Inflating the Bubble of Trust

What exactly is the magic of a very good gathering? And what does it have to do with social change? Can we engineer a pandemic of hospitality?

You live in a bubble of trust.

There’s a small group of people in your life that have a special status in your mental rolodex: you can count on them when you’re in distress, you would lend them money without hesitation, and you would happily look after their kids or water their houseplants when they need a favour.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has formalised this understanding of human relationships into a detailed categorisation of nested circles of friendship:

The idea is that we’re more cooperative with the people closest to us. We share more with the people in the innermost circles, and we have progressively less trust in people as the circles expand outward.

We’re living in a period where some of these circles are emptying out. Studies show an increasing number of people with zero close friends, compared to just a few decades ago:

We know that loneliness has severe consequences:

“The single most important factor affecting your psychological & physical health and wellbeing, indeed even your likelihood of dying, is the number and quality of close friendships that you have.” – Robin Dunbar summarising the recent research into the consequences of loneliness.

What’s harder to measure is the impact on those wider circles. When our inner circles empty out, what does that do to a society? If you don’t have a tight crew of people to practice cooperation with, how does that change your attitude towards strangers?

You can look at history as the project of creating ever-larger circles of cooperation, from clans & tribes, to kingdoms, city states, nation states and empires. We’ve devised different strategies to enact this process, sometimes using coercive & violent means (join us or else), other times appealing to intrinsic motivations (join us and enjoy these benefits). Military power, religious/mythic storytelling, economic trade, transportation, law, culture, language, science… these are all tools for enrolling increasingly large groups of people into cooperative relationships.

It’s become common knowledge to say “trust is decreasing in society these days”. At some scales, this is true. It’s not just that people lack close friendships, we also treat strangers with greater caution than we did a few decades ago, there’s greater polarisation between political tribes, there’s fewer people participating in clubs & churches & civic organisations. But on the other hand, tomorrow I could fly to any one of thousands of cities around the world and trust that I will be able to communicate when I arrive, trust that my credit card will work and that I will be treated fairly when I deal with local merchants, trust that I will not face threats of violence simply for being an outsider, trust that I will be granted the protection of the law if someone mistreated me. In some sense we do seem to be growing into one global extended family.

So I’m not completely a doomer, I think things are simultaneously getting better and getting worse at different points in the system. But I do personally feel a burning mission to recuperate the lost trust that many of us feel at the micro- and meso- scale. I’m constantly meeting these isolated young adults you read about in the loneliness studies, and it really is as miserable as you imagine. It’s extremely rewarding when I get to play a role in them finding their way into satisfying & nourishing relationships with new friends, collaborators and partners.

I’m excited about the Microsolidarity Network because we’re developing repeatable, reliable, predictable methods for weaving social fabric. The methods are really pretty simple, it’s just hospitality, attentively & abundantly deployed. There’s two essential technologies that we rely on: crews & gatherings.

A crew is a group of 3-6 people that engages in repeated, reciprocal interactions, building a fabric of trust while being a united for a common purpose, task or shared intention. Check Julia Karmo’s excellent new blog if you want to understand how these small crews support the healthy function of much larger groups.

The gatherings I’m talking about range in size from a few dozen to a few thousand people: they’re regional Burning Man events, pop-up communities, the Gathering of Tribes, TPOT gatherings, or Enspiral retreats for example.

And now we finally get to the point of this blog: what exactly is the magic of a very good gathering? And what does it have to do with social change?

A gathering is a temporary, set-apart container, where we get to experience a different social reality for a few days. At a really good gathering, you may suddenly find yourself interacting with potentially hundreds of people in ways that you would normally reserve for just your close friends: you become more open, more generous, more trusting. A gathering can temporarily inflate your bubble of trust to include many more people.

I’ve repeatedly heard reports from people saying that spending a few days in a high-trust gathering made a lasting impact and renewed their openness in general, making them more open to strangers in the world, more able to drop their defences sooner, and be more trusting.

I’m fascinated by this temporarily intensified intimacy. What conditions enable the sudden expansion of the trust bubble?

Here’s one way to understand the mechanism of action: compared to society-at-large, the people at a gathering have less variance between them. Less variance makes strangers more predictable to each other. If I can make more accurate guesses about your behaviour, I can be more generous with you even if I don’t yet know you personally, because there’s less chance of you taking advantage of me.

We have many ways of reducing variance between strangers. As an event organiser, you can impose top-down structures, like a daily coordination meeting that everyone is expected to attend, or an explicitly defined shared practices or ethics. Burning Man for example has explicitly defined a set of 10 principles that help to standardise people’s behaviour. But conformity is also produced implicitly, for example the aesthetic of your event will attract people with similar values and repel others. And everyone at a gathering has at least one important thing in common: they all responded to the same invitation.

This raises more juicy questions. What methods do we have for synchronising people’s behaviour, making them more predictable to each other without being excessively controlling, without feeling manipulative or contrived, without putting extreme concentrations of power in the hands of a few, without excluding people for unethical reasons? Where can we prototype and test these methods? Can we identify super effective & wholesome methods for building trust and intentionally design them for mass adoption & viral spread? Can we engineer a pandemic of hospitality?

If you’re in Europe and you’re curious about these questions, for heaven’s sakes come join us at Microsolidarity Summer Camp in Austria from August 29th!

Photo from the last Microsolidarity Summer Camp