One of the major findings is that “a person like me” is consistently one of the top two types that people trust. It underscores the inherent personal-ness of trust. All institutions of necessity will rank lower than personal relationships.

I have found in my work with trust that the most obvious hypothesis is the best one. The biggest reason people don’t trust government or business, either one, is that they simply find them untrustworthy. People are not dumb. Do not reject the obvious hypothesis. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy.

This is where government is at a double disadvantage. First, any democratic government is inextricably entwined in politics. And politics is the art of enacting the majority desires at the least cost to the minorities–on issue after issue, all the time. This means a politician has a hard time speaking “the truth,” because “the truth” is different for nearly all.

Of course, politicians usually make it worse yet. “Read my lips,” “It depends on the meaning of the word ‘is’”, and so on. Robert S. MacNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Vietnam era, said, “never answer the question the press answers you; answer the question you wanted them to ask.”

Good politics? Perhaps so. Good trust-creating behavior? No way.

Itnerestingly, one of the highest-trust government ratings in the survey was China–a non-democratic government.

Within business, I find far too many companies thinking that their low trust ratings are a job for the PR department to fix.

If you think your trust problem is a PR problem, then right off the bat you can’t be trusted. Worse yet, the PR department will likely come up with ad campaigns that basically say, “trust us,” which of course further ensures that we don’t.

The single simplest we to be trusted is to be trustworthy. How to do that? Don’t lie; tell more truth; do what you say you’ll do; and biggest of all, don’t think of your customer and employees as abstract assets to increase your quarterly return over capital and strategic compettiive advantage–treat them like people. Do that, and they will trust you, and–paradoxically–your bottom line will improve too. But only if your motives are clean.