Too trusting or too lazy?

Trust thought for today - My Trusting Week - Part 1: A few weeks ago I decided to log my trust/distrust judgements over a week and see what was behind them. It was harder than it sounds, and not as helpful as I hoped! Here are my reflections:

1. I find I am by default a trusting person. When in doubt I default to trust, and I have residual trust in institutions & people probably based on lack of bad experiences and personality type.

2. However, it's hard to tell when this is in fact simply lethargy. Unsure too whether lethargy was a result of feeling overwhelmed by information, lack of alternative options, perception/misperception of risk, or just being too busy/confused to make any effort. Or when it was simply laziness + optimism.

3. On a few occasions, past experience played a part and fewer still were grounded in reasons of my proactive experience of another's trustworthiness. Trust in governance, and particularly openness, effective communications and 'warmth' was in there.

4. A couple were a direct result of lack of trustworthiness with seeming lack of integrity and selfish purpose mainly behind those. I think some were about finding excuses for inaction/selfishness on my part and dislike or revenge for other random reasons.

5. I was also quite surprised how much other's views counted. Not just trusted others. Particularly people like me & the opposite, in person & media/social media. Rather shocked by my reliance on recommendations/ratings via websites even though I know they are often rigged.

So overall, I concluded I default to optimism because of my personality and fortunate past experiences and have been lucky in lots of ways my trust has not regularly been badly misplaced! Or, on balance are others and institutions in reality more trustworthy than what we read in media/social media suggests? As Rutger Bregman proposes. Who knows!

Kent Grayson, Mathew Mytka as mentioned. I can see the behavioural biases in here Roger Miles, but think there are other things too!