"Sense of Community" Trust

Trust

The Spirit of sense of community can begin as a spark. With truthtelling, emotional safety, sense of belonging, and dues paying, this spark can become a flame. But it will never become a fire unless there exists in the community an authority structure that can sustain the fire.

In McMillan and Chavis, this second principle was called Influence. A community must be able to influence its members and members must be able to influence the community. To be effective, a community must have these influences flowing concurrently to create a sphere of influence. The salient element of influence is the development of trust. Trust develops through a community’s use of its power. Who has it? When do they have it? If not present in some members, when don’t they have it? For the spirit of community to survive beyond its first initial spark, the community must solve the problems arising from the allocation of power.

The first requirement for such resolution is that people must know what they can expect from each other in the community. In effect, some sort of order must be established. This would include the development of community norms, rules, or laws. When a sense of order is present, one can predict, plan, and commit. Knowing a community’s norms or laws allows one to develop a sense of personal mastery. Consider what has been achieved by mankind’s knowing the rules of mathematics, engineering, chemistry, and physics. In a sport such as golf, order is found in knowing and executing the mechanics of a good golf swing. In baseball, knowing how to hold the ball in relation to the seams allows one to throw a curve ball. The relationship between knowledge and behavior extends to almost every human endeavor including dancing, drawing, music, etc.

Learning the laws of how things work gives one mastery and creates the potential for attaining one’s desired level of performance. In a community, this knowledge translates into social, emotional, and political potential. Without social norms, however, there is only social chaos. The results of studies of group cohesion... suggest that people become more cohesive when they know what to expect from one another.

Once order exists, the next element for developing trust in a community relates to authority. It is assumed that an individual or individuals has to be in charge. A community must have a way to process information and make decisions. Without this capacity, the community will eventually perish. The decision maker or makers must have authority over the members for the sense of order to be maintained in the community.

In primitive times, the strongest man ruled. When he became weak or died, the community order was threatened or lost and the community’s survival was at risk. Eventually, primogeniture evolved to put an end to the power struggles related to the succession of leaders. This solution, however, left authority or law dependent on the leader’s will or whim. If the leader vacillated, order disintegrated. Leaders could be, and often were, self-serving and capricious and could not always be trusted to serve in other than their self-interest. For this reason in 1212, English noblemen forced King John to sign the Magna Carta. This mandated that the King would rule by establishing law and abide by legal principles instead of his personal will. It introduced into communities the concept that authority can serve many rather than self. Western civilization advanced with the American and French Revolutions to a governance concept of democracy. If leaders did not answer to the people they led, the possibility of rebellion was always present.

Social scientists have demonstrated that communities and groups are more cohesive when leaders influence members and when members influence leaders concurrently. Grossack’s experimental paradigm clarifies this point. One set of participants are instructed to work cooperatively. A second group of participants are instructed to compete against one another. Grossack assumed that these instructions would create respective high cohesive and low cohesive groups. In fact, Grossack found that, in the “cooperative” group, members made more attempts to influence their fellows and accepted more pressure to conform than did those in the competing groups. A review of the social science literature confirms this point—the forces of love, intimacy, and cohesiveness operate from individual participant to the group, and from the group to the individual. This process occurs all at the same time because order, authority, and justice create the atmosphere for the exchange of power.

Lawler found that the more unequally the power is distributed within a group the meaner and more ruthless are all members of that group. Hung found that people exerted greater personal force when they were in a relatively strong position compared with others in the group. People exerted less personal force when they were in a weaker position. Lawler also found that people used greater personal force when they believed they were right. When people believe they are following a transcendent principle, they may be inspired to passion. Thus, the belief in “principle above person” can be as effective as authority. Seta et al. found that when groups expected more than was considered fair, those groups lost the allegiance of their members. The principle of justice as a cohesive force was also observed by Chin in a study of Hong Kong Chinese college students.

Cotterell, Eisenberger, & Speicher, studied wary and suspicious college students. When these students interacted with peers, their distrust was contagious. It is likely that the opposite is also true and that trust can be contagious. Roark and Sharah compared factors of empathy, self-disclosure, acceptance, and trust to see which of these were more effective in producing intimacy. They found trust to be the most important of these factors.

When a community has: 1) order, 2) decision making capacity (i.e., authority), 3) authority based on principle rather than person, and 4) group norms that allow members and authority to influence each other reciprocally, then that community has trust that evolves into justice.