Her eyes were like saucers when I pointed to her and said "You're in for Kathy. Make those foul shots for us, Beth."
Kathy was our starting shooting forward, and she'd just turned an ankle after being fouled. Beth was a first-year player who had only signed up for basketball because her mom thought it might help her come out of her shell. But she'd worked hard over the past weeks, and I liked her gritty determination. In the previous game, she'd heaved up a half-court shot at the buzzer. She'd missed.
"Coach," she said quietly, "last time--"
"These are foul shots," I said, not letting her finish the sentence or the doubts it would form in her mind. "You make foul shots every day in practice. I trust you."
More below the fold....
Trust, Esteem, and Expectations
Beth had failed last time, but it hadn't shaken my confidence in her. Even professional basketball players rarely make shots from half-court, and Beth was only 12. Her half-court desperation heave hadn't come close, and she'd brooded about it. Perhaps because of her profound shyness, she also assumed her teammates and coach had brooded about it. I hadn't. She had taken the only shot available, a near-impossible shot, and she'd missed. Oh well. That was then and this was now, and I trusted her to shoot foul shots well.
We all experience disappointment, in ourselves and in others. How we construct the experience of disappointment - and how much it undermines our trust - rests on assumptions about intention, and those in turn rest on our expectations. I hadn't expected Beth to make that half-court shot, but she expected perfection in everything she attempted. Our different expectations led to very different constructions of a shared experience. I had shrugged it off as a near-impossible shot missed, but Beth had lost trust in herself when a game was on the line, and assumed I'd lost trust in her as well.
Beth's reaction didn't surprise me, given her shyness and what I'd learned in my then-major of psychology. Our general default of trust or mistrust seems to be linked to self-esteem.
Trust and extremes of self-esteem.
Like most observations in psychology, the linkage between trust and extremes of self-esteem is not fixed and universal. Even if it were, it applies only to our general defaults and not to trust or mistrust for a given individual in a given situation. But our general defaults of trust and mistrust shape our constructions of disappointment experiences, so they shape our expectations and responses in specific cases.
Beth had very low self-esteem, and that makes it harder to trust. I recognized it in Beth in part because of what I'd learned in social psychology courses, and in part because it was a problem I wrestled with for much of my own life and still wrestle with at times. If we believe we're unimportant, or failures because we can't meet impossible standards of perfection, we assume others see us as unimportant or failures. We assume no one would go out of his/her way to do anything to help us, and confirmation bias takes over: highlighting experiences of trust disappointed, marginalizing experiences of trust fulfilled.
Trust issues also cluster at the other extreme of very high self-esteem. Here the problem is not that we expect too little of others and bias our experience to confirm that expectation. Rather, we can think so highly of ourselves that we expect others to set aside their interests in favor of ours. Here the ego defense is projection: assuming others are as selfish as we are, and thus any disappointment must be caused by others' bad intentions.
If the trust issues for too little self-esteem may be summarized "I can't trust others because they know I'm a bad person," the trust issues for too much self-esteem may be summarized "I can't trust others because I know they're bad people." It's often difficult to see which is which, and psychologists like George Kelly speculated they may be flip sides of the same coin. Kelly's dyad exercise suggests we tend to suspect and disapprove of most strongly in others the perceived flaws we most strongly disapprove of in ourselves.
Trust and estimating difficulty.
The other element in my example with Beth concerns how we estimate the difficulty of an undertaking. If we believe something is or should be easy, we're more prone to attribute failure to lack of effort and/or bad intentions. If we believe something is very difficult, we're prone to attribute failure to not yet having developed the requisite competence, or to even a competent person not being able to reliably perform that very difficult task. Research shows we find it easier to rebuild trust if we attribute disappointment to difficulty, and harder to rebuild trust if we attribute disappointment to lack of effort and/or bad intentions.
Beth assumed her half-court shot was or should have been easy, and thus her missing it was due to lack of effort, lack of focus, or some other personal letdown. Missing it had shaken her trust in herself. I saw it as a near-impossible shot that, even for a good shooter giving a best effort, only goes in if you get exceptionally lucky. Her missing it hadn't shaken my trust in her.
Narrative choices.
When we have unrealistic expectations of ourselves and others, we're more likely to meet disappointment and to construct those disappointments as showing a lack of effort and/or bad intentions. That undermines trust and can start a vicious narrative cycle of disappointment-and-mistrust, where each disappointment seems to confirm our mistrust, leading us to be even more distrustful and act on that mistrust in ways that all but guarantee more disappointment.
Or we can change our narratives, their underlying assumptions and how we construct experiences of disappointment. Often there isn't evidence to prove one estimation of difficulty - and the resulting assumptions about trust - to the exclusion of another. Then we have to choose a narrative, and we're responsible for the consequences of those choices. If progressivism relies on trust in each other and in institutions of government, then absent evidence to the contrary we should choose narratives that recognize difficulty rather than imputing lack of effort and/or bad intent.
Beth made the foul shots.
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As for whether we can trust the Professor of Astrology Janitor's reading of the stars, or the stars themselves, that's up to you....
Scorpio - Your friends trust you to be difficult. Don't disappoint them.
Sagittarius - It's not too much self-esteem. You really are that good.
Capricorn - Your self-esteem is very realistic. We're sorry.
Aquarius - Expectation is your middle name. Your parents chose strange names.
Pisces - People trust in you to buttress their self-esteem by contrast.
Aries - It's not unreasonable mistrust when they really are out to get you.
Taurus - Everyone meets disappointment sometimes. And then there's you.
Gemini - That isn't as easy as it seems. Well, not for you anyway.
Cancer - Trusting others as far as you can throw them can cause muscle pulls.
Leo - Others find you very trustworthy. Where do you find those others?
Virgo - You estimate difficulty well. Like plumbers estimate repair costs.
Libra - This is a good weekend to practice overcoming disappointment.
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Happy Friday!