Trust leads to Trust?

If you’ve ever been to Rio de Janeiro, you’ve most certainly seen the writings of ‘Gentileza’. A prophet for some, a crazy old guy for others, he walked around the city grafting his messages of peace, love and kindness in street walls and viaduct pillars. His moto was: “kindness leads to kindness”. Crazy or not, he was right.

I remembered him when I read Domenico de Masi’s article about Finland: the happiest country in the planet.

“[Finnland] It is the northernmost country in the world, with a third of the territory located north of the Arctic Circle. The part that coincides with Lapland, when it is not frozen, is covered with tundra. With its 5.7 million inhabitants, it is the least populated country in Europe. Seas and lakes remain frozen eight months a year. The night lasts six months. The temperature drops below 30 degrees. […] It is the home of the extreme music genre Funeral Doom metal. In short, there are all the ends to make Finland the most desolate nation on the planet […] But no: the latest UN World Happiness Report, elaborated on seven parameters: GDP per capita, social support, expectation of a healthy life, freedom in life choices, generosity, perception of corruption, relationship between length of life and partner parameters -healthcare workers in the country; ensures that Finland is the happiest out of 156 countries examined.”

When he compared the position of Italy (47th), his country, in the rank, he concluded out that:

“our inferiority with respect to Finland does not depend so much on the economic situation as on the degree of freedom, generosity, honesty. In other words, we are made unhappy by our way of relating to each other. Ennio Flaiano said that Dante’s hell is nothing but a mass of Italians breaking the bolls of other Italians. The UN ranking certifies and quantifies it.”

If the happiness of the happiest country on Earth is based on freedom, generosity, honesty, what is the sadness of the saddest country on Earth based on? You guessed right: mistrust.

I read the tale in Erik Barker’s book ‘Barking up the wrong tree’:

“Ruut Veenhoven, the Dutch sociologist known as the “godfather of happiness research,” maintains the World Database of Happiness. And when he looked at all the countries of the world in terms of happiness, Moldova came up dead last. What garnered this little-known former Soviet republic such a dubious distinction? The Moldovans simply don’t trust one another. It has reached epic proportions, so much so that it stifles cooperation in almost every area of Moldovan life. […] Getting people to act collectively for the benefit of the group seems impossible. Nobody wants to do anything that benefits others. Lack of trust has turned Moldova into a black hole of selfishness.”

But it got more interesting when he talks about the research of a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, on cooperation. Robert Axelrod created a competition among computer programs to play the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Briefly, the game requires you to trust that your partner will not turn you in after you both got caught on a robbery. Whoever turns the other in, goes free and the other gets a 5 years sentence. If you both play guilt, you get 3 years. If no one talks, you both get 1 year. The best outcome for both is not to talk and take one year. But, can you trust your buddy?

“Researchers from psychology, economics, math, sociology, and other disciplines sent in a total of fourteen algorithms plus one program that would behave randomly. One of the programs was insanely nice: it always trusted its opponent even after being screwed over. Another of the programs—named ALL D—was the opposite: it always betrayed its opponent without fail. Other programs rested somewhere in between. Some of the more complex programs played nice for the most part while occasionally trying to sneak in a betrayal to get a leg up. One program called Tester monitored the other player’s moves to see how much it could get away with and then would backpedal if caught betraying its opponent. Which ethical system reigned supreme in the end? Shockingly, the simplest program submitted won the tournament. It was only two lines of code. And it’s something we’re all familiar with: tit for tat. “

“All TFT did was cooperate on the first Prisoner’s Dilemma round, then in every subsequent round, it did whatever the opponent did previously—that is, if on the previous round the opponent cooperated, it cooperated on the next round; if the opponent betrayed, it betrayed on the next round. This simple program decimated the competition. So Axelrod ran the tournament again. He reached out to even more experts and this time had sixty-two entries. Some algorithms were more complex and some were variants on TFT. Who won? Simple ol’ tit for tat. Again.”

Robert Axelrod conclude that selfishness doesn’t pay off. It may look promising at first, but it destroys the very environment it needs to succeed. It seems even simple software code can learn that:

“Even TFT, the eventual winner, always got the short end of the stick early on because it cooperated initially. But as time passed, the bad guys couldn’t match the big gains of the cooperators.”

“The main reasons for the success of TFT were that it was nice, it was forgiving, it was easy for the other players to deal with, and it would retaliate when necessary. This happens in real life. We get a reputation. The majority of our dealings are not anonymous. Most of us deal with the same people over and over again.”

My conclusion from reading all these articles is that, like Gentileza would say, Trust leads to Trust. So we should stick to building trust behaviours. Nothing can make us happier!

However, after a short while, it was impossible not to realize that ‘mistrust (must also) leads to mistrust’. And this may be the reason why so many of us are so stressed and unhappy. We need to get out of our mistrust death spirals.

Initially published on February 13, 2020 on LinkedIn Trust leads to Trust?