of crossing the street necessitates some level of trust. Unless you’re crossing the road in a ghost town somewhere in the Midwest—a place where there are no cars for miles—stepping into an intersection makes you vulnerable to being hit. Remaining safe, then, usually involves trusting that approaching cars will slow down or stop and allow you to proceed. Now, you might say that you never actually think about trusting a driver, but I’ll bet you do. Most people have had that experience of trying to decide whether cross in front of an oncoming car. Does it have a lot of collision damage? Is the driver blaring his music and revving his engine? My guess is that if the answer to either of these questions or ones like them is yes, you’d probably choose not to cross the street when you might have done so if the car were a cute VW Bug being driven by a nun. You see, the choice to cross isn’t just influenced by the physics of velocity; trust plays a role.

To understand how this fact relates to social class, consider the following. You’re standing on a corner in downtown San Francisco. It’s a four-way stop, meaning cars are supposed to pause before entering the intersection. As you’re sipping your latte, you look to your left before stepping off the curb. The car approaching is a shiny BMW. Do you cross? How about if it’s a Ford Fusion? The model of trust I’ve been describing suggests you might want to pause if it’s the BMW. There’s really only one way to tell, though. You’ve got to put yourself out there. And that’s just what Paul Piff and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley did.

As cars approached this busy intersection in San Francisco, a researcher would enter the crosswalk. Unbeknownst to drivers, he also noted the make of their auto and their perceived age and gender. The main datum for each car was whether the driver paused to let the researcher cross at the stop sign (as is required by the California Vehicle Code) or sped up to cut him off and thereby proceed more quickly toward the driver’s goals. Piff and colleagues divided drivers into five SES categories based on their cars—think Hyundais on one end and Ferraris on the other. The results were quite remarkable. At the lowest end of the class gradient, every single driver stopped to let the pedestrian entering the crosswalk continue on his way. Midway up the class ladder, about 30 percent of drivers broke the law and cut off the pedestrian so that they could keep going. At the upper end of SES, almost 50 percent of drivers broke the law to put their own needs first.At the most basic level, these findings offer a provocative warning. When you’re vulnerable, upper-class individuals are more likely to disregard the trust you place in them if doing so furthers their own ends.

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