Trust

The online freelance world is built on trust.

That sounds obvious, I know, but like most things that are obvious it’s also true. When a buyer hires a freelancer for the first time they not only have to trust that they can do the job, but also that they will do the job.

The freelancer also has to trust that the buyer will pay them for the work.

Yes, oDesk makes trust much easier for both the buyer and the provider through guaranteed payment and remote management via the oDesk Team, but it’s still a leap of faith for both parties at first. But we’ve talked a lot about oDesk procedures on here, and so I’m wanting to take a different look at trust this time.

What is trust?

When you come down to it, trust is a belief. It’s the belief that someone else will do what they say. Now there’s an interesting thing about trust: we tend to trust people more than institutions or organizations. This goes both ways. There are a huge number of people who will quite happily take advantage of a corporation but would never think of doing the same to a person.

You see it all the time with music downloads: people feel it’s perfectly all right to take from “the record companies” but wouldn’t dream of stealing from their favorite recording artist.

So what does trust have to do with downloading mp3s?

Plenty:

Because the flip side of trust is trustworthiness. In order to earn trust you have to be trustworthy, and while that may sound like I’m restating the obvious there is something more to it.

You’ve probably all heard the saying “you can’t steal from a thief.”

Many people who download mp3s feel that the record companies are ripping them off, that they have made themselves enemies of the consumer and therefore feel no guilt for downloading and pirating music. They see it as “stealing from a thief.”

They see the record companies as not deserving such consideration as living up to the unspoken societal convention of paying for what’s received.

In many languages, especially those of preliterate and isolated cultures, there is no word for “stranger.” They use their word for “enemy” instead. In many such societies only members of the society are seen as fully human. These are often societies that are known for stealing from scientists or explorers.

The thing to remember is that by their lights, they aren’t stealing. You can only steal from people, and according to many of these societies the anthropologists aren’t really people so it’s not really a crime to take something from them.

This kind of thinking permeates many cultures, and different cultures reflect it to different degrees. Some cultures only extend trust to either the family or the tribe– other people may only extend it to their nation or perhaps their color. Yet others will extend human status to everyone.

Put more generally, there’s a common belief that you need only be trustworthy to the human “us” not the non-human “them.”

This is why the oDesk community is so important. By creating a community among users, both buyers and providers, oDesk is fostering a common “us” that includes everyone on the site. It’s one reason why the term “oDesk Members” is used so frequently.

The community works to bind people together and thus makes it that much more likely that people will live up to their obligations on both sides of the table. Providers will do the best they can at the jobs, and buyers will work with them and not try to work outside the system to minimize costs.

Everyone wins when we just treat each other as people and worthy of trust.

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What is trust?

So what does trust have to do with downloading mp3s?