Would You Trust a Gangster Nanny? - Cautionary Questions with Rachel Botsman

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According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, to trust is to believe that someone is good and honest and will not harm you, or that something is safe and reliable.

As loyal listeners to cautionary tales, you will have heard countless stories of people who were not good and not honest and did do harm.

People such as Ponzi scheme fraudster Samuel Israel III, art forger Han van Megeren and the murderous Dr.

Harold Shipman.

And yet, these men were trusted.

Why?

I've told you about people who trusted in technology when they shouldn't, and those who didn't trust it when they should.

Again, why?

To help us get to grips with issues of trust, I am joined by my friend and fellow Pushkin voice, Rachel Botsman.

Rachel lectures in trust at Oxford University and her new audiobook, How to Trust and Be Trusted, is available via pushkin.fm or wherever else audiobooks are sold.

Hello, Rachel.

Hello, Tim.

It's nice to see you.

It's great to see you as well.

So we have asked...

listeners to cautionary tales and subscribers to your newsletter, Rethink, to get in touch for this special trust-based edition of Cautionary Questions.

Before we dip into the mailbag, though, please tell me, why is this topic so interesting to you?

For so many reasons, but I generally am interested in things that aren't always visible, that are quite difficult to see or complex to understand.

And trust is one of those forces.

You can't see or touch trust, and yet you feel it and you know when it's gone.

So I like topics that are very complex and ever-changing and that impact so many different areas of our lives.

And I guess that's very true for trust.

It's hard to think of an area of our life that isn't touched by trust.

Yeah.

And I should say, just before we started recording, you caught a glimpse of my script with that definition of trust from the Cambridge Dictionary.

And you said, well, that's boring.

Yeah, I think it's wrong as well, to be honest.

Yeah, I'm listening.

Go for it.

Well, first of all, good.

is a terrible word, right?

Like good is so subjective.

Trust is subjective, but what does good and honest mean?

And something that is safe and reliable.

Well, I don't like that because it's making a distinction that the way you trust someone and the way you trust something,

there's a distinction there which doesn't seem right in the age of intelligent technology.

But also, so many definitions of trust are about knowing what to expect or knowing what the outcome is.

And that is not really the complexity of trust.

The way I define trust is it's a confident relationship with the unknown.

So trust sits much more in the space of risk and uncertainty.

And I think it's when people think, oh, I know I can trust someone because they're good and they're honest or they're safe and reliable.

That's when we make really bad decisions.

Fascinating.

We will get into all of this.

But before the questions, you can trust Cautionary Tales to give you this music.

I'm sitting with Rachel Botsman, the author of How to Trust and Be Trusted.

Rachel, you ready for some questions?

I am.

I think they're good questions.

Don't reveal to everybody that you've already seen the question.

It's fine.

It's fine.

We're being trustworthy and transparent.

Okay, this question, which is a total surprise and you have not seen before.

I have not.

She's seen the questions.

But they were on my newsletter, Tim, so I had to connect them.

It's fine.

Okay.

Our first question, as you very well know, is from Lee in Iowa.

And Lee asks, is trust given, earned, or buried so deep in our psyche that we don't even know?

Now, my sense is Lee kind of knows the answer to this question, but

it's a very interesting question because trust is given and it's earned.

And sometimes we do those things without even thinking.

We just lead with our intuition.

Now, the way that works can differ.

You could give me your trust by saying, come on this show.

And then I have to earn that trust back.

So I have to show up.

And if that works, we form this really nice loop.

This is what we call by a trust loop.

But if you give me my trust and it turns out I don't know anything about this, that is is broken.

What also can happen is you can give your trust to someone and they can choose not to trust you back.

It's slightly different, right?

So you can choose to trust a leader in your organization and they're not ready to trust you.

And that can really hurt as well.

But most trust decisions we do without even thinking about them.

And that's because we couldn't function if we were always thinking about giving.

and earning trust.

But particularly in new relationships, you want that loop to be really, really healthy.

This idea that it's buried so deep in our psyche that we don't even know, is it a very mysterious process, who we trust and who we don't?

Or would you think it's perfectly explicable?

It is often led by intuition and not information.

You don't always think about why am I trusting this person, especially when you make decisions when you're under pressure or you really want to trust that person.

Then it is buried deep within us.

And also our trust relations form very early, around three or four.

We develop our trust profile, which is tied to risk and safety and protection.

So, so much of that is environmental conditioning that is set from a really young age.

So, that suggests that there's a type of person who is trusting or who is not trusting.

It is.

So, around 70% of people are naturally trusting.

That is their instinct to trust.

And that is a lot to do with nurture and environment versus nature.

They've learned from experience that most people do deserve to be trusted.

Yeah, I can depend on you.

I've got that feeling.

By the time children hit primary school, if they've never felt that relationship, teachers will talk about this, right?

They have children that they don't know how to trust an adult because they've never had that experience and can lead to all kinds of unraveling.

And 30% of people won't give their trust until they have proof.

So they hold their trust back, which is actually quite tricky to live life like that.

It reminds me of the famous marshmallow test.

It's a psychological experiment.

These children were given a marshmallow and said, you can eat this marshmallow now, or if you don't eat the marshmallow while I go away, I'll be back in a few minutes and I'll bring you another marshmallow.

And if you can wait, you get to eat two marshmallows.

And some kids eat the marshmallow and some kids don't.

The psychologist who led this experiment was Walter Michel.

Turns out this was predictive of success later in life.

So the kids who had the willpower to hold on and wait for the second marshmallow, that was a wonderful predictor of going on to be an incredibly successful human being.

There are lots of different arguments about what this really shows, but one possible interpretation, I would guess, is some children are told if a grown-up promises to bring you a marshmallow, they are actually going to show up with a marshmallow.

And others have learned from painful experience.

do not in fact follow through on their promises and you might as well eat the marshmallow while you while you can.

And some people, they see that as an experiment in self-discipline, but I see it as an experiment in trust.

And you probably know this, Tim, but many people have tried to recreate that experiment.

And I can't remember when they did it, but someone changed who the person was that gave the instructions.

This is really interesting.

So a teacher, parent, or a grandparent, someone that was familiar to them and a total stranger.

And it turned out the key variable was the person giving the instructions.

So that's because, oh, I trust you.

I trust that you're going to bring in the other marshmallow versus my own self-discipline.

So it was really interesting that the outcome of the experiment changed depending on how much they trusted the instructor.

That's fantastic.

We have a question from MJ

who asks, why do people continue to trust someone after finding out that they've been lied to?

It's a very common one, both in personal relationships and professional relationships.

I tell a story in the book about my parents who trusted a nanny.

They hired her because she said she belonged to the Salvation Army and she liked helping people.

And she had a Scottish accent and accents are very influential in how we trust.

They're a signal.

Long story short, she came into our house.

She was wearing the uniform, she was carrying a tambourine.

She lived with us for about a year before they realized she was stealing.

money and doing various other things.

I mean, the story culminated with her stealing our car and using it as a getaway and an armed robbery.

So this did not end well right but the point is to the question she lied to them so many times

and what I wanted to find out from my dad is exactly this question like why did you continue to trust her and they said well she was actually a really good nanny so in the context of taking care of us yeah it didn't matter that she was dealing drugs on the side in the context they needed her yeah she was trustworthy yeah

was that also your experience that she was a good

She was.

She was actually very friendly.

But the thing is, like, when I was taping my dad, he did confess, and this is a big one, it would have been inconvenient to get rid of her.

Right.

You know, she'd been in our life, she understood how everything worked.

And so to find someone else felt like effort.

They were really busy in their lives and they were traveling lots and their business was in that real period of pressure.

Inconvenience is a big one, but also we don't like the uncertainty of getting rid of that person.

So there is a certain certainty of placing your trust in an untrustworthy person and I think that speaks volumes to how much as human beings we hate the unknown yeah did your father know and decide it's fine okay she might be an armed robber but she's a good nanny And we haven't got time to find another nanny now.

Or was it more a case of

he was in denial, just choosing to overlook or not wanting to believe the evidence that was starting to accumulate?

I think it was a bit of both.

I think they were in denial.

So they didn't look harder or they didn't look further into the situation.

So she once lied that her uncle had died.

And then, so when her mum rang, you know, my dad said, I'm so sorry about your brother's loss.

And she was like, well, Uncle Charlie's having a cup of tea and a digestive right next to me.

And he just made all these excuses for her that now when he looks back, he's like, how did we miss so much?

Yeah.

And it wasn't until the police came to arrest him because it was our car.

And then they went into her room and they realized the extent of the fraud because she'd been using his credit cards.

So, yeah, I think they definitely turned a blind eye to things they just didn't want to see.

And they're not stupid people.

And they're very good parents as well.

So I wanted to ask about the relationship between wishful thinking and misplaced trust.

So a couple of cautionary tales that come to my mind, both involving people who are not stupid.

So one, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who famously was fooled by a teenage girl into believing that there were fairies at the bottom of her garden.

Here are some photos of the fairies.

And he really wanted to believe in fairies.

He wanted to believe more broadly in a spiritual realm.

He'd lost his son in the great influenza of 1918.

He'd lost his wife.

She had died quite young.

He'd lost his mother and he really missed his mother.

The idea that they might still be out there somewhere was really important to him.

And so he was absurdly receptive to this idea of fairies at the bottom of the garden, despite being not only a doctor, but also a semi-professional photographer.

That was wishful thinking.

And then, another example, one of our early cautionary tales, involved the art forger Han von Megren.

And he painted a Vermeer

that was designed to appeal to a particular art critic who had a particular theory about Vermeer's career.

There were some paintings that had never been found, so he'd speculated publicly that he thought Vermeer had painted this particular Caravaggio-influenced canvas, but we'll never know because it'll never be found, and then along comes this Caravaggio-influenced canvas.

It was a spearfishing attack, really.

Van Megren knew that this critic, Abraham Bradius, believed that this painting had been painted.

And so he was so vulnerable to the con, even though it really was objectively not convincing, but subjectively perfect because of the power of wishful thinking.

Yeah.

But wishful thinking, I mean, as a concept, it's so interesting.

Like, when I think of wishful thinking, I think of hope and I think of possibility and I think of creativity and pegging your ideas and your mind on something where you're not quite sure whether it exists.

And that's where most discovery exists.

You kind of have to be a wishful thinker to be creative, to be an entrepreneur, to be a scientist.

But where it gets sad is where

people play into the vulnerabilities.

Think of all the hacks people fall for around their health, like the wishful thinking around this vitamin or this drink or this thing is going to make you feel better.

So Maria Konikova, who presents a Pushkin podcast, Risky Business, but who's also made a study of cons,

she told me she doesn't want to be the kind of person who could not be fooled by a con artist.

Because to become that person, you also have to be a person who doesn't trust anybody at all.

Maria's actually in the book because this point she makes that if you can't be wishful and you're not open to being conned, you're just cynical.

And there's a difference between that and just being totally gullible.

And I think the difference is that some people don't slow down enough to get enough of the right information to make a good decision.

And that's the real problem.

Like, where do you go to find reliable factual information to make a decision in a high-risk situation?

So, most bad trust decisions are made very quickly.

Interesting.

Thank you, Rachel.

Rachel Botsman and I will be back after the break for more questions of trust.

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We are back.

You are listening to a special Q ⁇ A episode of Cautionary Tales.

I am Tim Harford.

I'm here in the studio with Rachel Botsman, the author of How to Trust and Be Trusted.

And we're answering your questions on trust.

Another question?

Yes.

Okay, right.

Andy in Connecticut writes that my whole life, people, often complete strangers, have been entrusting me with their secrets.

They always say the same thing.

I've never told anyone this.

I don't know why I'm telling you.

I don't probe.

I don't pressure.

Most of the time we're just chatting.

The thing is, they are right.

They can trust me.

I'm not a judgmental person, and I'm dedicated to the principle of keeping secrets.

As they say in Seinfeld, it's in the vault.

But his question is,

how do they know that?

After just 15 minutes of chatting, is there such a thing as a trust aura?

I love this question.

It's quite a weird question.

I like it.

I love this question too, because Andy, I have the same, I don't know if it's a gift or a problem, because I can't tell you the stuff that people tell me, whether it's friends, but then, yeah, like...

total strangers on a plane.

This happens to me a lot.

So I'm with Andy.

I don't think it's his like energy and his aura, but he's probably not giving himself enough credit that it's his presence, it's the way he's listening, it's the questions that he's asked, that he's genuinely curious about that other person, and that other person feels a very quick sense of confidence in them.

And you have to be really careful because the worst thing is, you know, people say, I shouldn't tell you this because someone told me it in secret.

And what goes off in my head is, well, I'm never telling you anything, right?

Because you've just, you've opened the vault.

The relationship between trust and gossip and trust and secrets is an interesting one.

If you spread a bit of gossip, on the one hand, you are clearly violating trust.

You're telling a secret that you shouldn't be telling, but at the same time, you're building a sort of conspiracy with the person you're trusting with the gossip.

You're trusting them not to tell other people that you were the source of the gossip.

Yeah, but I think once that trust has been broken once, it's broken.

Yeah.

They told you.

and you're telling me.

So you've kind of given me permission to tell someone else, like you've broken the chain.

But you know what's really interesting?

I think um

secrets aren't the enemy of trust actually people that you really trust should be able to keep secrets yeah it's deception and I think once you actually tell someone else's secret you've come out of that space of secrecy into the place of deception and this this applies to leaders as well that they should be able to have secrets if we trust them it's when they deceive us that's what's really damaging to trust yeah at the same time if you tell somebody a secret and you you you confide in them and then you say, now you're not allowed to tell anybody else, I've heard this described by Dan Savage, the advice columnist.

It's like if you're queer, you're in the closet, you tell somebody else, but they're not allowed to betray your secret either.

Well, now they're in the closet with you.

So in a sense, that secret is, the way Dan Savage expresses it, it's a kind of a burden that you've...

you haven't halved, you've forced on them.

Yeah, I think it's actually a really good point because a good friend or someone who's very self-aware, they will ask for permission I'd really love to share something with you it might impact how you see so-and-so is it okay I think sometimes we are in a culture of oversharing and we don't sometimes ask for that permission to offload that thing on the other person and therefore they can't carry it they have to break the trust yeah I have one for you, Tim, that I think will be of interest.

It's from a listener called Naga, and she writes, Dear cautionary crew, I'm curious about trust within cults.

I was in Montana during the heyday of the Church Universal Triumphant.

Their leader, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, famously predicted the end of the world and ordered all of her followers to take extreme measures to be prepared for it.

I remember this story.

When it also famously failed to take place, her followers didn't seem to lose any of their trust in her.

Instead, they stuck with her under the rationale that her prediction and their evasive action had, in fact, prevented the predicted apocalypse from taking place.

How can this kind of blind trust prevail in the face of such obvious and abundant evidence to the contrary?

I've wondered about this story, so I'd love for you to answer this question.

Well, I'll have a go.

I mean,

it's really an exact replay of an earlier incident involving an end-of-the-world cult called The Seekers, which operated in Chicago in the 1950s.

And like a lot of other cults, the world is going to end, the aliens are going to come, they'll destroy the world.

But if you believe in the message of the aliens and you act in the right way and you remove metal items, take the clips out of your bra, take the zip out of your trousers, and the aliens will preserve you.

And it's all going to happen at midnight on, I think it was December the 23rd, 1953, something like this.

It was a very specific date.

What's interesting about that cult is a group of social psychologists had found out about them and sent some grad students to infiltrate the cult and basically be there on the day when the aliens were supposed to arrive.

And it's a very famous book about this episode called When Prophecy Fails, because spoiler, the aliens didn't come, the world didn't end.

And so we covered this story in a very early episode of Cautionary Tales called Buried by the Wall Street Crash, Crash, which was mostly about great economist Irving Fisher,

who predicted that stocks have reached a new and permanently high plateau.

He predicted that two weeks before the Wall Street crash began in 1929 and wiped 89% off the value of stocks and destroyed Fisher's reputation.

It's all about, do you change your mind when your forecast went wrong?

And Fisher didn't.

A lot of these cultists didn't.

And the psychological theory that was promulgated was called cognitive dissonance.

So the basic idea is you've got two different ideas in your head.

So one is I believed this cult leader who told me that the aliens were going to come.

And the other belief is I'm a perfectly sensible human being who does not make bad choices.

And then when those two beliefs are in conflict,

You've got to change one of them to ease the cognitive dissonance.

So which one are you going to change?

Are you going to say, okay, turns out I'm an idiot?

Or are you going to say, actually, there's some reason, there's some excuse I'm going to make on behalf of this cult leader?

And in this particular case, the people who were most committed to the cult beforehand, who you might have expected to feel most betrayed and be most angry when the prophecy failed, actually, they doubled down.

So they started issuing press releases, they started phoning the journalists.

Previously, they hadn't been very interested in talking to the press, but at the very moment where the whole thing just seemed absurd, that's when they started calling the Chicago Tribune and going, hey, great news, aliens haven't destroyed the world.

And it's the same story as Nager is relating.

Because of our prayers, because of what we did,

we successfully averted the apocalypse.

Aren't we brilliant?

That's the theory of cognitive dissonance.

It's incredible.

But

yeah, all I can say is Nager's experience is this is not the first time this has happened.

I think it's one of the most fascinating theories because it's like the wrestling of the mind.

But it's really helpful to understand when it comes to trust because

so much of our lives focuses on what we believe,

not why we believe things.

And understanding the motivations behind your belief, why you need to believe something is true, why you really want to trust that person, it explains misplaced trust so well.

This is also really helpful in terms of understanding other people, that if you focus on what someone believes, it leads to judgment right those silly people who believe in that cult or in that politician whatever it may be but if you really dig deep and say why does that person need to believe that it's usually because of some air of vulnerability there's usually some hole in their life that this thing or this person is trying to fill and then you come from a place of compassion not from judgment.

They have to place their trust somewhere.

They may not be placing it in the most trustworthy thing.

I think another point that it's worth emphasizing is that we are all influenced by the people around us and fundamentally a lot of what we believe is based not on first principles but on our trust in some authority or another.

So a friend of mine believes that vaccines cause autism.

She's wrong,

but you know she believes it.

I believe that carbon dioxide emissions cause climate change and I'm right.

However,

the reason reason that she believes that vaccines cause autism and that I believe that carbon dioxide emissions cause climate change, the same basic reason, which is that there are people who we trust who've told us that

and they've presented us with evidence that makes sense to us, but that we're not really qualified to understand.

And I believe what they believe.

Not because I've read every scientific paper, not because I understand climate physics, but because that's where I've placed my trust.

Yeah.

Ready for another question?

Yeah, let's go for it.

We've got one from another Andy.

And this Andy writes that he is a massive fan of yours, Rachel.

He's a man of taste.

He is a fraud manager.

And he writes, I often find that victims of fraud are too trusting of their scammers, with some evidence suggesting that some victims get scammed multiple times.

So the question: What advice would you offer to encourage more trust in good fraud advice and to have less trust of the nasty little blighters who commit fraud?

It's a really hard one to answer because I feel like the fraudsters now replicate the trust signals.

So like a bank sending you a text to authorize a payment.

They're using the same mechanisms for you to give your trust to the wrong person or thing.

I fell for one the other day, and it's like you have a pass or but someone didn't pay the whatever duty.

Click on this link, put it in your credit card.

So I did, and that was so stupid, but it's because I was doing something else.

And I didn't really think, well, who wouldn't pay tax and who wouldn't pay the duty?

And I think it's a huge societal problem as to how we have better signals and marks to know when it's coming from a trustworthy source.

So in my book, How to Make the World Add Up, the data detective in the US, US, I argued that a lot of the mistakes we make when we're thinking about

statistics that are presented to us on social media,

they're basically the same mistakes we make when we're presented with any factual claim.

We are rushed, we are angry or otherwise emotional, and that is very often why we believe things that we shouldn't believe, because we've actually not got the headspace and the calm to really take a step back and ponder and think seriously.

So, the first piece of advice I give people when they're thinking about a statistical claim is search your feelings.

Quote my all-time statistical hero, Darth Vader,

search your feelings.

Any emotional reaction is all perfectly valid, but it's not necessarily putting you in the space to logically evaluate what's been put in front of you.

And actually, I think the same thing is true for that email that comes in that says, oh, by the way, you've sent $399 to somebody via PayPal.

If you didn't send this transaction, just click here and we'll fix it.

Just

slow down a moment.

Is that email real?

So it's giving yourself that time.

It's noticing your emotional reaction.

I think that's really good advice.

Ready for another question?

This is absolutely your area of expertise, I think.

I think this is something I actually shared.

Well, the meme may or may not have come from you, Rachel, but in any case, Betsy from California has sent it to us.

And the meme she has sent to us says this: this.

1998, don't get into a car with strangers.

2005, don't meet strangers from the internet.

2018, use Uber to summon a stranger from the internet and get into their car.

She says, many transactions online and off rely on rating systems as a proxy for trust.

How can we make these systems more reliable and less vulnerable to scams and fraud?

It's a good question.

And Betsy is my cup of tea.

This question, I mean, this is how I got into studying trust.

It was 2006.

I first started looking at how trust works in these platforms.

The investors were really interested in the efficiency to match supply and demand.

So you have something, and I want it, and we can now be matched.

But the piece that no one was studying was the trust signals, the trust mechanisms.

This is amazing.

Like, how are we going to trust strangers?

And to Betsy's point, like, things that we described as hitchhiking and dangerous have now become these massive multi-billion dollar platforms like that's a remarkable thing yeah now

the thing that is as amazing is that the trust systems or the reputation systems haven't improved that much yeah yes we have far better insurance we have far better identity checks so checking this person they who they are who they say they are we have better payment mechanisms but the reputation system is still.

Yeah.

Think about eBay and the five stars that were given by Haunted Pirate.

We haven't come that far.

Now, there are some that have got a lot better.

Airbnb introduced the double-blind system, right?

So you wouldn't just give a good review to get a good review.

Yeah.

They introduced context.

So if I'm traveling with my two kids and I'm looking at a place, that's a completely different context than, say, a business traveler.

Yeah.

And they just introduced very good filters and markers and categories that meant it became less subjective.

Yeah.

Although from my subjective experience, no really bad experiences, but several where you get there and you're like, oh, yeah, okay.

I see how this looks so good on the photos, but it's kind of not that great.

And then in the end, you're like, oh, do I really want to give a three-star review?

Or maybe it's just easier to...

click five stars and contribute to the problem.

I stayed in one in Australia recently and it described itself as a remote farm getaway, but it was literally 10 minutes from the equivalent of the M25.

The traffic, right?

Not really the remote farm cicadas I had in my head.

And they also failed to mention that it came with a cat.

Now, my friend who was staying with me is very allergic to cats.

And I was like, I can't leave a bad review because this person is really dependent on the income.

Sounds like they should mention the cat.

The cat and the motorway, but that feeling of guilt is wrong because you actually have a responsibility to the community to protect others.

But the feeling of guilt is wrong, but it's also real.

It's real.

So, and that's a problem for these kind of decentralized trust platforms.

It is.

And also, who's responsible for when it goes wrong?

We still haven't solved that problem.

Yeah.

Thank you, Rachel.

We are going to take a quick break and we will be back soon with more questions of trust.

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We are back.

I am sitting with Rachel Botsman and we are answering your questions.

I should reveal, we have been for a run together.

We have.

You are very well dressed.

No one has ever accused me of being well dressed.

I meant that you had lots of clothes on.

It was a cold day and we weren't running that fast, but

I wanted to ask about fitness trackers because I've become fascinated by these things.

These connected watches that will measure your heartbeat.

They're really just the last few years, but they're now ubiquitous.

My watch...

really helped me to run more and to vary my runs and so on.

But I'm aware that there are certain risks that, first of all, I might not be able to trust all the data I'm getting from the watch.

Second, I might not trust the data the watch is revealing about me.

Or third, that this training program might not be very well suited.

In principle, the watch knows I'm an old man, but in practice, it doesn't seem to take that into consideration.

So, this idea of trusting your body to this thing on your wrist, that's what I wanted to get your reflections about.

Yeah, so can I ask, do you feel like the watch is in control of you?

Hmm.

No, but

I do care about what the watch thinks.

I do too.

I do like to sort of get enough activity.

I don't really care about calories as such, but the watch's estimated calorie consumption is sort of an indicator to me of how active I've been.

I kind of like to get that to a particular number and I get a bit fidgety if I haven't.

And there is this absurdity, of course, if sometimes you forget to wear the watch or you forget to switch it on.

And actually, it doesn't matter because you're still getting the exercise whether or not the watch is paying attention.

But of course, it does matter.

I've run with people where they say, oh, this one doesn't count, but I'm like, what do you mean?

And they're like, because I haven't got my watch on.

I'm like, ah, it's gone a bit fast.

I just talked to a sleep scientist at Oxford who did an experiment where he got people who were having trouble sleeping and gave them a sleep tracker.

In the morning, they were asked, well, how are you feeling?

Are you feeling sharp?

Are you feeling full of energy?

And the same question was asked at 12 and at 3.

But after they'd first given their feedback, how are you feeling?

The watch would tell them,

you had a terrible night's sleep or you had a brilliant night's sleep.

At the end of the day, they went back to the sleep clinic and he said, okay, I'm sorry, but all of that was a lie.

But what people were told by this sleep tracker in the morning governed how they felt all day.

Totally.

Have a good night's sleep.

Your watch told you you had a bad night's sleep.

You will act as though you had a bad night's sleep.

It's incredible.

It does really tie to trust because sometimes we really trust things when we want to be in control.

And so, you know, you can see like amazing indicators and it is very rewarding.

Like if you're putting the work in, seeing all these things, especially as you get older, you have to work quite hard at it.

But I do think when it takes the enjoyment out of it, where you can't run without the watch, I know someone who runs with three, a whoop, a garmin, and an apple.

Okay.

And that is...

obsession and that is like clinging on to something so tightly and anyone that's done sport knows that the magic thing about sport is it's a journey into the unknown.

It's the ultimate trust in yourself.

That's why I love long distance running is that you don't know what's going to happen when you get over 16, 17, 18 kilometers.

Like it's so interesting where your mind goes.

And the watch.

Oh, I do know what's going to happen at 17 kilometers.

I'm not going to stop.

You're going to stop.

Yeah.

I love that.

Yeah.

I usually need the toilet around them, but that's probably too much information.

But the point is, like, a lot of trust is, it's a confident relationship with the unknown right so my my watch can tell me exactly today what my marathon time is

and it could be boiling hot it could be freezing cold my knee could blah it could trip on a cup what so many things can happen like i'm gonna be disappointed if i hold on to that yeah time too much trust in fitness trackers bad bad thing

and wearing three bad thing

you know some of the insurance plans like if you measure all these steps that they'll give you discounts and things.

But I've seen people in airports tapping their feet.

Have you not seen that?

They take the watch off, they put it around their ankle to keep up their step count.

Yeah.

I've seen it on the train, people do that.

Like, that's too much, right?

I have one last question for you, Tim.

I love this question.

It caught my eye.

It's from Kayan in New York State.

So, Tim, why do people trust podcasters so much, even on topics they aren't knowledgeable about?

Yeah, I feel seen.

I mean, it's a good question.

But I think that people trust cautionary tales and they trust other podcasters

because trust is often placed not on the basis of a rational assessment of expertise, but on other intuitions.

So do I like this person?

Do I know this person?

People have me in their ears every week.

They get used to my voice.

I feel like someone they really know and somebody you really know is somebody you can trust, right?

So that's part of it.

Or maybe I sound fluent.

I have a nice accent.

I don't stumble over my words.

Of course I don't stumble over my words because I've got a producer cutting all the ums and the ers out or retaking if I stumble.

But because I sound fluent, well that also sounds trustworthy.

And these are just proxies for actually being deserving of trust.

But I think they're proxies that

work.

You're the expert on trust.

Does that make sense to you?

So if you think about the way trust used to work was who that person was,

what they were saying, and then lastly, how they made that person feel.

And that has completely been inverted.

So number one is we make most trust decisions, particularly through social media or audio content, based on feeling how that person makes you feel, and then who they are, and then what they say.

and that's why people that make us feel comfortable you know there's some podcasters and it does literally feel like oh Kirsty Young does this like if I'm stressed I just turn but there's others that are funny and there's others that are salacious but it's such an important point because

people with feeling that understand that mechanism how I make you feel is whether you're going to engage with me yeah they are the ones rising to the top yeah more so than ever before so there we go thank you so much for sending in your questions and thank you so much to Rachel Botsman for answering them.

Rachel, this has been a lot of fun.

It has, yes.

We've gone all over the place.

So Rachel's audiobook is How to Trust and Be Trusted.

It's available via Pushkin.

Rachel, you also have a newsletter.

Remind us of the name and where people can sign up for it.

It's called Rethink and it's on Substack and I love writing it.

I genuinely do.

We will be back again next week with another classic episode of Cautionary Tales.

In the meantime, if you have a question for us for our next episode of Cautionary Questions, please send it in.

The email address is tails at pushkin.fm.

That is T-A-L-E-S at pushkin.fm.

Send in those questions because we do love hearing from you.

Thank you for listening.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at TimHarford.com

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fienes and Ryan Dilley.

It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.

Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio.

Ben Nadaf Hafrey edited the scripts.

The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrah, Sarah Jopp, Masaya Monroe, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Bretta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey and Owen Miller.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

It's recorded at Wardore Studios in London by Tom Berry.

If you like the show, Please remember to share, rate and review.

It really makes a difference to us.

And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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Kevin and Rachel and Peanut M ⁇ Ms and an eight-hour road trip.

And Rachel's new favorite audiobook, The Cerulean Empress, Scoundrel's Inferno.

And Florian, the reckless yet charming scoundrel from said audiobook.

And his pecs glistened in the moonlight.

And Kevin, feeling weird because of all the talk about pecs.

And Rachel handing him Peanut M ⁇ Ms to keep him quiet.

Uh, Kevin, I can't hear.

Yellow, we're keeping it PG-13.

MMs, it's more fun together.

This is an iHeart podcast.