Blog: ​Internal Audit and the Game of Trust

Blog by Jim Pelletier: CIA, vice president, Standards and Professional Knowledge,​ for The IIA. Internal Auditor’s blogs reflect the personal views and opinions of the authors. 

​Trust is often thought of as a simple process, yet it actually is a complex game, and how you play that game matters. To understand the trust game being played between two people, we must first understand some basic science behind how trust works in the human brain.

There are two big driving forces in the brain that are at the core of our ability to trust and be trusted. The first is our human capacity for empathy. Said another way, people have an enhanced ability to sense and even adopt the emotions of those we are interacting with (some people are much better at this than others).

Our ability to essentially mimic emotion is critical to trust. For example, as someone tells you a sad story, that person expects that you will feel sadness similar to how he or she is feeling, even if the story doesn't directly impact you in any way.

To reinforce this point, imagine the flipside. What if you were telling a story about your pet dying and the person listening sat there with a smile on his or her face? Not only would you not trust that person with future insights into your personal life, it would be a bit unnerving.

The second driving force behind building trust is what psychologists call the "theory of mind." Simply put, this is the ability to think from another person's perspective. What is he thinking? How might she act or react to something? Does he really agree with what I'm saying or is he just nodding along? In other words, theory of mind represents our ability to "step into someone else's shoes."

Visit IIA's website to read the complete blog.