The Leap: The Science Of Trust And Why It Matters Part 3

The gacaca process was remarkably decentralized, and each community essentially created its own genocide court. Individuals brought forward their own charges. Defendants argued their own sides. No lawyers helped the perpetrators or the victims, and many of the judges didn't have a legal background. Some worked as cooks. Others were farmers.

Without question, this sort of community-based approach comes with its own set of problems. Some Hutus didn't feel that the local judges were impartial.31 Others didn't testify because they were afraid of retribution. One Tutsi woman claimed that her uncle would give her a cow if she falsely accused a man of rape. But overall, the gacaca system worked far better than you might expect. The process appeared to be relatively fair, and many Hutus were exonerated, with an acquittal rate of around 25 percent.32 At the same time, many victims said that the process gave them a sense of agency. By creating their own courts, by describing what had happened in front of the killers, many Tutsis began to nurture a sort of owners.h.i.+p over the genocide, according to political scientist Phil Clark.33 What might be the most surprising is that the gacaca also provided a type of intimate liability for those who killed, and by confessing in front of their victims, many Hutus felt "a sense of release from feelings of shame," according to Clark. The Hutus were able to engage the people that they harmed. They could speak of their crimes-and ask for a way to work together again.

This social approach to justice matters more than you might think. It turns out that there's a groupish angle to the law, and when a trial is well executed, it can give people a broader feeling of dignity. If you're still skeptical, consider what happened in South Africa's Robben Island prison in the 1960s. Even by the standards of the Afrikaner-led government, the prison was a brutal place, as Chuck Korr and Marvin Close make clear in their book More Than Just a Game.34 The men would have to hammer rocks into smaller rocks. Food was typically a filthy gruel. Some, like Nelson Mandela, ended up spending almost two decades in the prison, and the guards often brutally beat the men, telling them, "Here you will die."35 But with the help of the Red Cross, the prisoners eventually won the right to play soccer games on Sat.u.r.day afternoons. The men dubbed the league the Makana Football a.s.sociation, and they took the rules of the game very seriously. Everything was done according to FIFA rules-the club system, the number of referees, the way that complaints were registered. If a player had a dispute, he could turn to the Makana Football a.s.sociation's disciplinary committee as well as a special appeals tribunal, according to Korr and Close. One quarrel over a disputed game dragged on for months, complete with legal briefs citing the Magna Carta. The referees' union even had a motto: "Service before self."

Why did the players take the game so seriously? Why, in a prison where the men could barely get a piece of food, would they take the time to establish a court to decide the implications of a bad offside call? I asked the question of Marcus Solomon. In 1964, Solomon had been picked up by the South African police while he was driving to a fundraiser with Winnie Mandela, and during his ten years in Robben Island prison, he became one of the soccer league's main administrators. Solomon explained that the game was a way for the men to build a sense of ident.i.ty, a way of developing their shared values, an approach that brought them together as a community. "Sports developed out of our struggles," Solomon told me.

The league also gave the men a way to practice building a new type of nation. The prisoners were ultimately preparing for the day when they would take over South Africa. Take Dikgang Moseneke. He wrote his first legal brief as the prosecutor of the soccer league's appeals tribunal, and after the fall of the apartheid government in 1994, Moseneke became a judge on South Africa's Const.i.tutional Court. Or consider Jacob Zuma. He was both a player and a soccer club administrator at the island jail, and he eventually became the president of South Africa in 2009.

Everyone on the island knew that the men were doing more than just kicking a ball around, including the prison guards, who eventually built a wall so that Nelson Mandela could not watch the games from the window of his cell.36 "Our sports have played no small role in bringing us closer together," Solomon once wrote to his teammates.37 "Some of us might say: n.o.ble ideals and big talk which has no bearing on the real situation. My reply to those people is in the form of a question: If we had no n.o.ble ideals, would we have been here today?"

We often think that courts are only about outcomes: Did you win or lose? But it's not quite that simple, as psychologist Tom Tyler has argued. We also want our voices to be heard. We want people to respect our values. When researchers in Minnesota studied the experiences of drug offenders some years ago, they found that the convicts who believed their case was "handled justly" were more likely to finish a drug rehab program.38 So if a cocaine addict thought that the judge was impartial, he or she was less likely to do cocaine again. And one of the main reasons that the convicts gave for staying off drugs was not the threat of more jail time or random urine testing or the promise of job training. It was meeting with the judge.

As for Rwanda, gacaca is over, and the process didn't heal all of the nation's wounds by any means. But for many people, the court system made a significant difference. I met Fredrik Kazigwemo one afternoon in a village devoted to reconciliation a few miles west of Kigali.39 Short and thick, with the shoulders of a hockey linesman, Kazigwemo told me without emotion that he had murdered seven people during the genocide. Some died in their homes. A few were finished off in their fields. After the genocide, Kazigwemo went through gacaca. He also approached the families of the people that he had killed to ask for their forgiveness.40 He explained himself in letters and personally visited their homes, and as he told me his account, our eyes met. He didn't seem worried or anxious or scared. Kazigwemo knew, it seemed, why justice was necessary.

For the past few years, Benjamin Ndizeye has been traveling around Rwanda, working with different communities to build up a sense of society, a feeling that other people can be trusted. Typically, a local pastor or village official will call Ndizeye and say there are people in his community looking to reconcile. Ndizeye will then spend a few days in the town, walking the group through a workshop built around a film called As We Forgive. Afterward, he'll typically help the group set up a small cooperative, which pools money so that the members can buy farmland or animals together.

While I was in Rwanda, I followed Ndizeye around for a while. We spoke with some of the survivors of the genocide. We visited some of the fields that the Hutus and Tutsis had planted together. Near the end of my visit, a Tutsi victim, Anastase Kayisire, told me that he believed that a Hutu woman in his cooperative may have lied about her family's role in the genocide. Had her husband really not partic.i.p.ated in the murdering of his family? Had she really tried to protect his sister from the militias? He wasn't sure. "The truth is few," Kayisire told me.

It can be easy to understand some of the contextual factors that set the stage for a genocide. It can be easy, too, to watch someone do penance and serve time in prison. What's often the most difficult is building up trust again. To put it another way, a lot of trust recovery boils down to the question: Can people change? Because once we deal with our own disappointment, what makes a difference is that we will not be disappointed again. We're willing to trust people again, even strangers, but only if that trust is rewarded.

This makes our belief about the nature of the violation important. A few years ago psychologist Peter Kim gathered a group of subjects and showed them a video of an accountant applying for a job.41 The subjects then found out that the applicant had once sent in a false tax return. Half of the subjects were told that the applicant's error was a matter of skill: The applicant did not understand the tax code well enough. The other half were told that the applicant's error was a matter of morals: The candidate filed the wrong tax return on purpose.

What Kim found was that the framing, or context, of the betrayal made a difference. If someone made a skill-based violation, an apology helped people trust that person again. But if someone made a moral violation, people became less forgiving. Why does this happen? According to Kim, we care about the nature of the violation because it suggests whether or not someone will double-cross us again. So if an accountant goofs up someone's taxes because he doesn't know the ins and outs of capital gains taxes, he may simply need more training. But if an accountant makes a mistake because he's morally corrupt, he's probably going to commit that same error again.

This issue goes beyond trust recovery. Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck studies why some people regain trust, and for her, much of it boils down to the way in which we view human nature.42 Some people, Dweck argues, have a "fixed" mind-set. They believe that either people have a talent, or they don't. Other people have a "growth" mind-set. For them, people can change. They can develop and improve.

In one now famous study, Dweck gave two groups of students some problems from an IQ test. After the exam, she lauded some of the kids in a way that emphasized a type of fixed mind-set, while the second group got kudos for their academic growth. And though the difference was nothing more than a matter of emphasis, Dweck found enormous differences in how the students approached future problems. Kids applauded for their raw intelligence faltered when the problems got more difficult. But that didn't happen to the children who received compliments for their effort or growth, and even when the problems became far more difficult, those students stayed engaged.

Dweck sees similar issues within relations.h.i.+ps. Some people have a fixed mind-set toward others. They see any sort of betrayal as a deep-rooted flaw in the other person's character. They believe that any hint of trouble is a sign of the end. Maybe it wasn't ever supposed to work, they think to themselves, and then, like children praised for their intelligence, they stop working at the relations.h.i.+p. But people with a growth mind-set are different. For them relations.h.i.+ps are a matter of understanding and learning. They believe that people can change, that betrayals can be forgiven, that trust can be recovered. Or as Dweck writes, "There are no great relations.h.i.+ps without conflicts and problems along the way."43 Within this context, any effort to rebuild social trust in Rwanda is extraordinarily difficult, and in many cases it might be impossible. After all, no matter how the issue is framed, some Hutus committed deep moral violations, and even with a growth mind-set, it's impossible to excuse the atrocities. But still, hope remains. Just look at Ndizeye. One afternoon, he told me how a group of Hutus attacked his family shortly before the genocide began. He was a young boy at the time, eleven years old. His family was living in the Congo, just over the border from Rwanda, and a man came up to his mother with a spear, saying: "I want to kill you."

Ndizeye's family managed to escape, but they lost everything-their home, their cattle, their restaurant. Over the years, Ndizeye has worked to give up his sense of anger, his feeling of betrayal. Given the nature of Rwandan society, he engages with Hutus constantly. Most of them aren't perpetrators of the genocide. Rather, they're the children or the wives or the distant cousins of someone who killed. And it's here that Ndizeye-and the nation-might have the greatest reason for optimism, because the children or the wives or the distant cousins of someone who killed didn't commit a moral violation. Strictly speaking, they might not have committed any violation at all, and so a sense of trust can come more easily.

There is another takeaway, and that's that rebuilding trust requires some trust, and for Ndizeye, that's why the farming cooperatives are so crucial: They give people the chance to work together again. Within the cooperatives, Hutus and Tutsis can build a sense of reciprocity. They can engage in an extended exchange of t.i.t for tat, and from that experience, Ndizeye hopes that a deeper culture of trust will arise.

In Semugabo's cooperative a few miles north of Kigali, each family donates around a dollar per month to the a.s.sociation, which is a significant amount of money in a place where most people live on less than two dollars a day. But even with all the community-building efforts, there are no guarantees. When I was in Rwanda, I asked Semugabo how long his cooperative would last. We were in a small sedan at the time, bouncing along a dirt road, driving Semugabo to his part-time job. He was quiet for a moment. The red-brown hills jumped and jangled outside the car window. He thought it might be around five years, he told me. But Semugabo didn't seem too worried about it. "Everything has a beginning and has an end. But now we choose to begin."

Semugabo's experience underscores the fact that we instinctively trust others, and there are clear signs that Rwanda has come back together. The country has one of the world's fastest-growing economies.44 Starbucks now s.n.a.t.c.hes up a quarter of their coffee exports.45 Corruption-widespread elsewhere in Africa-is relatively low, and a few years ago, the Clinton Foundation gave President Paul Kagame its Global Citizen Award.46 But the Kagame regime also has a somewhat authoritarian soul, and within the public sphere, there's little room to express opinions that are contrary to the government's views. "There's freedom of speech. There's just no freedom after speech," one Rwandan told me. The Kagame-led government has also imprisoned opposition leaders and crushed independent voices for reform. Critics of the government have been shot and killed, while hundreds have been s.h.i.+pped off to "rehabilitation" camps.47 For the international community, however, the last straw was Kagame's support of M23, a brutal rebel group in the Congo, and some nations, including the United States, have either slowed or stopped giving aid to the country.

But the more serious problems may be at the local level. The genocide still lurks behind almost every interaction, even if it's not always spoken about explicitly, as Jean Hatzfeld makes clear in his haunting book The Antelope's Strategy.48 "At the market, we sell to one another without a qualm. In the [bars], we talk with them about farming, the weather, reconciliation; we share bottles and we exchange civil words of agreement . . . except about that," a Tutsi man told Hatzfeld.

For most Rwandans, trust remains a very fragile process, and it will probably stay that way for decades. Survivors have seen how uncertain the world can be, and even those who say they've reconciled still feel aggrieved. At the same time, Rwanda's leaders will also need to make a crucial decision. Does the government want to create the type of culture that sustains trust in the long run? Or will the authorities continue to stifle free speech, limit individual rights, and squash efforts at democracy?

The issue is obvious: While the nation's current authoritarian approach may create stability in the short term, it ultimately works to erode our faith in others, and the nation will need to empower citizens, embrace dissent, and foster civic equality if it wants to build this sort of faith in others. This is particularly important when it comes to creating faith across social lines. A few years ago, some sociologists conducted a study looking at the impact of growing social diversity in Canada.49 They wanted to know if a greater racial and ethnic mix eroded our faith in others, and they found that by itself, diversity did not make people less trusting. Instead, there were two things that actually weakened trust: increased diversity and people connecting less frequently with their neighbors. What ultimately worked to erode people's faith in others, then, was a matter of feeling different-and isolated.

Plus, sanctions can misfire. They can smother our cooperative nature, and authoritarian governments can make us less trusting. They can snuff out our social ways. In a way, every parent knows this problem. Imagine, for example, you have a teenage daughter who generally takes out the trash.50 But then one day you decide to start forcing your daughter to haul the garbage bags down the driveway. The issue is that your daughter will probably not want to take the bags out on her own anymore. Her social motivation (taking out the trash because of her ties to the family) has become replaced by external motivation (taking out the garbage because you tell her to).

In the end, our faith in others is something that comes from society's deepest cultural roots, and in the next section of the book, we'll look at some more specific examples of ways that we can promote social trust. As for Rwanda, there is reason to believe that it will eventually be healed. No one knows for sure, and while I was there, it did seem on occasion as if the nation's efforts at rebuilding trust were some sort of show, a type of fiction put on for visiting foreigners.

When I talked with killer Fredrik Kazigwemo, for instance, I felt at times like there was something manufactured about it all. His heartfelt talk of community, the search for forgiveness, the need for repentance-perhaps it was all staged? The thought tugged and nagged, and after the interview with Kazigwemo was over, I stepped outside into the bright afternoon suns.h.i.+ne. I took some pictures and chatted with some of the children, and as I stood there, I saw Kazigwemo walking with a Tutsi man who worked with the village. The two men couldn't see me, but I could see them, and they were holding hands.

PART II.

How We Can Improve Trust.

Chapter 5.

Teams.

"Go on Faith and Knowledge"

THE first football game took place on November 6, 1869, when Rutgers University beat Princeton 6 to 4.1 The game was different back then. Players couldn't actually run with the ball. They could only kick or hit it. Tackling wasn't as sophisticated either, and players would sometimes just throw themselves at each other in flying formations. Over time the game evolved. The rules were changed. New positions were added.

But for decades the sport emphasized strength over teamwork, and for many, the game remained a sort of organized mayhem. Give a player some instructions on where to go and when to do it, and if he had the physical prowess-and the raw desire-he would make it happen. "Coaches who can outline plays on a blackboard are a dime a dozen," Vince Lombardi once explained.2 "The ones who win get inside their player and motivate."

All of that ended with Bill Walsh. In the late 1970s, the coach of the San Francisco 49ers created a new way of playing football, one which required far more trust. In the past, quarterbacks would either opt for a bruising, rus.h.i.+ng play, or wait in the pocket to launch long pa.s.ses to an open receiver. But under Walsh, the 49ers developed a new type of offensive attack. Walsh claimed that he invented the approach for a Bengals quarterback named Virgil Carter, who couldn't throw very far.3 To address Carter's liability, Walsh created crisp, timed pa.s.sing plays, and Carter would throw the ball to a place just beyond the line of scrimmage, a.s.suming that a receiver would be there to make the grab.

The approach became known as the West Coast Offense, and Walsh used the offensive system to build San Francisco into a football powerhouse that included five Super Bowl victories. Football pundits dubbed Walsh "the Genius," while players like Joe Montana and Steve Young became Hall of Famers. "The beauty of Bill's system was that there was always a place to go with the ball," Montana once explained.4 "I was the mailman, just delivering people's mail, and there were all kinds of houses to go to."

Take, for instance, what's known to football obsessives as the Catch.5 The play marked the start of Walsh's NFL reign-and it took place on January 10, 1982. San Francisco was playing Dallas at the time. Some sixty seconds remained on the scoreboard. The 49ers were just a half dozen yards from the end zone, and if they scored a touchdown and field goal, they'd be going to the Super Bowl.

The ball was snapped to Montana, and three Cowboys soon barreled down on the quarterback as he scampered toward the sideline. Montana then spotted wide receiver Dwight Clark moving across the back of the end zone, and he threw the football in a high, tight spiral.

One step, two steps, Clark launched into the air and snagged the ball. But here's what might be the most surprising thing about the play: It turned out that Clark couldn't even see Montana, and still he continued his route, knowing that Montana would throw the ball if he was open. In this chapter, we're going to look at improving faith within small groups, because that's often what underlies social trust. When we learn the norms of reciprocity within a group, particularly a diverse group, we're more likely to trust more broadly.6 As for Walsh, he believed that the process of building cohesion on a team began with expectations, and the coach would provide all of his employees with a memo detailing his goals and a.s.sumptions.7 In these missives, Walsh would describe proper staff attire ("s.h.i.+rttails in"). He would spell out how people should act ("your focus must be on doing things at the highest possible level"). He would delineate what sort of att.i.tude people should have ("affirmative, constructive, positive"). Walsh gave these written lectures to everyone: players, coaches, even groundskeepers. The doc.u.ment for the team's secretaries covered two pages. "Your job is not civil service or even big corporate business," Walsh wrote in bullet seventeen. "We exist to support and field a football team."

These lists seem pedantic, and frankly they are pedantic. Walsh knew this. He understood, in other words, that culture was something that he ultimately could not control. It was something that happened among the players. It was something that occurred within the team itself. Of course, a coach could nurture certain norms. Walsh could try, for instance, to ensure that no one saw himself as more important than anyone else. He once chastised a coach for having a vanity plate on his red Corvette.8 But in the end, culture is a very human, very connective sort of tissue. It was something that Walsh could only try to foster. Coaches needed to connect with players. Players needed to connect with other players, and if people bickered, Walsh recommended that they grab a coffee and talk it out on their own.9 Or take how Walsh approached team practice. During training sessions, Walsh didn't want full-contact tackles or blocks. He didn't want the men showing how tough or fast they were. Instead, Walsh wanted the team to focus on working together. He was one of the first coaches in the NFL to have players run through practices in just shorts and a T-s.h.i.+rt.10 In his book The Score Takes Care of Itself, Walsh describes how crucial it is for a team to build up a sense of trust. "Combat soldiers talk about whom they will die for. Who is it? It's those guys right next to them in the trench, not the fight song, the flag, or some general back at the Pentagon, but those guys who sacrifice and bleed right next to them," Walsh writes. "I nurtured a variation of that extreme att.i.tude in our entire organization, most especially the players: 'You can't let your buddies down. Demand and expect sacrifice from yourself, and they'll do the same for you.'"

For years, Walsh made all of his staff work together in a crowded office in Redwood City, California.11 He wanted everyone to be able to listen in on everyone else's calls. He argued that the small s.p.a.ce fostered communication, and later, when the team moved to a more s.p.a.cious facility, he worried about the lack of openness. He thought that a "country club mentality" might erode the team's ability to discuss important issues. "The minute there is a difficulty," Walsh once explained, "you have to be ready to attack the problem and find a way to communicate about it without being difficult. It's part of building leaders.h.i.+p throughout the team . . . [Players] are always talking with each other and always listening."12 Walsh's focus on communication was new. At the time, football coaches were all about command-and-control authority. One of Vince Lombardi's star players, defensive tackle Henry Jordan, once joked that "when Coach Lombardi says, 'Sit down,' I don't look for a chair."13 And when someone asked Jordan if Lombardi treated his best players any better, Jordan said, "No. He treats us all the same-like dogs." Walsh took a different approach. He encouraged players to speak up. He promoted collaboration. He saw communication as a way to promote trust and community. The 49ers coach even put together some rules on the best ways to foster dialogue. Walsh's first law? Be a great listener. Walsh's second law? "When you're not listening, ask good questions."14 The problem is that communication is hard, and talking to someone else doesn't mean that you'll become friends or teammates or protect the quarterback on game day. When it comes to groups, though, the even bigger problem is that communication needs to both build cohesion and promote dissent. Cohesive teams can become insular. They can become too trusting, and, in some cases, communication can make a person's views more extreme than they already are. In one experiment, a team of researchers had two groups of voters-a group of liberals and a group of conservatives-go into separate rooms and talk for a few hours about hot-b.u.t.ton political issues, like affirmative action.15 The effects were unmistakable: The discussion made each of the groups more politically rabid. The "liberals became more liberal," the researchers wrote, and the "conservatives became more conservative."

The takeaway here is that when it comes to small groups, the devil's advocate might not be much of a devil. Author James Surowiecki's writings on teams inspired this chapter, and he argues that "one of the most consistent findings from decades of small-group research is that group deliberations are more successful when they have a clear agenda and when leaders take an active role in making sure that everyone gets a chance to speak."16 What's important, as Surowiecki makes clear, is that group leaders listen to the people who are most likely to disagree. A crowd can become wise, then, but only if the crowd has a chance to speak. "The confrontation with a dissenting view, logically enough, forces the majority to interrogate its own positions more seriously," Surowiecki writes.

Bill Walsh worried about this issue a lot. Many of his plays were deeply complex. His offense depended on the receivers executing a play "down to the inch," and during practices, after games, and between quarters, Walsh wanted his players and coaches to speak up if they thought something wouldn't work. Would the opposing cornerback be too fast? Would the receiver not be able to spot the ball? Would the other team plan to run a different defensive formation? How should they respond to a new type of onside kick?

Walsh built an expectation that players and coaches should give him feedback. He wanted everyone to weigh in. "I tried to remove the fear factor from people's minds so they could feel comfortable opening their mouths," Walsh once explained in an interview.17 People "have to be comfortable that they will not be ridiculed if they turn out to be mistaken or if their ideas are not directly in line with their superior's. That is where the breakthrough comes."

Walsh's other solution to the communication problem was simpler. It was a matter of more communication. So once a week, all of the team's coaches, along with Walsh, would eat lunch with the players in the locker room.18 They would talk over tuna fish sandwiches and sodas. Walsh saw it all as a way to make sure that people across the team knew each other, that the defensive line wasn't isolated from the receivers or special teams squad. "The person most familiar with a topic-you, for example-can get myopic, in need of an outside perspective," Walsh once wrote. And you can "learn a lot while eating your sandwich."

In the late 1960s, Bill Walsh worked as an a.s.sistant coach to Paul Brown of the Cincinnati Bengals. During the games, Walsh would sit up in a booth above the field and recommend to Brown which plays to run.19 But as the head coach, Paul Brown wanted it to look as if he were the one actually figuring out if the team would go for a short throw or a strong-side run. For Brown's ego, for his sense of control, for the crowds that filled the stadium, he wanted to be seen as the man calling the shots. So Walsh would have to phone the play to an a.s.sistant coach down on the field. That a.s.sistant coach would then run over and give Walsh's decision to Brown, and Brown would grab a player and inform him of the play. The process was slow and laborious, and it taught Walsh a key lesson for building faith within teams: "Share the glory."20 In a way, the issue is a matter of fairness: If we work with others, we want a share of the spoils. Plus, the cold logic of the Prisoner's Dilemma haunts every cooperative activity. When it comes to a team, each individual is constantly faced with a choice: Do I betray the other person for a short-term gain? Or do I work with others for a long-term profit? Or consider an NFL wide receiver: During practice, should he run faster, or ask his quarterback to throw better? During a game, should the receiver take the time to congratulate the quarterback, or get himself a quick moment's rest? During the postgame interview, should the receiver give credit to his teammates, or should he take the glory for himself?

The issue is that if people are working for the good of the team, they want to know that everyone else is working for the good of the team. When other people trust, we're more likely to trust, and if someone feels like his contribution is not being valued, he's less likely to contribute. For leaders, though, there's a catch: If you value one person's contribution, you are not valuing someone else's contribution.

For Walsh, part of the solution to this problem was emphasizing the importance of the team. During team meetings, during games, and after practice, he constantly underscored the importance of the group. He didn't allow any post-touchdown dances.21 There was no jeering at other teams. When Walsh saw a rookie hollering at a woman during training camp, he cut the man from the team.22 At the same time, Walsh worked to make sure each person was valued. He prohibited the bullying of rookies.23 He recognized individuals. Yet he did so in a way that showed that it was all about the group's overall success. "The offensive team is not a country unto itself, nor is the defensive team or the special teams, staff, coaches, or anyone in the organization separate from the fate of the organization. We are united and fight as one; we win or lose as one," Walsh once wrote.24 "Success belongs to everyone."

When it comes to teams, it's hard to understate the importance of Walsh's point about success belonging to everyone, and even the simplest of gestures-a word here, a pat on the shoulder there-makes a difference. They remind people that they're working together, that everyone is recognized. A few years ago psychologist Michael Kraus had a team of researchers categorize every single example of physical touch between players during a single NBA game.25 If there was a fist b.u.mp or a head grab, Kraus's researchers made a note of it. Kraus then used the data to predict the team's performance, and he showed that if players touched others more frequently, they performed better both as individuals and as a team. "If I was a coach, I'd focus on starting a culture that is about these real sorts of cooperative actions," Kraus told me.

Trust, then, can become virtuous only if everyone gains. This matters for teams. This matters for society. But sometimes we need prompting. Sometimes that prompt can come in the form of a chest b.u.mp. Sometimes it can come in the form of a yell. Quarterback Steve Young was inducted into the National Football Hall of Fame some years ago, and during his acceptance speech he recalled some of his early days with the 49ers.26 Young explained that when he first landed with San Francisco, he would not throw to a receiver unless he could see him.

After one of his first games, a coaching a.s.sistant named Mike Holmgren yelled at Young on the sidelines.

Wide receiver "Jerry [Rice was] open. Why didn't you throw it to him?" Holmgren called out.

"I couldn't see him," Young responded.

"Well, you better start seeing him," Holmgren replied.

At that moment, Young realized that the 49ers were a very different sort of football team. "Go on faith and knowledge," Young explained. "You can believe that I have learned that lesson many times."

Chapter 6.

The Economy The Art of Trustworthiness NOT long ago, Ray Young went to the U.S. post office in Silver Spring, Maryland. Young was sixty-seven years old with wide eyes and a thin mustache.1 He had an artificial hip, and within a few months he would be walking with the help of a cane. On that July afternoon, Young parked his Toyota Corolla and stepped inside the post office. It was supposed to be like any visit to any suburban post office in any suburban town on any suburban afternoon: One or two postal workers behind the window. A steady hum of fluorescent light. The woody smell of paper. A long line of people that stretches six, seven, sometimes twelve deep.

Young took his place in the post office queue, according to a series of articles in the Was.h.i.+ngton Post. Earlier, another man-let's call him Jim-had mailed two envelopes. After Jim left, he realized that he should switch the delivery times of his envelopes, so he walked straight to the head of the line, skipping past all the other people in the queue. Young must have watched Jim and thought: Outrageous. How selfish, how unfair. Who does that guy think he is, cutting the line like that? So after Jim finished remailing his envelopes, Young waited for him in the vestibule of the post office, a small knife in his hand. The two men began brawling. Young pushed his knife into Jim's chest and shoulder before speeding off in his Toyota.

Psychologists describe Young's behavior as a type of "queue rage," and it happens more often than it should. A few years ago, a man in London killed another man after an argument over line jumping.2 In Jacksonville, Florida, someone pulled a gun on a customer who had been "standing slightly off-center" in a line.3 In Milwaukee, a woman slashed open another woman's nose because she had jumped into an express checkout lane with too many items.4 There's something extraordinarily petty about flying into a rage over line jumping, and there's no question that people who attack others over a spot in the express lane probably have deeper psychological issues. But at the same time, irritation over line jumping isn't all that unusual, and frankly, I suffer from a silent, nonviolent type of queue rage probably around once a year. Usually, it happens in my car. Traffic is backed up on a highway or bridge. Some car horns blare in the distance, and out of nowhere, a driver forces himself ahead of me. I glare and mutter and swear, simmering in frustration at the outrage.

A few years ago, the New York Times ran an article t.i.tled "Why Waiting Is Torture," and the piece gave an unambiguous explanation for queue rage: It's about fairness.5 When someone cuts in front of us, it offends our sense of justice, and we're willing to go a long way to make sure that people who arrive later than us don't get served before us.

A few years ago, some Israeli researchers studied people's preferences for different types of lines, as the New York Times notes.6 Would people rather stand in a first-come, first-served line? Or would they rather wait in a "multiple queue" line, which is common in supermarkets and requires individuals to wait in separate first-come, first-served lines? People overwhelmingly wanted their lines to be first-come, first-served, and they were willing to wait some 70 percent longer for this sort of justice. In other words, in exchange for their time, people got something that's often just as important: the principle of fair play.

In previous chapters, we've been looking at how and why we trust. In this chapter, we're going to look at our economy and what it means for our sense of society. Why? Well, it turns out that one of the causes of the nation's recent collapse in social trust has been the soaring rise in income disparity, and I hope to convince you that economic fairness works as a type of social trustworthiness. It supports a sense of community. In his provocative book The Penguin and the Leviathan, Yochai Benkler writes thoughtfully about issues of fairness-Benkler's work inspired this chapter-and the Harvard law professor argues that notions of equity are crucial to any sort of cooperative system. Without some sense of fairness, we can't work together.

Or think of it this way: Because we're more cooperative than any other animal, it seems that we care more about fairness than any other animal, and our response to inequity is often a matter of unrestrained emotion. Scientists can see this in brain scans, and the brain region that's a.s.sociated with processing feelings of disgust-the anterior insula-typically roars into action when someone sees or smells something foul. What's striking is that the anterior insula also kicks into gear when we experience inequity.7 In other words, the same neurons fire when you see a c.o.c.kroach on your bowl of cereal as when you see someone cutting you in line at the post office.

This doesn't always happen. Sometimes we can live with a little inequality. We will accept a lower salary for a job because we need the work. Or we will pay for something at a restaurant that we did not order because we don't want to make a scene. A few years ago, some scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, studied the brains of two dozen subjects as they considered an unfair proposal.8 And it turned out that when people agreed to an unfair deal, one of the brain circuits a.s.sociated with self-control lit up, while the anterior insula-the area tied to disgust-became less active. As science writer Wray Herbert points out, our brains, it seems, can limit our emotional outrage in order to endure a bit of inequity. The acceptance of injustice, then, isn't an issue of greediness. Rather, it appears to be a matter of dialing down our sense of revulsion.

In Ovid's epic poem Metamorphoses, Ajax is a man of grit and strength, of muscle and devotion. He is the most athletic, most loyal soldier in the Greek army, and Ajax believes that because of his size and steadfastness, he deserves one of the most treasured prizes of the Trojan War, the precious armor of Achilles. The issue, as philosopher Paul Woodruff describes in his book The Ajax Dilemma, is that Ajax has to compete against Odysseus.9 Wily and inventive, smart and slick, Odysseus is the man who figures out a way past both Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus, then, is the charming brain to Ajax's loyal brawn, and he wants the precious armor, too.

King Agamemnon has Ajax and Odysseus each give a speech in front of a panel of judges, arguing his case. But it's already too late, according to Woodruff. In a battle of words, Ajax is doomed. He stands no chance, and the prize goes to the brainy Odysseus, while Ajax feels deeply betrayed. For years, Ajax has been a devoted warrior. He saved the life of the king. He once even rescued Odysseus from death. As Ovid writes, Ajax is "conquered by his sorrow," and the warrior eventually impales himself on his sword, killing himself.10 We live in a world of high-stakes compet.i.tions. Like Ajax and Odysseus, we compete for salaries, we compete for partners, we compete for friends. But landing the rewards-the money, the fame, the suits of armor-is often a tricky business. It would be nice, of course, for society to recognize the efforts of everyone equally. But we also want to highlight the aces, the top performers, the Odysseuses. And, by their nature, rewards are scarce.

On the one side, it's clear that Odysseus should win the armor. He is the inventive genius. His work is a matter of superior imagination, and without Odysseus's idea for the Trojan horse, the Greeks might still be laying siege to Troy. Still, when society's Ajaxes see the prizes always going to the Odysseuses, they feel hoodwinked, as Woodruff told me when I reached him in his office at the University of Texas. They've worked hard. They've been loyal. What's their reward? In the end, no system can function without an Ajax. He ensures that the work gets done. He sticks with you when times are tough. But as Woodruff told me, Ajax might be replaceable, but if you lose too many, an organization will fall apart.

Woodruff calls this the Ajax Dilemma, and the message is simple: Fairness alone isn't enough. Leaders also have to create a feeling of community, and that is where things went so wrong for Ajax. The contest between him and Odysseus was based on clear rules. Odysseus didn't cheat. Odysseus wasn't dishonest. But the process gave Ajax no meaningful way out, as Woodruff suggests. The loyal soldier had no way to feel pride, to feel part of something bigger, so he took his own life. "Justice is what ought to have kept Ajax on the team, or, more generally, justice is what ought to keep any community together through the stress of disputes," writes Woodruff.

What does this have to do with our economy? A lot, actually, because our financial system is a type of contest. It's a compet.i.tive market. But at the same time, our economy is built around the idea that everyone profits. This is true at the micro level. When you buy a carton of milk at the grocery store, you and the store benefit. The storeowner lands some revenue, while you get some tasty milk. This is also true within an organization: You go to work and earn a decent salary, while the company gains from your labor. Even at the macro level, our economy relies on the notion of mutual benefit, and countries with more equitable distributions of wealth have higher rates of economic growth.

What's more, fairness pays off when it comes to business. In the long run, firms gain when they're more trustworthy. I recently visited the headquarters of the natural beverage company Honest Tea and met with the firm's cofounder Seth Goldman. As Goldman explained, the company has long been dedicated to trustworthiness, and one of the reasons that Goldman called the firm Honest Tea was to underscore its commitment to probity. Or consider a sample line from the firm's original business plan: "We strive for relations.h.i.+ps with our customers, employees, suppliers and stakeholders which are as healthy and honest as the tea we brew."

As Goldman and I sat in an office room, bottles of tea between us, he explained that shoppers are deeply aware of whether they're being treated fairly or not. In fact, even the slightest change in Honest Tea's product can catch the attention of consumers, and when the company recently made a very minor change to the design of its bottle-it put a larger dimple in the bottom-Goldman immediately heard from customers, who thought they were getting less tea for the same price.

The new bottle held the same amount of tea as before. It just looked like the bottle contained less tea. But still, Goldman took the concerns seriously, and the company began placing stickers on its bottles describing the change. "We clearly need to do a better job explaining why the bottle has this design," the firm noted at the time. "In the next label run we plan to say something to explain this to our customers. We hope that makes you feel that you can still trust us and will stick with us."

From an economic perspective, this sort of trustworthiness makes sense, because reliability is what turns a one-time interaction into a repeat interaction. If people think that they're overpaying for a bottle of tea, they're not going to want to buy that bottle of tea again. Same thing within a company. If your boss is a jerk-if he or she underpays you-then it's time to find new job. This also explains why studies show that more social cohesion leads to increased GDP: If we believe people are generally trustworthy, then we're more likely to engage them in trade.

The issue is that Honest Tea is unusual in its dedication to fairness. Once, while I was visiting Paul Zak in California, he and I drove to his lab on the Claremont campus, and as we sped along the highway, Zak argued that one of the main problems with business today is that firms don't do enough to inspire trustworthiness. Just look at television advertis.e.m.e.nts; most of the TV commercials today brim with half-truths. Or, as Zak told me, businesses often encourage people "to check your morality at the door. To check our social nature at the door."

Before Zak became fascinated by oxytocin, he edited a book called Moral Markets. The book is thick, some four hundred pages long, with chapters written by two n.o.bel Prize winners. It includes writings by many of the people that we've already met in this book, such as Frans de Waal and Robert Frank, and the book argues that moral values are what drive a market economy. Plus, ethical firms often do better in the long run: "Our research revealed that most economic exchange, whether with strangers or known individuals, relies on character values such as honesty, trust, reliability, and fairness."

But when it comes to the economy, fairness alone isn't enough. This goes back to the Ajax Dilemma: Communities often require compet.i.tions, while compet.i.tions often require a sense of community. In other words, business has a social side, and our economy should create a sense of togetherness. If we want both the Ajaxes and the Odysseuses on our team, if we want to keep a client or an employee, there needs to be a connection that extends beyond the economic exchange itself.

The research on oxytocin provides another way of understanding this idea, and according to Zak, markets can engage our hardwired bonding system in ways that make an economy more productive. When we're more empathetic, when we spark the social motivations of others, people act in more trusting and trustworthy ways, and thus create new opportunities for mutual gain. What's more, Zak argues that this sort of social connectedness is what produces wealth, and research by the neuroeconomist and others has shown that nations with deeper social bonds have more dynamic economies.

The key, it seems, is creating a business culture that supports our social nature. None of this is economic rocket science, to be sure. It's about relations.h.i.+ps. It's about community. It's about purpose and values. What's new is that our emotionally driven faith in others can become a type of habit. Or recall the work of David Rand, who studied almost two thousand people playing the Prisoner's Dilemma. The results showed that if people saw a lot of collaborative behavior in their everyday lives, they became more instinctively trusting. Or as Rand and his colleagues argue, "intuition supports cooperation."

For a real-world example, let's take Honest Tea again. A few years ago, Coca-Cola purchased Honest Tea. The move angered many of the organic firm's customers, and Goldman responded quickly to the complaints, detailing why the move was good for the organic drink firm's mission. In his explanations, Goldman noted that what matters are values, and since the purchase Honest Tea has stuck to its ideals. For a while, Coca-Cola wanted Honest Tea to remove its "no high fructose corn syrup" text from its bottles. Honest Tea disagreed, and the labeling remains. What's more, the company has continued to build relations.h.i.+ps, to create community, and sales remain strong. In other words, Honest Tea's customers may have learned something too, even the ones with the Honest Tea tattoos: Responsible businesses foster togetherness because when it comes to markets, we want a very different experience than Ajax, who says before he dies, "Now dishonored / Thus am I prostrate."11 A few years ago, Harvard University psychologist Michael Norton conducted a survey.12 First, Norton asked people how wealth should be distributed in the United States. Overwhelmingly, respondents chose a fairly moderate distribution of wealth. In a perfect world, Americans thought that the top 20 percent of people should have around 35 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 20 percent should land about 10 percent. This alone is notable. The results were consistent across backgrounds, so whether the person was a Republican or Democrat, white or black, young or old, he or she wanted the nation to have a fairly equal distribution of riches. As Norton put it, most people wanted the range of American wealth to look like someplace in Scandinavia.

Norton then asked people what they thought the actual wealth distribution was in the United States, and that's where things started to get weird, because the actual levels of inequality and the expected levels of inequality were not even close. For instance, people guessed that, on average, the top 20 percent of Americans had around 60 percent of the wealth. But if wealth is defined as net worth, the top 20 percent of Americans actually own more than 85 percent of the total. In short, the survey suggested that Americans know that inequality exists in the United States; they just have no idea how much. And if you compare the current distribution against the desired distribution, the wealthiest Americans should have 50 percent less money.

Why does this happen? When I asked Michael Norton, he told me that the explanation is "pretty boring." The issue, Norton explained, is that we typically compare our wealth to the wealth of the people that we know well. So when a researcher asks us who has a lot of money, we think about the people who live in our neighborhood. But the people in our neighborhood are a particularly bad comparison group, since we tend to live with people who have similar levels of wealth. People who have lots of money tend to interact with other people who have lots of money, while people who live in poverty tend to interact with other people who live in poverty. This makes it hard to understand that some people may have a lot more-or a lot less-money than we do.

But the research is clear. Our middle cla.s.s is shrinking. Social mobility is low, and in cities like New York, only 10 percent of kids who grow up in the bottom 5 percent of income reach the top 5 percent as adults.13 More than that, the rate of poor kids becoming rich adults in the United States lags behind all sorts of nations, from Germany to Canada.14 Among high-income democracies, in fact, only the United Kingdom shows worse economic mobility than the United States. At the same time, income inequality is growing, and in many cities the level of wealth disparity matches that of developing nations.15 In Los Angeles, for instance, the level of inequity is now similar to that of the Dominican Republic; Chicago matches up with El Salvador; and New York City ranks up with Swaziland.

All in all, the data here are pretty ugly, and the growing equality gap is eroding our faith in others. It's tearing away at the sense of community that fuels our social ways, and some, like political scientist Eric Uslaner, argue that income inequality is almost entirely to blame for the recent dramatic fall in our faith in others.16 Inequality, then, is not just a problem that threatens our economic system. It's a problem that threatens society itself. Think back to Ray Young, who got into a brawl at the post office. He saw Joe jump the queue, so he pulled out a knife. He was willing to stab someone in order to uphold a sense of equity. "I was fighting with a guy," Young told the police when they caught up with him. "He cut the line and I said something to him."

Chapter 7.