The Difference Between Trust and Confidence

Trust thought for the day - is there a difference between trust and confidence and does it even matter? This is actually quite hard, if rather arcane!

It came to me because of the football! England manager Gareth Southgate trusted his penalty takers because of his confidence in their skill based eg on a combo of their competence in practice, their experience at top level footie and their mental toughness in similar situations. That didn’t work out. But does it mean they weren’t trustworthy. No.

Does it mean he shouldn’t trust them in a similar situation again? Again no, depending on what they take from it and how they recover, it could conceivably mean the experience makes them more resilient and able to deliver in a similar situation. Or not. Tho this trust decision will also be coloured by whether he loses confidence in his own judgement and stops trusting himself!

So in this example you could use trust and confidence pretty interchangeably. But I can't nail why they still feel different!

Looking at basic dictionary definitions didn’t help me much (eg I would have flipped these from Oxford):

TRUST - firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something

CONFIDENCE - the feeling or belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something

There is lots of guff written on this, the main gist of the thinking is that confidence is based on past experiences and trust can sometimes be more speculative. But trust is based on experience too and you can have confidence in people with very little information to go on for lots of different reasons. Also like trust.

My current feeling is that confidence feels more certain and more about competence and from the perspective of the person showing the confidence. ‘I have total confidence in you.” Whereas trust is more about the perceived trustworthiness of the person, the 7 signals and more open ended. ‘I trust you’.

But actually that is rubbish. You equally trust people and have confidence in them based on lots of different things and in fairly narrowly defined realms. Perhaps they really are interchangeable. Does it matter. Unsure.

Anyone have thoughts?