Reasonable Doubt
Train Yourself to Be Less Naive
Trust is innate, but knowing when to withhold it is a skill that takes some practice
When Rachel Botsman was five years old, her parents discovered that the family’s nanny, who’d come with stellar references, was actually one of London’s biggest drug dealers. They had no idea about her side hustle — right up to the point when she used the family Volvo as the getaway car in a bank robbery.
Though Botsman was too young to fully understand what was happening, “that experience of betrayal and deception had a massive impact on my view of the world,” she says. “How could my parents have trusted a criminal to look after me? How were they conned? How did they get it so wrong?”
Today, Botsman is a lecturer on trust and skepticism at Oxford University and author of the book Who Can You Trust? Perhaps surprisingly — considering she encountered her first major example of deception before kindergarten — Botsman’s answer to the question in her book title is an optimistic one: Trust, she explains, is innate, and a vital part of our day-to-day existence.
“Trust is an elusive concept, and yet we depend on it for our lives to function,” she noted at the start of her 2016 TED Talk. “I trust my children when they say they’re…
