In this post:
What is the Edelman Trust Barometer?
What does it say?
Application
Summary, Audio included 🎧
1. What is the Edelman Trust Barometer?
According to its website,
The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer is the firm’s 23rd annual trust and credibility survey. The research was produced by the Edelman Trust Institute and consisted of 30-minute online interviews conducted between November 1st and November 28th, 2022. The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer online survey sampled more than 32,000 respondents across 28 countries.
You can learn more about the history of the ETB here, but in short it emerged in the tumultuous era of the early 2000s to measure societal trust and safety.
It is highly regarded and widely distributed.
2. What does it say?
You can read the full report here (I highly recommend) but the top-line takeaways are summarized below and in the following graphic:
A lack of faith in societal institutions triggered by economic anxiety, disinformation, mass-class divide and a failure of leadership has brought us to where we are today – deeply and dangerously polarized.
Business is the only institution seen as competent and ethical.
Fifty-three percent of respondents globally say that their countries are more divided today than in the past.
CEOs are obligated to improve economic optimism and hold divisive forces accountable.
3. Application
The gist of this report is that most countries in the world are experiencing:
Deep Polarization
An insurmountable lack of trust
as existential threats to their governments, institutions, and way of life.
And in response to this, for better or worse, more people than not look to business (specifically CEOs) to mend this breach in trust.
The US has been measured to be one of the furthest into the red on the polarization scale.
This data driven assessment brings our work here to the absolute forefront.
This is why the study of philosophy and the timeless wisdom therein is vital now more than ever.
Summary 🎧
This week I witnessed one of those all-too-common moments we sometimes encounter in our professional lives.
Someone made a comment seeping with intolerance and no meaningful attempt was made to rectify or clarify the situation.
What was most interesting, is that the comment came in response to something I had said.
I was speaking to the importance of psychological safety among historically marginalized people, and the respondent retorted with an unrelated and loosely-aligned set of conspiracy theories undermining the dignity of a certain demographic of people.
In the entirety of my professional life to this point, I would have followed up with both the leaders who didn’t address the comment, and the person who made it.
I would have approached with curiosity and without judgement to better understand what had happened, and clarify the importance of making all people feel safe and welcome in professional environments.
Who knows, perhaps I misunderstood the comment, perhaps there is at more at play.
But instead I froze. And quite frankly, I froze for the first time that I can remember.
Early in my philosophy training I was inundated on the realities of the bystander effect and trained how to think through the classic Trolley Dilemma.
I have worked hard to develop both empathy and temperance in such settings, to ally myself with those who are most vulnerable to expressions of negative power.
But this time, I was too scared to do anything.
Perhaps it was the school shooting last month that took the lives of children not much older than my own, just miles from where we grocery shop.
Perhaps it was the violent attack we missed by a day while on vacation a few days after.
Maybe it was the tragedy of a neighbor violently executing a family only days later.
Or maybe, it was the blatant attack on migrants in El Paso conducted by a man in a vehicle only days ago.
I’ve never really been one to shy away from risking safety for important outcomes.
But this time, I felt frozen.
Something feels different.
I was aware of physical danger, not just polite disagreement, as a potential outcome.
As I began to float this experience with others, two separate people suggested that I consider the Edelman Trust Barometer.
I am insatiably curious to study data-driven analysis as it relates to our communal and corporate behavior.
As I read the report, I realized that my feelings regarding the connection between violence and ideas is not unfounded.
In fact, the data shows us that my country (the US) is one of the most polarized countries surveyed.
A few other statistics that only affirmed my feelings was the amount of people that identified political differences as insurmountable. This belief appears to be responsible for a snowball effect that crescendos in lack of trust for those that disagree with each other.
This distrust in each other accelerates a distrust in institutions of all kinds.
To read between the lines, for many Americans disagreement is no longer an intellectual or character-driven exercise, but one in which we wholly reject the “other.”
My experience (maybe you can relate) is that this then lays the ground work for things like unhinged conspiracy theories and populist/fascists activity of all kinds.
All types of people stumble into these rabbit holes, especially of the online variety.
There, the distrust is amplified and violent ideations normalized.
And, in the US, easy access to things like assault weapons mean that this violence when actualized is devastating.
Polarization breeds distrust, distrust leads to insurmountable differences, which leads to isolation, which leads mental health decline, which leads violent ideation, which is easily actualized by access to military-grade weapons.
Maybe the causal-chain I’m building here isn’t perfect, but if you take a moment to reflect I believe it represents something close to what we are currently experiencing in our 24 hour news cycle.
There is also this interesting reality that the US is positioned along the tail end of short-term and long-term debt cycles.
In the short-term, we’re entering into a recessionary period.
In the long term, we’re experiencing the 100 year debt cycle crisis that comes after years of economic viability and overspending.
This puts us squarely in the crosshairs of multiple crisis even outside of the societal and political tensions explained above.
Ray Dalio in his book Principles for Navigating a Changing World Order notes that at this moment in a country’s cycle (of which the US is by no means the first or most important) there has historically only been one solution.
That solution is strong,
disciplined leader(s) capable of massive compassion, thoughtful policy (both fiscally and socially), and above all the ability to make peace where there exists insurmountable obstacles between parties and people.
So what are we to do?
Enter, Philosophy.
We will spend the next few weeks exploring the ways to respond to this reality in our social lives, our collective lives, and our personal lives.
Join us next week as we consider the advice of two leading anthropologists regarding the best way to address the core issues at play in the modern age.
Their primary critique: we lack imagination.
So come imagine with us next week and we’ll see where the rabbit hole goes.
Until then,
Matt