What we don't understand about trust

Events occurring and how they relate/affect Anabaptist faith and culture.
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Bootstrap
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What we don't understand about trust

Post by Bootstrap »

Rules for this thread:

1. Finish watching the video or reading the transcript before commenting.
2. Discuss the presentation, not other topics.
3. Don't change the topic to specific people or groups you do not trust. This is about us and how we make choices about trust.

http://www.ted.com/talks/onora_o_neill_ ... bout_trust
Trust is on the decline, and we need to rebuild it. That's a commonly heard suggestion for making a better world ... but, says philosopher Onora O'Neill, we don't really understand what we're suggesting. She flips the question, showing us that our three most common ideas about trust are actually misdirected.
How does this relate to biblical teaching? How does this relate to your experience deciding what and whom to trust as a Christian?
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Is it biblical? Is it Christlike? Is it loving? Is it true? How can I find out?
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Bootstrap
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Re: What we don't understand about trust

Post by Bootstrap »

I found this interesting:
... the opinion polls are supposedly the source of a belief that trust has declined. When you actually look at opinion polls across time, there's not much evidence for that. That's to say, the people who were mistrusted 20 years ago, principally journalists and politicians, are still mistrusted. And the people who were highly trusted 20 years ago are still rather highly trusted: judges, nurses. The rest of us are in between, and by the way, the average person in the street is almost exactly midway. But is that good evidence? What opinion polls record is, of course, opinions. What else can they record? So they're looking at the generic attitudes that people report when you ask them certain questions. Do you trust politicians? Do you trust teachers?
Now if somebody said to you, "Do you trust greengrocers? Do you trust fishmongers? Do you trust elementary school teachers?" you would probably begin by saying, "To do what?" And that would be a perfectly sensible response. And you might say, when you understood the answer to that, "Well, I trust some of them, but not others." That's a perfectly rational thing. In short, in our real lives, we seek to place trust in a differentiated way. We don't make an assumption that the level of trust that we will have in every instance of a certain type of official or office-holder or type of person is going to be uniform. I might, for example, say that I certainly trust a certain elementary school teacher I know to teach the reception class to read, but in no way to drive the school minibus. I might, after all, know that she wasn't a good driver. I might trust my most loquacious friend to keep a conversation going but not — but perhaps not to keep a secret. Simple.
So if we've got those evidence in our ordinary lives of the way that trust is differentiated, why do we sort of drop all that intelligence when we think about trust more abstractly?
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Is it biblical? Is it Christlike? Is it loving? Is it true? How can I find out?
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