Unconditional trust in the tower of Babel

The complexities of everyday life are so big that we just cannot move around checking every possible thing that can go wrong. First of all because it would be an inordinate amount of work, but also because we would offend many people with our inquisitiveness and, in many cases, this kind of check would even require access to facilities that are not meant for public access. If we consider the example of drinking water, we could in principle try to visit the city's water reservoir and check that the quality is good enough, but under the same pretense an evil-minded individual might gain access to it and pollute it. That is why the city administration asks everyone of us to give up on our need to check the water quality and trust their systems instead. We could still go ahead and check the water at our house, but the fact of life is that most people do not do so unless they have reasons to doubt that the systems in place are working properly. Actually, even if the water would come out murky one day, we would not necessarily rush to check the quality ourselves, but instead go to the water works service website and trust once more that they accurately report any irregularities in their service.

Both from the point of view of the society and of the individuals, the advantages of trust are quite obvious because it saves all the effort and resource that the individual checks would require. If all families where to check the quality of their water daily, the energy cost and amount of waste generated in the process would be huge. Instead, we just trust the system and are free to devote those resources to more profitable undertakings. In fact, a similar course happens in our decision making: trusting our intuition is both faster and easier than examining the question in detail and providing our own assessment, and this for hundreds of decisions every day.

Photo: Rex Sorgatz

However, trust is not completely free of cost: in every situation where we trust someone or something we are giving up on the possibility to check. That is how trust can be built or destroyed over time, because it is not unmovable. The repeated interactions inform how trusting we can be in each situation and in fact we are perfectly capable to adapt our level of trust to the recent events. Just think of the life cycle of a car: initially, it is very reliable, you can spend months without thinking about conducting any maintenance on it, and the absence of problems reinforces that believe. Then, after a few years you start to have one mechanical problem here, another there, and you adjust your expectations accordingly. For instance, you would not plan crossing the desert with just one car that has been giving mechanical problems and can fail at any moment, but you would not give it a second thought with a well oiled one.

It is remarkable how evolution has imprinted on each species, over the course of millions of years, different levels of trust, depending on the conditions under which they evolved. One unlucky example is the dodo, a flightless bird native to the island of Mauritius, which was so unprepared to run away from the human visitors that it became extinct within 70 years or its discovery at the end of the 16th century. On the other end of the scale, zebras are incredibly weary of anything human and this lack of trust makes them impossible to domesticate on any practical scale. In human societies, the level of trust varies from region to region and there are very strong contrasts: while in some Eastern Asian nations like Japan or Korea, the trust in the institutions is at its highest, Western societies of protestant heritage (US, Australia and Northern Europe) insist on keeping a controlling eye on the government even if they essentially trust it. Western societies of Catholic tradition (Southern Europe and South America), no the contrary, are less trusting in the government and rely strongly on smaller and less formal circles for support (families, neighborhoods, etc.). At the bottom end of the trust scale are many African and Southern Asian countries, where the government is regarded more as a burden than as a help. But this is just a general picture and there are indeed some countries in Africa which are making excellent progress at establishing the rule of law and fostering public trust in the institutions.

The high number of experiences required to determine the adequate level of trust in a given situation means that we often end up having to take shortcuts and adopting a certain confidence without requiring evidence, but just by transitivity. It could be called meta-trust: if someone we call our friend recommends a given restaurant we would once again spare ourselves the effort of assessing the restaurant first hand and take our friend's judgement for good, with the hope that, within one visit or two we would be able to confirm the evaluation with our personal experience. The problem is that this approach does not work for one-time products and services: if your realtor rips you off when buying a house it is certain that you will not go with them again next time you buy a house... in ten or fifteen years.

This reflection about trust started because of a picture I received from a friend. There is a genre of internet jokes for failed translations in all sorts of signs: if you just type your message in Google Translate it is likely that you will get a reasonably accurate translation, but it might not be contextually or culturally adequate for the purpose of the sign. The fact that the person translating the sign might be unable to understand the result at all makes for a clear case of unfounded trust. But then again, when you only need to translate something once in a blue moon, how are you going to learn from the experience.

Still, the most hilarious case of faulty translation was the road sign in Wales that my friend sent me. Apparently the authority responsible for the sign prepared the text of the sign, emailed it to one of their usual translators to comply with the dual-language Welsh Language Measure, and simply printed the answer and hung the sign. Only a few days later, Welsh language speakers started to report that the text in Welsh meant "I am currently on vacation, please report to another translator in the team".

Funny situations like this one are almost unavoidable in the Tower of Babel that the Internet has become. English has become the main vehicular language (at least in Western countries) and in fact has many more non-native than native speakers, but this only makes the situation worse because language competence among non-native speakers varies a lot. Some people will unavoidably fall prey to the unconditional trust, because they do not have the resources to check these one-time translations. If you happen to run into one of these failed translations (they are very common in restaurant menus), just be so kind as to provide in writing an alternative that would sound more natural to the speakers of your language, so that the owner of the sign has a chance to fix it. But, above all, do so humbly, because you do not want them to be offended by the remark! Have a nice evening.