Hands up if you’ve got trust issues
When her instincts about a nanny proved right, Rachel Botsman explored trust in a digital world, she tells Cara Mcgoogan
As a child, Rachel Botsman could never shake the feeling that there was something amiss with her nanny. But Doris had come via an ad in The Lady, with amazing references, a Salvation Army uniform and a friendly face, so whenever she told her mother that she didn’t trust her, the response was always, “You have a really vivid imagination” and “Don’t make up stories”.
It wasn’t inventiveness that the five-year-old was blessed with, though, but an astute sense of trustworthiness: 10 months after moving in with the Botsmans, Nanny Doris was arrested for running the biggest drugs ring in north London. She’d even used the family Volvo as the getaway car in an armed robbery.
“What I find amazing ... is that my parents really are quite smart,” says Botsman, now 40. “How do we get other people so wrong? That led me down this path of trying to figure out how my parents made that mistake and whether they would make the same one today.”
Botsman’s fascination with this question has led her to become a globally renowned expert and consultant on trust. A lecturer at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, she designed and teaches its course on trust in the digital age.
Trust and technology are the twin focus of Botsman’s latest book, Who Can You Trust? How Tech Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart, which explores how the rise of the sharing economy, digital currencies, artificial intelligence and more, have made us “trust on speed”. For one who encourages incredulity, when we meet in a London coffee shop she has a warm laugh and surprisingly open, unsuspicious eyes.
Two decades on from the Nanny Doris debacle, she was working for the Clinton Foundation – “where I learnt a lot about trust”, she jokes – as Barack Obama ran his first campaign for the presidency. She watched closely as Obama’s team used technology to mobilise people who had lost trust in traditional institutions.
Banks, governments, the church and the media may have lost the public’s trust, but the boom in emerging technologies – such as Airbnb, Uber and ebay – shows people still have trust, it is just being placed elsewhere; flowing sideways into peer-reviewed individuals instead of upwards to unanswerable institutions.
“Technology has changed how we trust,” she says. “People will share their home [on Airbnb] or get in a car with a stranger [via Uber].” The question, then, is “does technology make us smarter about who we trust or does it encourage us to give our trust away too easily?”
She uses Grace, her four-year-old daughter, as an example. In an experiment for her book, she gave her an Amazon Echo smart speaker.
“Grace spoke to it like she speaks to her dolls,” says Botsman. “But her dolls aren’t recording her. She shared things she wouldn’t even share with me, like who didn’t play with her [at school].”
Very quickly, Grace began to see Alexa as her friend and ask for advice. It’s a mistake we have all made, Botsman says. “The other day I was driving home and I ended up in Birmingham instead of Oxford because there was a road of the same name there,” she says. “I trusted the GPS, an algorithm.”
It isn’t something Botsman wants to stop her daughter doing altogether, but she wants to equip Grace with the tools to make informed decisions about how she gives away her trust in a digital age. “When she got an answer she didn’t like, she asked for a different Alexa,” says Botsman. “I used her confusion to explain that there is a company inside the machine.” Grace’s response was that she wouldn’t ask Alexa again.
“We dumb it down for little children, but they actually get it,” says Botsman. “Now, I see her whispering around speakers.”
Instead of being automatic and expected, trust should be thought of as something that people and organisations earn, she believes. By the same token, it is possible to make yourself more trustworthy.
“Business leaders often ask me, ‘How do I get people to trust me?’” says Botsman. “They think it’s through big gestures, but it’s actually through daily conversations and interactions over time.”
The main criteria for any trusting relationship are competence, reliability, empathy and integrity, she says. When we “make a bad decision” about someone’s trustworthiness it is often because “we haven’t thought enough about one of those traits and we haven’t asked enough questions”. Nanny Doris fulfilled the first three traits, which helped her to dupe Botsman’s parents. “She didn’t say in her interview, ‘I’m going to use your house to run the largest drugs ring in north London’,” Botsman jokes. Now, of course, digital footprints and reference checks may have given her away on the fourth.
Another common mistake people make is confusing trust with transparency. Offering too much of the latter, Botsman says, is actually indicative that trust has failed. “I travel a lot for work and my husband often doesn’t know where I am – he just cares I come home,” she says. “That’s actually trust because what he has is faith in the unknown.”
With all her expertise, Botsman has still made some bad decisions when making her own hires. But there is one lesson she has learnt: “When my children said they were dodgy, I got rid of them straight away.”