Key Trend: The Decline of Trust

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Topic: Key Trend: The Decline of Trust (Read 8519 times)

metahuman
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Key Trend: The Decline of Trust
« on: 2003-12-13 06:21:44 »

Just to add to our discussions about the rationality / irrationality of trust...

************ <snip>

Key Trend: The Decline of Trust

1919
Eight members of the Chicago White Sox throw the World Series in exchange for money from gamblers. Deceit meets America's national pastime.

1920-1929
The muckrackers: Sinclair Lewis exposes phony evangelists, Ida Tarbell exposes the Rockefellers, and everyone exposes evil businessmen and corrupt politicians.

1959
Appearing before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Columbia University professor Charles Van Doren admits to participating in fixing the hit NBC quiz show "Twenty-One." We can't trust professors, either.

1961
Burt Lancaster wins the Academy Award for his portrayal of an amoral evangelist in Elmer Gantry, based on the Sinclair Lewis book.

1965
Thirty-one-year-old Ralph Nader, a fance since childhood of Ida Tarbell and Sinclair Lewis, attacks General Motors in his book "Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile." General Motors compounds its problem by invading Nader's privacy to find information with which to discredit the author.

July 19, 1972
Americans learn that a Republican security aide is among the five men arrested two days earlier for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel and office complex.

August 8, 1974
Impeached for his attempt to hide his administration's role in the Watergate break-in, Richard Nixon becomes America's first president to resign.

1982
Janet Cooke is fired from the Washington Post after admitting that her 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning story on drug use included a totally fabricated story. Further investigation reveals that Cooke also fabricated her Vassar and Sorbonne educations and fluency in four languages. She is discovered twenty years later selling Liz Claiborne in a Kalamazoo, Michigan, department store. In an Only-in-America twist, her discoverer learns that Cooke has sold the movie rights to her story for more than $1 million.

1982
John DeLorean, a former top General Motors executive, is indicted for money laundering to raise money for his new car company.

1989
Praise the Lord and pass the $20 million: Jim Bakker, who earlier confessed to an affair with church secretary Jessica Hahn, is sentenced to five years in prison for defrauding members of the Praise the Lord ministry of $158 million.

1990
Michael Milken, of the once well-regarded financial firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, pleads guilty and is sentenced to ten years in prison for securities fraud and racketeering in the sales of "junk bonds." Recognizing the harm to its name, his firm ceases operating as Drexel Burnham Lambert.

1995-2000
In defending a federal class action suit against them, tobacco company executives testify they did not know that smoking cigarettes could be harmful.

2002
Enron and Arthur Anderson. The likely beginning on an era of distrusting huge companies.

In "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe," Lily Tomlin offers an understandable reaction to the last fifty years: "I worry that no matter how cynical you become," she says, "you still can't keep up."

We do not know who to trust.

In the 1970s, millions of Americans hitchhiked. The biggest challenge was not the risk--no one felt any--but other hitchhikers, with whom they competed for rides. Today, no one dares enter a stranger's car. Hitchhiking is less popular than whaling.

We disbelieve our newspapers, our priests and preachers, and our political and business leaders--and one another. Fifty-five percent of Americans in 1960 agreed that "most people can be trusted." By 2000 only 34 percent did.

This feeling has evolved from the baby boomers' famous warning, "Never trust anyone over thirty" to the bumper sticker "Question Authority" to the even broader "Who can you trust?"

"A generation is coming of age in America that doesn't take the news straight, that doesn't take the utterances of public figures straight, that doesn't take social games straight. . . . It sees giant con games everywhere." -- Jacob Brackman, The Put-On (1971)

We even disbelieve our own "knowledge." Read the best-known thinkers of the Enlightenment, writing a little over two centuries ago, and you feel amazed by their confidence. They saw a Newtonian world that worked like a machine. Understand the moving parts and you could predict everything. Mankind was about to control the world.

Today, our world looks neither controllable nor predictable; it looks chaotic. Chaos theory fills the shelves of our bookstores and, with the popular book and movie Jurassic Park, enters our mainstream.

We feel uncertain--including about others. But because we feel we can trust fewer people, we value those we trust even more; they are more rare and therefore more valuable. We love the assurance they provide, that there is someone we can rely on in this chaotic world.

Our choices--both their sheer number and type--add to our uncertainty. We cannot see or inspect much of what we buy. Estee Lauder, the woman behind the famous perfumes, expressed our problems with intangibles when she observed, "If a person cannot smell it, a salesperson cannot sell it."

Our senses help us tell if something is right. But how do you smell, taste, touch, or hear a service? What sense can you rely on to determine if you have chosen the right doctor, consulting engineers, or bank?

You worry, what if the service fails? Does the firm offer a warranty or a full refund? Services rarely do, and often can't. You cannot return a bad haircut, knee surgery, or catered party.

Fear, uncertainty, doubt--marketers first noticed this trio of feelings among prospects for computers and software, and dubbed it the "FUD Factor." Today, FUD dominates everything. Clients are fearful, uncertain, and doubtful. But.

Like all problems, this presents you with an opportunity. The ability to inspire trust has becom more rare, and as a result, more valuable--particularly if you explore the recommendations that follow.

************ </snip>

The latter was written by Harry Beckwith in his book What Clients Love.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0446527556/metavirus-20/