The Trust We Assume, the Consent We Feel

Imagine standing in a busy train station, asking strangers to answer a few questions. How many people would you need to approach before five say yes? In a now-classic study, Vanessa Bohns predicted twenty. The actual number was ten. People were almost twice as likely to agree as she expected, and two decades and more than 14,000 requests later, the finding still holds. We consistently underestimate how often others will say yes to us, and how hard it is for them to refuse.

This is really a conversation about trust. We tend to assume that when someone agrees to a request, they have thought it through and decided the person asking can be trusted. Vanessa's research suggests something different. People often say yes in the moment because saying no is hard, not because they have decided to trust. The judgment about trust comes later, sometimes much later, and sometimes the trust we thought was there was never really there at all.

In this episode we talk about why gratitude letters mean more than we expect, why Monica Lewinsky could call the same relationship consensual in 2014 and question it in 2018, how a single phone call from Countrywide Financial moved Moody's to reverse a credit rating overnight, and why telling people they have the right to refuse changes almost nothing, but giving them the words to do so changes a great deal. We also look at how moving so much of our professional and political life into email and text quietly erodes the trust we build with each other.

Vanessa Bohns is the Braunstein Family Professor and Chair of Organizational Behavior at the ILR School at Cornell University. She is the author of You Have More Influence Than You Think, and her next book, Should I Say Something?, is out later this year.