Thomas Vander Wal believes the word “trust” has too many different meaning, and after researching with his clients suggests the term “social comfort”.
Right. I have a difficult time with the word trust, not because of trust itself, but because the word has many different meanings. And in an awful lot of my consulting work that I did, people would lean on trust because it is a very powerful word. Around 2008, 2009, I started banning the word trust and you had to use other words.
One of them was comfort. I find there’s comfort that I have confidence in what they’re saying. There’s about 10 to 12 different terms that people were using regularly. Essentially in working with online environments and social computing and social technologies, I started using social comfort as one of the questions. Are you comfortable using this tool? What are the things that make you uncomfortable? And I could get really good responses. If I asked somebody, do you trust the system? Do you trust other people in the system? They couldn’t really give a good answer, but they could surely tell you that they had comfort or they did not have comfort and where they found comfort and why and where they did not have comfort and why.
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