{"id":21409,"date":"2019-01-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/global2020prd.wpengine.com\/insights\/the-neuroscience-of-trust\/"},"modified":"2020-05-11T09:14:37","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T09:14:37","slug":"the-neuroscience-of-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.global-integration.com\/insights\/the-neuroscience-of-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"The neuroscience of trust"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Can you tell how trustworthy someone is by analysing a sample of their blood? The answer is yes. <a href=\"https:\/\/hbr.org\/2017\/01\/the-neuroscience-of-trust\">By drawing blood from people\u2019s arms<\/a> before and after a psychological test, researchers found that the amount of oxytocin people naturally produced when asked to share money with a stranger predicted how trustworthy they would be.\u00a0 A decade of research later, Prof Zak and colleagues have used these insights to bring us the eight key ways to build a high-trust workplace \u2013 the neuroscientific way.<\/p>\n<p>To corroborate their earlier findings, the researchers then gave people synthetic oxytocin through a nasal spray \u2013 and found that this more than doubled the amount of money sent to the stranger as compared to those given a placebo spray. Importantly the link between oxytocin and trust was also shown to hold true when the researchers moved from the lab to the complex real world of work.<\/p>\n<p>Luckily we don\u2019t need to start offering up our arms for blood samples to build a culture of trust within our own team. After a decade of further experiments, Paul Zak, professor of economics, psychology, and management at Claremont Graduate University, has been able to identify the key promoters and inhibitors of oxytocin in the workplace \u2013 and as a result, the eight most effective management habits for building trust.<\/p>\n<p>8 ways to build a high-trust workplace (the neuroscientific way):<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Encourage peers to recognize excellence, publicly<\/li>\n<li>Induce \u2018challenge stress\u2019 \u2013 with challenges that stretch but don\u2019t strain<\/li>\n<li>Give people discretion in how they do their work<\/li>\n<li>Enable \u2018job crafting\u2019 \u2013 allowing people to migrate to projects they are interested in<\/li>\n<li>Regularly share key information about the company\u2019s goals, strategies and tactics<\/li>\n<li>Facilitate people building social ties at work (especially important in remote and virtual teams \u2013 see previous <a href=\"https:\/\/www.global-integration.com\/blog\/how-can-we-build-trust-in-virtual-and-transient-digital-teams\/\">blog<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>Help people develop professionally and personally \u2013 including discussions about career next-steps, work-life integration, and whether they have sufficient time for recreation and reflection<\/li>\n<li>Show vulnerability \u2013 asking for help and being honest when you don\u2019t know the answer stimulates oxytocin in others and counter-intuitively builds your credibility<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Most likely you\u2019ve heard similar advice before. But in the rush of the modern workday, it is easy to let some of these seemingly important but not urgent activities fall by the wayside. That is a mistake. Just in case you need to prove it to yourself (or your manager), the graph below shows the impact of working in a high-trust company on individuals in Prof Zak\u2019s studies (based on data collected in the US in Feb 2016 from a nationally representative sample of 1,095 working adults):<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-22846\" src=\"https:\/\/www.global-integration.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/stress-out.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"585\" height=\"356\" \/><\/p>\n<p>To reap these benefits, share the eight ways to build trust above with your team \u2013 and ask individuals to separately identify which three they feel are not consistently happening at the moment.\u00a0 Have a look at the themes that emerge and figure out exactly when and how you can all improve in this area. Put time in the diary to review progress in a couple of months. Let\u2019s get that oxytocin pumping.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Can you tell how trustworthy someone is by analysing a sample of their blood? The answer is yes. By drawing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":21410,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-21409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","type-blog","training-agile-and-digital","training-matrix-management","training-virtual-teams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.6 (Yoast SEO v27.6) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The neuroscience of trust - Global Integration<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Can you tell how trustworthy someone is by analysing a sample of their blood? The answer is yes. 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