At work two weeks ago, a coworker—-a communication scholar—-came to my office to vent about a problem she was having in writing a paper. She was struggling to define and differentiate between trust and deference. She studies the ways in which science is communicated to the public by scientists and by the media. From what little I know about the history of the field, I understand that the concept of trust is critical to analyzing people's engagement with science and, indeed, their judgements about any given topic. But the question my friend asked was, are trust and deference the same in this context? Is trust in science the same as deference to science?
Two of her colleagues say that when the words are used in survey questions, the two are interchangeable. My friend and I disagree, arguing that trust is more accurately a measure of belief in someone else's good intentions; deference is merely a respect for their positions, regardless of what they do with them. Trust assumes the trusted person or, in this case, institution can make a moral decision and will make one that will not harm the person doing the trusting. Deference means granting permission to the other person or institution, although the outcome is not necessarily expected to be morally or ethically good.
Still, when considering this issue within the field of communication studies, I have to both defer to the scholars and trust that they have my best interests in mind in parsing the definitions. But another, related, question has been stuck in my head since our conversation: can an institution be trusted, or merely deferred to—does it make sense at all to ask people to trust institutions?
I'm extremely wary of that proposition. What does trust do for the person doing the trusting? Does it give emotional recourse? Is that recourse unavailable through deference? Or does it maintain an illusion that institutions are capable of empathy or compassion? Google says “Don't be evil,” but what does it mean for an institution to be good?
In our current political and cultural climate, trust feels foolish. Of course there is still value in trusting the people in our communities, but the power disparities between individuals is vanishingly small compared to those between individuals and institutions. Maybe we're predisposed to value and trust institutions as a failsafe against the suffering that might be inflicted by other people. We might imagine that institutions have the capacity to anticipate and prevent, or at least avenge suffering. Because they combine the power of many people, institutions are, in a way, superhuman.
But that makes them extremely dangerous. To me, the bigger they are, the scarier.
Still, to refuse to trust in institutions (government, church—-even clubs and sports teams) at all requires extreme fortitude in the face of inevitable suffering. Without institutions, our individual powerlessness becomes a thing unto itself, immutable and intractable. You can't sue fate, fate just is.
Maybe I'm ridiculous, but I struggle to trust anything I can't see. Mail makes me nervous, because I'm not exactly sure what happens between my package leaving me and arriving at its destination, even though I'd never lost a package until a month ago.
However, although I don't trust every scientist, I defer to science as an institution because I've been taught and seen with my own eyes the way it works. I understand it, rationally, to be a sound way of getting good information.
The last few months have been an epic test of trust in the US. I work for an institution that has failed on many fronts to serve its purpose--why can't communication scholars make people better at communicating? Maybe it isn't anyone's fault. Maybe the vicissitudes of political economy have revealed again the weirdness of power. Certainly, its mysterious movements have left everyone sputtering for answers.
We all expect things from others. Living in a relatively peaceful time and place, we expect civility. Living in an open and free society, we expect tolerance. What happens when those expectations are supplanted by fear? What is fear if not an admission of vulnerability? Behind the "bad" works of institutions are usually people who think they are acting for the "good". And what is socially "good" and "bad" except what is decided upon by the agreement of individuals?
Now, I'm looking out from my house to a snowy day and wondering whether all of the mail was delivered.
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