How do you know who to trust?
Who to trust?
You always hear stories about people who get screwed over by their friends that they trusted. How do you prevent such from happening to you? Here are a few principles. Understanding trust is fundamentally a matter of human motivation — the same behavioral design principles explored in the Octalysis Framework apply to why people act the way they do in relationships and business.
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
If someone behaves shadily to someone else, they will eventually do that to you too
The key to knowing who to trust is not how close they are to you, but what their core values are. When there are no zero-sum games at play between you, it’s easy to be friends. However, for some people, once they can get some advantage by screwing you over, that becomes an obvious choice.
If you have a friend who often talks about how he tricked someone else, even though he told you because you are buddies, you have to be careful of him later on. On the other hand, if your friend is always talking about how to help others, then even if you are not as close of a friend, you can trust them more.
This is like judging if you want to date/work with someone based on how they treat waiters and waitresses. If they treat you well, it just means they want something from you, but you can evaluate their true personality by how they treat others.
Careful of those who just talk about making money
If you are working with someone who just talks about money all the time, you should be careful. In their minds, making money is one of their high priorities in life, and even though working with them as partners might get you to gain a lot, it also means that there are chances that they will screw you over for a big enough paycheck. If a person always talks about “creating an impact” or “changing the industry” then you have a better feel of what motivates them and you can trust them a little better.
This connects to what behavioral science calls Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling — people driven by a higher purpose beyond personal gain are more reliably trustworthy partners. Pure monetary motivation, by contrast, signals that self-interest will dominate when stakes are high.
There is nothing wrong with wanting money or working with people that just want money. However, it’s a good red flag to raise before you completely get screwed over by someone who has been treating you well for three years.
Build your reputation with trust
In the same way, you want to build up your reputation with the right values too. If you are always talking about making money and showing off how you ripped off some stupid person, not only do you sound sleazier, but overdoing that will cause people to trust you less. Ideally you don’t want to ever be shady and do things with integrity, but either way, you don’t want to promote that part of your personality to people.
Rather sound altruistic and naive than too materialistic and calculating. A lot of people would want to work with you if they think you are easily tricked, instead of thinking that you are out there to trick people. Trust also operates through Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness — your reputation is a social asset that compounds over time, and the signals you send about your values shape how others perceive and trust you.