Distinctions and Concepts: Forms of Trust

(This is the third in a series of posts talking about a concept/or tool for how to think about something, distinguished from most of my other posts by being relatively short and easily digestible. The first post in this series was about Risk/Reward Modeling; the second post, particularly relevant to this topic, was Language as Variable Passing)

In Language as Variable Passing, I talked about how some words we use to communicate carry a particularly large payload of meaning and are therefore particularly prone to misinterpretation — where in a two-person conversation one person uses such a word to mean one particular payload but the other person interprets it to mean a different payload. In a professional context, one of the concepts most in danger of misinterpretation that will cause pain is trust. In my experience, this happens because we have two very different ways to think about trust, but only typically use that one word to describe both.

Personal, Moral, Trust (PMTrust) The personal, moral, concept of trust is somewhat squishy — if I trust you in this way, it’s not so much necessarily that I trust what outcomes you’ll generate, but rather that I trust in your intentions, your good faith, your honesty. As the word “personal” indicates, this trust is, in fact, highly personal — it’s about how I see you as a person, and how I see you acting in the context of our relationship.

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