The Compassionate Instinct

PAUL: There are a lot of clinical reports of people who are commitment adverse and can’t trust others. Based on their reports of their childhood, it seems that this is often a result of how they were brought up. They found they couldn’t trust their parents because their parents broke their promises or their commitments. And unreliability can be very damaging.

When I was 13, I spent five weeks rehearsing to play a role in a Gilbert and Sullivan show, The Mikado, for one performance, which my parents missed by 2 hours. I never forgave them for that. That was very decisive for me, that unreliability. Something like that can make it quite a struggle for you to trust others. Quite a struggle.

But there’s been much less scientific attention given to the positive side: What does positive parental behavior that earns trust look like? What are its benefits? Psychologists study problems; we don’t study success. But I would expect just the reverse—that people who were trusting as children grow up being able to be trustworthy.

JASON MARSH: Some parents might try to earn their kids’ trust, but they might not exhibit trust toward their kids in return. What could be the consequences of not demonstrating trust toward your kids?

PAUL: You have children who are either crippled by the overcontrolling, micromanaging parent or who become devious in order to get their freedom. They’ve got to grow, and they are increasingly capable of acting independently. So they’re going to find a way to do so, or you’re going to destroy them.

If they find a way to gain autonomy through deviousness, through gaming the system, that’s really a bad way to learn it because once you learn how to do it with your parents, there’s a lot of temptation to do it with everybody else. That brings short-term gains and long-term losses. But if you’re the type who just goes from one relationship to another, then you may never realize what you’re losing—until you get late in your life and you feel you haven’t built anything.

JASON MARSH: Based on research and your own experience, is it possible for you to sum up what you believe is most important to raising kids who are both trusting and trustworthy?

PAUL: The two are related. People who are distrustful are usually not very trustworthy themselves, and difficult to deal with.

You have a fundamental choice to make about how you’re going to lead your life: Are you going to be suspicious and risk disbelieving people who are truthful? Or are you going to be trusting and risk being misled? As a parent, you always need to be trusting and risk being misled. Being wrongly accused is terrible. And it is less pleasant to live your life being suspicious all the time, unless you are a police investigator. And you do not need to be an investigator in your home.

EVE: Is there such as thing as too much trust?

PAUL: No.

EVE: Really? Even when your kids are lying to you, and you know they’re lying to you?

PAUL: There is no general rule.

EVE: I imagine people who read your book Why Kids Lie would want to be able to better catch their kids in lies.

PAUL: But that absolutely was not my intention; my intention was to explain to parents why kids lie, not how to catch them in lies. There is nothing in the book that teaches how to detect lies. That is not your job as a parent to be the cop, to be the interrogator. You must be the teacher, or the model. You want to talk to your kids about the real costs of lying. The real cost is not being trusted. If you are not trusted, it makes all intimate relationships impossible.

EVE: I did trust you and always felt you had my best intention in mind. I sometimes felt that I knew how to take care of myself more than you could give me credit for, but I think that is a pretty natural part of growing up and wanting full freedom.

To this day, I think that trust is present in my everyday thinking. When I am making a hard or risky decision, I think, “What would my parents think?”

PAUL: Having had parents who made every mistake you could make—they were good models of what not to do.

EVE: So, do you trust me?

PAUL: Of course.

HOT TO HELP

Daniel Goleman

WE OFTEN EMPHASIZE the importance of keeping cool in a crisis. But sometimes coolness can give way to detachment and apathy.

We saw a perfect example of this in the response to Hurricane Katrina, whose devastation was amplified enormously by the lackadaisical response from the agencies charged with managing the emergency. As we all witnessed, leaders at the highest levels were weirdly detached, despite the abundant evidence on our TV screens that they needed to snap to action. The victims’ pain was exacerbated by such indifference to their suffering. So as we prepare for the next Katrina-like disaster, what can the science of social intelligence—especially research into empathy—teach policy makers and first responders about the best way to handle themselves during such a crisis?