Trust is a bond. It holds everything from families to entire nations together. But are we living in a world where those bonds are breaking? OnPointRadio brings you a week-long series, 'Essential trust.' Hear the first episode:
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Have you stolen money from the association? She leaned in. Her face filled the Zoom box when she shouted again. Have you stolen money from us? I was shocked, confused, and did not know what to do. I'd done my very best to responsibly serve as trustee for our condo association, and there was no way I'd ever steal anything from anyone.
So we're going to spend all this week bringing you a special series that we're calling"Essential trust." And we start today with a question that's as big as it is simple. Is trust uniquely human? Or is it something that's intrinsic to every cooperative and social species across the animal kingdom? And if so, what can we learn from them?
GOODALL: We're part of the animal kingdom, not separated from it. We could have a blood transfusion from a chimp. If you match the blood group, you really could. And the other way around, too. People say to me, thank you for giving them characters and personalities. I didn't give them anything. I merely translated them for people.GOODALL: It was obvious watching them that they could be happy and sad. And then the communication signals.
ENGELMANN: Well, they engage in many high risk cooperative activities together. So, for example, they engage in border patrols as a group, where they really have to trust each other, that they don't run away, for example, when they encounter a neighboring group. They share food. When one chimpanzee has found some food, they might share it with another chimpanzee. And, you know, at a later point, the second chimpanzee might reciprocate.
ENGELMANN: So I mean, the development of trust is actually a really interesting question. So you can ask, How can one actually establish a trusting relationship? And, you know, in the literature, two types of, or two forms, are described. One is called testing the water. So if you want to establish a trusting relationship with someone, you first, you know, you invest a little bit in the relationship, and you see whether they reciprocate, whether they are trustworthy.
ENGELMANN: So I would say actually that's one of the main differences between trust in humans and trust in chimpanzees. We humans, we live in the company of strangers, right? All day, every day, wherever we are, we are surrounded by people who we have never met before. And we somehow manage to trust them. Chimpanzees all day, every day, they're surrounded by members of their group. They're surrounded by individuals who they know very well.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now, so within the troop structure of a group of chimpanzees, is a lot of what we're seeing as trust sort of sorted out, because is there a very strict hierarchy in in the group? I don't know if I want to say it makes it quote-unquote easier to form trusting bonds. But how does the group hierarchy factor into this?
ENGELMANN: Well, data, like when I've groomed that chimpanzee, did they groom me back? When I needed this chimpanzee support in a fight, did they support me? When I went onto that Border Patrol, did that chimpanzee come with me? Or did they leave me stranded there? CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Well, one more question before I want to bring in another guest into this conversation. But does trust break down between chimpanzees? And if so, how does that happen and what's the consequence of that?
DUGATKIN: Yeah, I think that's a great question. I would say that what Jan was describing with the chimpanzees certainly is trust. I tend to work more with things like fish and the like. And when you start talking about trust, I think it's really important that you have a kind of clear definition in your mind of what you mean, because, you know, we can kind of say we feel like the chimps are doing human-like things.
I would say that's an example of trust building up. It's personal experience that allows a guppy in this case to know this other guppy is somebody who will stay by my side. And this one over here is somebody that's going to bolt out as soon as it's dangerous, and that's going to hurt me. CHAKRABARTI: Do a group of guppies ever end up ostracizing a guppy that's proven not to be trustworthy based on the criteria you just mentioned?
So when we engage in co-operative endeavors, we carefully select certain partners to interact with. And we select those partners that are trustworthy, that are cooperative, that we can rely on. And chimpanzees do a lot of that kind of partner choice. What chimpanzees don't do, however, and this is somewhat puzzling to me, but many, many experimental findings have proven that, is chimpanzees don't really seem to care about their reputation.
ENGELMANN: Yeah. So we ran a series of studies where we investigated whether chimpanzees would share more, so present themselves as trustworthy, when they were observed compared to when they were alone. So in one condition they were observed by others, and in the other condition they were completely on their own. And we didn't find any difference between these two conditions.
So I did this experiment with a colleague of mine ... where we basically set it up so that the fish could go on these explorations to look at dangerous situations. And we were looking at males and we asked the question, are the males more likely to go out on one of these dangerous expeditions if they're being watched by females, versus being watched by males or being watched by nobody?
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Oh, that's interesting. So, Professor Engelmann, let's just go quickly back to the chimps. What you were describing earlier, though, is even in a troop where there's, you know, the chimp version of a lot of genetic similarity, because they're blood relatives of each other. You can still have, though, the real sort of profound breakdown in trust between individuals.
And he's spent most of his career looking at wolves and coyotes. And his work has shown that being untrustworthy, being an untrustworthy animal is, in fact, downright dangerous. For example, one of his studies involved spending 5,000 hours. He spent 5,000 hours observing one pack of wild coyotes. CHAKRABARTI: And he also says it's clear that trust doesn't need language or even, you know, a society at the level humans express it to exist.
Now, I should just add that exactly what's going on, evolutionarily, there is a really hotly contested topic. So there are some people that think that basically natural selection and evolution are operating at the group level, as well at the individual level. And there are others who say, no, it's just individual care about groups, because they care about themselves. And if their group does well, they do well.
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