Who are the trustworthy, we think?

"A representative Swedish sample was asked to judge the relative trustworthiness of people from different groups, characterized by several dimensions such as political views and reading habits. A significant similarity effect was found in each of the seven dimensions analyzed. For example, rightwing voters consider Social Democratic voters to be much less trustworthy than rightwing voters, and vice versa. Thus, perceived trustworthiness appears to decrease generally with social distance, for which social identity theory offers a plausible explanation. Moreover, people who are old and live in small cities are generally considered more trustworthy than young people living in big cities. The results suggest reasons behind discrimination other than those underlying taste-based and statistical discrimination." [author's abstract

The Humility Heuristic, or: People Worth Trusting Admit to What They Don’t Know

People don't always speak the truth. When they don't, we do better not to trust them. Unfortunately, that's often easier said than done. People don't usually wear a ‘Not to be trusted!’ badge on their sleeves, which lights up every time they depart from the truth. Given this, what can we do to figure out whom to trust, and whom not? My aim in this paper is to offer a partial answer to this question. I propose a heuristic—the “Humility Heuristic”—which is meant to help guide our search for trustworthy advisors. In slogan form, the heuristic says: people worth trusting admit to what they don't know. I give this heuristic a precise probabilistic interpretation, offer a simple argument for it, defend it against some potential worries, and demonstrate its practical worth by showing how it can help address some difficult challenges in the relationship between experts and laypeople

The Impact of Instruction in the WWWDOT Framework on Students’ Disposition and Ability to Evaluate Web Sites as Sources of Information

Much research has demonstrated that students are largely uncritical users of Web sites as sources of information. Research-tested frameworks are needed to increase elementary-age students’ awareness of the need and ability to critically evaluate Web sites as sources of information. This study is a randomized field trial of such a framework called WWWDOT. A matched-pair design involving 12 grade 4 and 5 classes was adopted. Data were collected through 3 assessments administered before and after the intervention: a questionnaire, a Single Web Site Evaluation Task, and a Web Site Ranking Task. ANCOVA and ordinal regression analyses reveal that students taught the WWWDOT framework became more aware of the need to evaluate information on the Internet for credibility and were better able to evaluate the trustworthiness of Web sites on multiple dimensions. However, students’ overall judgment and ranking of the relative trustworthiness of Web sites was not improved

Choosing Whom to Trust: Autonomy versus Reliance on Others in Medical Decision Making among Plain Anabaptists

The idea of patients as autonomous agents dominates the medical ethics literature in Europe and America. I maintain that Plain Anabaptists allow their communities to influence medical therapy decisions more than the typical American does. They choose differently whom to trust. This is relevant to medical professionals interacting with them, especially when Plain Anabaptists make decisions at variance with standard medical recommendations. The typical American doctor will often mistake the area of disagreement, assuming that the presentation of more facts will sway the patient. However, the emphasis on community and acceptance of authority means that Plain Anabaptists will have a correspondingly different approach to decision making. It may be true that the patient does not have all relevant data or does not realize the relative trustworthiness of different information sources. Yet, often Plain Anabaptists will come to a different decision because of a different value system. They are making their own decision about who or what to trust. [Abstract by author

The Neuroeconomics of Trust

The traditional view in economics is that individuals respond to incentives, but absent strong incentives to the contrary selfishness prevails. Moreover, this “greed is good” approach is deemed “rational” behavior. Nevertheless, in daily interactions and in numerous laboratory studies, a high degree of cooperative behavior prevails—even among strangers. A possible explanation for the substantial amount of “irrational” behavior observed in markets (and elsewhere) is that humans are a highly social species and to an extent value what other humans think of them. This behavior can be termed trustworthiness—cooperating when someone places trust in us. I also analyze the cross-country evidence for environments that produce high or low trust. A number of recent experiments from my lab have demonstrated that the neuroactive hormone oxytocin facilitates trust between strangers, and appears to induce trustworthiness. In rodents, oxytocin has been associated with maternal bonding, pro-social behaviors, and in some species long-term pair bonds, but prior to the work reviewed here, the behavioral effects of oxytocin in humans had not been studied. This presentation discusses the neurobiology of positive social behaviors and how these are facilitated by oxytocin. My experiments show that positive social signals cause oxytocin to be released by the brain, producing an unconscious attachment to a stranger. I also discuss recent research that manipulates oxytocin levels, and functional brain imaging research on trust.Oxytocin, social capital, neuroeconomics, development, experiments

Authority and Trust: Reflections on Linda Zagzebski’s Epistemic Autohrity

Our modern egalitarian and individualistic age is suspicious of authority, and in recent times there have been almost daily reports in the press of cases where trust in various authorities, including financial, governmental, political and religious, has been found to have been abused or misplaced. Such disappointments seem to bolster the case for withholding trust in external authority and falling back on one’s own resources. But if the lessons from Linda Zagzebski’s groundbreaking work are accepted, 1 self- reliance turns out to be a confused and probably incoherent ideal ; and the rational and self-reflective person is committed to believing and acting on authority. In the second half of this short discussion paper I shall raise some possible concerns about Zagzebski’s positive case for reliance on authority, focussing on the moral and religious spheres. First however, let me say something about the negative part of Zagzebski’s work, her critique of self-reliance. Since I find this wholly convincing, I shall confine myself to some supplementary observations, mainly to do with the historical context in which her critique is located

The Making of Online Identity. The use of creative method to support young people in their reflection on age\ud and gender

In the .GTO.project our ambition is to study how young people (10 to 14 years old) in Estonia and Sweden construct and normalise gender and age, as markers of identity and identity development, in their online interactions. After\ud conducting interview studies on how young people experience on- and offline interactions, and their intertwining, as well as online ethnographic studies of online presentations, we went on with the third phase of the project: creative\ud workshops with young people. In these workshops, young people in groups of four were to create fictitious online characters. In the analysis of these, we focus on how power differentials and identity markers such as age and gender are constructed and negotiated.\u

A high-level semiotic trust agent scoring model for collaborative virtual organisations

In this paper, we describe how a semiotic ladder, together with a supportive trust agent, can be used to address “soft” trust issues in the context of collaborative Virtual Organisations (VO). The intention is to offer all parties better support for trust (as reputation) management including the reduction of risk and improved reliability of VO e-services. The semiotic ladder is intended to support the VO e-service lifecycle through the articulation of e-trust at various levels of system abstraction, including trust as measurable confidence. At the social level, reputation and reliability measures of e-trust are the relevant dimensions as regards choice of VO partner and are also relevant to the negotiation of service level agreements between the VO partners. By contrast, at the lower levels of the trust ladder, e-trust measures typically address the degree to which secure sign on and message level security conforms to various tangible technological security protocols. The novel trust agent provides the e-service consumer with an objective measure of the trustworthiness of the e-service at run-time, just prior to its actual consumption. Specifically, VO e-service consumer confidence level is informed, by leveraging third party objective evidence. This evidence comprises a set of Corporate Governance (CG) scores. These scores are used as a trust proxy for the "real" owner of the VO. There are also inherent limitations associated with the use of CG scores. These are duly acknowledged