Trust And Belief Risk
Risk that a party we are communicating with can't be trusted, as it has agency or is unreliable in some other way.
Part Of
Although protocols can sometimes handle security features of communication (such as Authentication and preventing man-in-the-middle attacks), trust goes further than this, it is the flip-side of Agency Risk, which we will look at later: can you be sure that the other party in the communication is acting in your best interests?
Even if the receiver trusts the sender, they may not believe the message. Let's look at some reasons for that:
- Weltanschauung (World View): the ethics, values and beliefs in the receiver's Internal Model may be incompatible to those from the sender.
- Relativism is the concept that there are no universal truths. Every truth is from a frame of reference. For example, what constitutes offensive language is dependent on the listener.
- Psycholinguistics is the study of how humans acquire languages. There are different languages, dialects, and industry dialects. We all understand language in different ways, take different meanings and apply different contexts to the messages.
From the point-of-view of Marketing Communications, choosing the right message is part of the battle. You are trying to communicate your idea in such a way as to mitigate Trust & Belief Risk.