The Trust We Assume, the Consent We Feel

About this episode

This episode explores the complexities of trust and consent in social interactions, highlighting how people often agree to requests without fully considering their trust in the requester.

Imagine standing in a busy train station, asking strangers to answer a few questions. How many people would you need to approach before five say yes? In a now-classic study, Vanessa Bohns predicted twenty. The actual number was ten. People were almost twice as likely to agree as she expected, and two decades and more than 14,000 requests later, the finding still holds. We consistently underestimate how often others will say yes to us, and how hard it is for them to refuse. This is really a conversation about trust. We tend to assume that when someone agrees to a request, they have thought it through and decided the person asking can be trusted. Vanessa's research suggests something different. People often say yes in the moment because saying no is hard, not because they have decided to trust. The judgment about trust comes later, sometimes much later, and sometimes the trust we thought was there was never really there at all. In this episode we talk about why gratitude letters mean more than we expect, why Monica Lewinsky could call the same relationship consensual in 2014 and question it in 2018, how a single phone call from Countrywide Financial moved Moody's to reverse a…

People in this episode

Host: Severin de Wit

Topics covered

• trust
• consent
• decision making
• communication
• social psychology

Keywords

• trust
• consent
• Vanessa Bohns
• Monica Lewinsky
• social psychology
• decision making
• communication

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Countrywide Financial, Moody's

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