Trust is the most precious of commodities. Without trust no transaction save the simultaneous swap can happen. Everything else depends on the trust of buyer or seller, that goods are what they claim to be, that a service will come at the time and at the standard it is needed, that payment will be made or a contract honoured. Hence everyone has an interest in how much their work is trusted.
Readers Digest surveys the level of trust in various occupations and brands each year and the results are always compelling. The latest, published this week, finds ambulance drivers top of the occupations, followed by firefighters, nurses, pilots, doctors and police in descending order. Teachers, plumbers and motor mechanics squeak into the top half of the table. But ministers of religion, lawyers, taxi drivers and journalists are well below par, ranking just ahead of trade unionists, car sellers and, bottom of the table as always, politicians.
In journalism we worry about this, even at the Herald, named the country's most trusted newspaper by a third of the survey. So we have come up with a theory that might be no more than a miserable excuse. But here it is.
Trust in trades and professions, we suggest, increases in inverse proportion to the customer's knowledge and power. We need to trust health professionals highly because their knowledge is specialised and not readily verifiable, particularly when we are at a low ebb from illness or accident and need their knowledge urgently. We have to trust them, want to trust them and, as the survey shows, we do.
At the bottom of the list, where politicians languish with marketers, car sellers, trade unions and journalists, the customer's knowledge is obviously greatest. Everybody is an expert on politics, quite rightly; how else could they vote? Likewise, nobody is much in awe of the knowledge of car sellers and others in marketing. Like politicians, their job is to impress and persuade but they have many competitors and it is comparatively easy to walk away.
Journalism, too, is a competitive business, dealing in the most accessible forms of knowledge. Most of it is easily verifiable and readily corrected by rivals, if not by the authors of an error. Oddly enough it is those occupations exposed to competition, correction and retribution that people can probably trust most, yet they rank them lowest. Those such as health practitioners, who resist competition, deal collegially with issues and bury their mistakes, are ranked highest.
In between there are pharmacists, bankers, architects, accountants and builders, all of whom confirm the hypothesis that it is not a matter of how much we can trust them but how much we need to trust them. Our need to trust them increases the more their expertise is a mystery to us or the result of their work is inaccessible. Rotting homes are a case in point.
Well that is one theory. Others might argue, noting the predominance of public sector occupations on the top of the ladder, that competition is no guarantor of reliability. People seem to trust most those who do not argue in public as do politicians, lawyers and the press, and have no need to commercialise their work.
Whatever the explanation, trust is essential to every job. It may come comparatively easily to emergency services, police, airline pilots and the like because we need, sometimes desperately, to believe in their expertise. But those we do not have to take on trust, those whose work we can criticise and check, read these surveys more nervously.
In the nature of their work they might never manage to raise their ranking but the reminder of how lowly they rate is a stimulus to improve. Trust is hard to build and easy to wreck. We are better for a regular check.
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