Doveryai, no proveryai

Doveryai, no proveryai is a rhyming Russian proverb.  Don’t trust me?  Look it up.  I found it on the internet, so it must be true.  It was used by President Ronald Reagan after an American scholar taught it to him.  It translates to be “trust but verify.”  The former president used it on numerous occasions when in talks with the Soviet Union regarding nuclear disarmament.  He used it so much that you can now buy a coffee mug with the slogan from his Presidential Library in California.

Who can we trust these days?  One firm sets out to answer this question each year.  Edelman is a public relations company which helps organizations promote and protect their brand.  Each year they produce their Trust Barometer.  Edelman breaks the world into four large categories (business, government, non-government organizations, and media) and assesses, via a global survey, whether or not the public finds each of them trustworthy.

Only one of the four was assessed as trustworthy.  This is actually an improvement from last year’s survey when none of the group was deemed worthy of trust.  Business becomes the sole trusted institution, with 86 percent of those polled expecting CEOs to speak out on a variety of societal challenges, and 68 percent believing CEOs should step in when governments don’t fix societal problems.

Before we start booing and hissing at the other three, we should note that two of the three improved in the past year, just not enough to be worthy of trust yet, and all three fall under the “neutral” reading (i.e., globally, people see these entities as neither deserving of trust nor distrust). 

Governments added to their neutral tally, but they are still thought of as being less competent than necessary and unethical.  In the U.S., however, distrust for the government remains high with members of both major political parties.  It should be noted that the survey was done shortly after last year’s election.

Media managed a worldwide uptick as well, but that group declined in the U.S.  Regardless of their political affiliation, individuals trust the media less than a year earlier, although the decline is much more pronounced among Reagan’s GOP.

Non-government organizations (NGOs) suffered the only setback in the past year but still have the second-highest rating out of the four.  A similar pattern emerged once again: both parties are less trusting of NGOs, but Republicans led the poll lower.

Truth is complicated and misinformation travels quickly these days.  It’s one of the reasons Atlas’ approach to managing risk is so data driven.  Narratives can be captivating, but numbers often more accurately represent the truth when headlines about companies and governments emerge.  We don’t do much marketing here at Atlas, but we might have to commission a “Trust but Quantify” mug.