Trust: It’s not just a warm, fuzzy word. It’s the hallmark of high-performing organizations.
So it stands to reason that understanding how trust works would be important to company leaders.
Turns out, there’s a biology to trust. According to Paul J. Zak, founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, it has to do with two “neurological idiosyncrasies” of the human brain that allow us to trust and collaborate with people outside our immediate social group (something no other animal is capable of doing).
The first is the hypertrophied cortex, where insight, planning and abstract thought occur. The second is empathy — a uniquely human ability to share the emotions of others.
There’s also a strong relation between the neurochemical oxytocin and our tendency to trust (or not) another. Like love, another oxytocin-adjacent emotion, trust makes us feel less anxious and makes connecting with others feel really good.
The more you inspire trust in your teams and colleagues, the better everyone feels and the more your organization can perform.
https://hbr.org/2019/07/how-our-brains-decide-when-to-trust
