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Don't smile about job losses
Why smiling kills trust
Telling people they may lose status, purpose, income, and security while seeming fine, or smiling, ends trust on the spot. The listener stops thinking of the speaker as being on their side, barely as the same species, and stops assuming that anything else the speaker says is something they'd agree with.
The Schmidt address
Eric Schmidt's commencement address put technology at the center of the story: AI would change the world and disrupt jobs, and graduates could help build it or find themselves in its way. The protagonist was the technology, not the person in the audience. When he raised the possibility of AI taking half the jobs of the anxious graduates, he sounded secure and blase and gave no sign of recognizing their fear.
Finding common ground
The way back from lost trust is common ground. When two people disagree and can't get on the same page, the best tactic is to find something both agree on, even something anodyne like a shared taste in a drink, and lay it as the foundation. After that, each assumes the other has things in common with them, so what comes next is easier to accept.
Why did the Luddites smash machines?
The Luddites were English textile workers active from 1811 to 1816. They targeted owners who used stocking frames and other machines to turn out cheap goods with less skilled labor, which undercut pay and trade customs. The government sent thousands of troops to the affected counties. Parliament passed the Frame Breaking Act of 1812, which made destroying machinery punishable by death.
Why does shared common ground build trust?
In experiments by the psychologist Henri Tajfel in the early 1970s, schoolboys were told they were being sorted into groups by their preference between paintings by Klee and Kandinsky. They never met their group-mates, yet they consistently gave more points to members of their own group. The finding, known as the minimal group paradigm, showed how little it takes to create a feeling of us.
How do listeners size up a speaker?
Psychologists Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy, and Peter Glick found that people judge others on two main dimensions, warmth and competence. Warmth, meaning whether a person intends good or ill, tends to be judged first and weighed more heavily. Fiske and her colleagues reported that these two dimensions account for most of the variation in how people perceive others.
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