Trust has to involve several people
Should we trust someone when we haven't seen how they treat other people?
A friend of mine sometimes repeats this truism: “Someone who is nice to you, but not nice to the waiter, is not a nice person.” It’s still a helpful reminder.
I’m finding it’s getting harder and harder for me to trust people. What I mean is: I need to put in more work and collect more information about someone before I can trust them.
This isn’t because the proportion of trustworthy people around me has changed. It’s just about me. And maybe about you, too? As we spend time in our careers, one would hope that we gain in seniority, social capital, and respect. And while I’m a tenured white guy and I’m not getting more tenured, more white, or more mannish, over the years I’ve gotten seniorier and powerier and statusier. While the fraction of people who I should be trusting is a probably a constant, the fraction of people who will treat me and the people close to me well enough that they might give off an vague impression of trustworthiness is a variable, and its value seems to be increasing over time.
This is useful to understand but if I’m not savvy, this dynamic can lead me to put people in a position where they can get harmed by others.
It should go without saying that people treat you differently based on your identity and your role. Like the professor from Cal State Long Beach who was locked out of his office and campus police refused to let him back in because they apparently couldn’t even fathom that a Black guy could be a professor. That kind of nonsense just happen to a person with my identity, and it takes actively keeping in mind my own identity when I have these kinds of interactions. With anybody, really. The first example that come to mind from my own experience is from a time when I was traveling across part of Australia with a couple students from my university (as a bit of biology touristing and cultural exposure before they started on long-term research experience in a government lab in the Northern Territory). We were passing through the alpine region to walk up to the country’s high point (which is a steady amble uphill, by the way), and were spending the evening in the rural town of Jindabyne. We were just hanging around the square in the main shopping zone, and I zipped off to run an errand for a bit. I don’t remember what it was, but it was generally quiet and I was away for maybe ten or fifteen minutes. When I came back, it was super clear that my students were startled and extremely relieved that I had come back. While they weren’t targeted by violence or slurs, it was made extremely clear to them by the folks generally passing through that they didn’t fit in, might not be welcome, and just got a bunch of stares that put them at unease. They were two Latinas in their early 20s, in a place that was extremely white. And apparently when I’m around with them, they weren’t subject to abuse, but when I stepped away, everything changed. This wasn’t an incident per se, but if I was more present of mind, it could have been avoided.
I need to remember that this is the kind of thing I need to be conscious of on a daily basis at work and when supporting students and colleagues.
For example, once up on a time, among the ever-rotating set of staff in the grants office was a guy who worked with science faculty on grant submissions. We are accustomed to frequent turnover, sometimes for better, sometimes not. I thought this guy was super solid. He was highly responsive, didn’t assume I was incompetent, had a good attention to detail, and all that. After he’d been on the job for some months I was chatting with fellow professors in my department about how relieving it is that we had someone reliable in this position, and they were like, “What, really?” It turns out their experience was the opposite of mine. For all that respectful treatment that I got from him, they did not. What’s the difference? I imagine it has a lot to do with gender, age, and ethnicity. I admit I was a little surprised, but I also admit that I should not have been surprised.
I’ve had similar experiences over the years, in which there are people who just fine to/with/for me, but are less than that for my colleagues with different identities, or with my own students. You’d think I’d learn, considering I’ve been well aware of this issue for a long time. I think I’ve repeatedly experienced failures in this area because I’ve been needing to retune my understanding of disparity in the way that I am treated and the way that other people might be treated. I’ve now hitting all the sweet spots with respect to my identity, seniority, and positional privilege that it’s just hard to build any foundation of trust based on my interactions with someone.
So what does it take to decide someone is trustworthy? I need to see this someone in action with people with all different kinds of identities and positionalities, and in different contexts.
It’s perfectly fine to engage in professional work with people who haven’t necessarily earned your trust. We have to do that. This is part of the job. A lot of what we do doesn’t require trust. But when it comes to supporting the professional development of trainees, protecting the safety of junior academics, and collaborations where the glue depends on equitably valuing the contributions of many parties working together, trust is needed.