Chosen: Why We Trust, Who We Trust

“I don’t try to get them to believe me anymore. I try to be the kind of person who can be believed. It’s completely different work.”

I wrote this book because I think this phrase is right, and because I think most of us have been taught the wrong thing.

We have been taught that trust is magic, or charisma, or something you are born with or without. We have been taught that confidence is the main currency, that the loudest person in the room will be believed, that a firm handshake and a steady gaze are enough. None of this is true. Trust, it turns out, is one of the most rigorously studied phenomena in human behavior, and what the research reveals is this, ‘Trust is not a feeling. It is a calculation.’ Very fast, mostly unconscious, but a calculation nonetheless.

Every time a human being meets another human being, a small tribunal convenes inside the skull. Variables get weighed. Evidence gets assessed. A verdict is returned in less time than it takes to finish a sentence. And that verdict, once rendered, is remarkably hard to reverse. This is the tribunal I want to introduce you to. It is the tribunal that decides whether your boss gives you the promotion, whether the stranger at the bar laughs at your joke, whether the investor signs the check, whether your teenager tells you the truth. It is the tribunal that, at scale, sorts the politicians from the prophets and the frauds from the founders.

This book is an attempt to take you inside that tribunal. To show you the variables it weighs. To help you understand, with the clarity of evidence rather than the vagueness of advice, why some people walk into a room and are immediately believed, while others, often more honest, often more qualified, walk in and are not.

Becoming believable is not a performance you put on. It is a practice you take up. It will ask more of you than you expect, and it will give more back than you can imagine. By the end of this book, I hope you will understand not just how to be trusted, but why being trustworthy is perhaps the most valuable thing any of us can ever become.