The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

This post and WindKiller's comments are part of a longer conversation going on at TheFutureOf, with certain elements appearing here only to keep my posts over there brief.

<UPDATE>
That blog no longer exists in its original form. The blog name is still there and it's no longer what I'd hoped it would be. All of my FutureOf contributions can now be found on TheAnalyticsEcology.
</UPDATE>

Yes, I know. I write in arcs and I'm wanting to be brief. Old dog, new dog bones, I guess.

Anyway, WindKiller's comments and my responses follow in italics. Enjoy

I agree with quite a bit of what you stated and thank you for it. "Trust" is also one of the things that is exchanged. It is also the first thing that needs to be exchanged before anything else listed can be exchanged because, unless I have a positive trust relationship with you, nothing else can be exchanged except what I am willing to "barter" to the limit that I am willing to trust no pain will come to me from the exchange.

And yes, this can take the form of an equation. (You're shocked, I know).

Also, I am not sure that the purpose of trust is to regulate social frames, but that is more that I do not have a ready made definition for social frames that makes me comfortable with that statement.

A social frame is what you and I agree to allow each other to do in each other's presence. One social frame is "friendship" and often this means we talk on the phone, see each other from time to time, share joys and sorrows, so on and so forth. A subset of the "friendship" social frame is "close friendship" and perhaps in this frame we talk to each other about deep concerns, maybe spiritual, maybe familial, maybe spiritual. The social frames around "friendship" tend to progress from cognitive to emotional as one goes through subsets from "friend" to "very close friend".

Contrast that social frame with "business associates". We exchange goods and services to which we've assigned certain economic realities. But we don't assign economic value to "friendship".

So the function of trust is to regulate the social frames we allow each other to participate in. The business associate who shows up bloodied on your doorstep and begs you to hide them has greatly altered the social frame of your relationship and done so by violating the assigned trust values that existed between the two of you.

I'd agree if the purpose of a relationship is to allow an exchange, then trust and vulnerability are going to govern that exchange. I'll even go so far as to say that trust is balanced on the belief that one will gain more pleasure than pain from making oneself vulnerable. That trust can be applied to bank loans (where collateral and a reliable legal/financial system is intended to limit the pain), flying (trusting our safety to self interest of airlines/pilots), and sharing personal information with a friend.

Pretty sure this is what I mentioned in the above.

I wouldn't have gone into that explanation if part of me didn't disagree with the statement. The root of my concern is more that I don't think trust has a "purpose".

Well...maybe we're not talking about the same thing. If "trust" didn't have a purpose it wouldn't exist. At least not from an evolutionary psychology or evolutionary biology point of view. There would have been no point to allowing that wiring to become such an important part of our neurology. The fact that the parts of the brain that register "trust" are some of the most primitive is an indication that trust has had a long and fruitful purpose in evolutionary history.

So perhaps we're not talking about the same thing when we use the word "trust".

Attempting to establish trust has a purpose, but trusting is done without intent and, thus, without purpose. In fact, when I say "I am trusting you with this", what I am really saying is, "I am making myself more vulnerable than is warranted given the trust I have in you, so please don't make me realize the anticipated/foreseeable pain."

What is being established are the rules of the exchange. Those rules will be established based on how we trust someone to do something we believe we will benefit from or by. Your statement about making yourself more vulnerable than is warranted is a statement that the rules of the exchange are being modified to allow new conditions -- or new exchanges -- to exist.

Also I would offer that trusting is always done with some intent, that being to avoid pain, receive pleasure or remain neutral.

As a last note I would add that the ability to "trust" usually occurs about the time we lose our "innocence". This is interesting to me because we lose our innocence (in the social sense) only once the brain has matured sufficiently for the parts that do the "trusting" to have sufficient experience to begin experimenting with different social frames. This happens anywhere from 6months to 2 years in the social frame of family and then spreads cognitively as the child engages in more and more non-familial social interactions.

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