The smart move: We learn more by trusting than by not trusting

an article by Hugo Mercier published in AEON [republished in the Big Think blog]


Members of the Castellers de Barcelona build a human tower in Tarragona, Spain, October 2007. Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty 

We all know people who have suffered by trusting too much: scammed customers, jilted lovers, shunned friends. Indeed, most of us have been burned by misplaced trust.

These personal and vicarious experiences lead us to believe that people are too trusting, often verging on gullibility.

In fact, we don't trust enough.

Take data about trust in the United States (the same would be true in most wealthy democratic countries at least). Interpersonal trust, a measure of whether people think others are in general trustworthy, is at its lowest in nearly 50 years. Yet it is unlikely that people are any less trustworthy than before: the massive drop in crime over the past decades suggests the opposite. Trust in the media is also at bottom levels, even though mainstream media outlets have an impressive (if not unblemished) record of accuracy.

Meanwhile, trust in science has held up comparatively well, with most people trusting scientists most of the time; still, in some areas at least, from climate change to vaccination, a share of the population doesn't trust science enough – with devastating consequences.

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12 Things You Can Do to Learn to Trust Again

a post by Rossana Snee for the Lifehack blog

NOTE: This post is primarily about a one-to-one relationship with a partner but there are, among the 12 suggestions, ideas that you can apply to other relationships.

T R U S T – a simple five-letter word. Yet one that carries so much weight. Trust is the soul of any relationship. It is the super glue that binds it together. If you have it, it is the reason you can go to sleep at night next to your partner and feel at peace; the reason that the ding of a text, or the ring of a phone doesn’t shoot off alarm bells; the reason that your partner working late doesn’t cause an anxiety attack.

Lack of trust, however, creates just the opposite effect. It causes untold psychological distress. It turns you into a spy as you search for clues that will validate your suspicions. It pits you against your worst insecurities. It makes you sick and hypervigilant; it keeps you up at nights wondering, Am I not good enough? Is it my fault? Is everything we have a sham? What will people think?

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Solutions for counteracting human deception in social engineering attacks

an article by Curtis C. Campbell (University of Phoenix, Tempe, Arizona, USA) published in Information Technology & People Volume 32 Issue 5 (2019)

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the top three cybersecurity issues in organizations related to social engineering and aggregate solutions for counteracting human deception in social engineering attacks.

Design/methodology/approach
A total of 20 experts within Information System Security Association participated in a three-round Delphi study for aggregating and condensing expert opinions. Three rounds moved participants toward consensus for solutions to counteract social engineering attacks in organizations.

Findings
Three significant issues: compromised data; ineffective practices; and lack of ongoing education produced three target areas for implementing best practices in countering social engineering attacks. The findings offer counteractions by including education, policies, processes and continuous training in security practices.

Research limitations/implications
Study limitations include lack of prior data on effective social engineering defense. Research implications stem from the psychology of human deception and trust with the ability to detect deception.

Practical implications
Practical implications relate to human judgment in complying with effective security policies and programs and consistent education and training. Future research may include exploring financial, operational and educational costs of implementing social engineering solutions.

Social implications
Social implications apply across all knowledge workers who benefit from technology and are trusted to protect organizational assets and intellectual property.

Originality/value
This study contributes to the field of cybersecurity with a focus on trust and human deception to investigate solutions to counter social engineering attacks. This paper adds to under-represented cybersecurity research regarding effective implementation for social engineering defense.

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Global lessons from Euroscepticism

a column by Stephanie Bergbauer, Jean-Francois Jamet, Hanni Schölermann, Livio Stracca and Carina Stubenrauch for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Recent successes of populist movements in Europe might seem to reflect eroded trust in the EU’s institutions.

This column asks what global lessons can be drawn from recent research on Euroscepticism at the ECB and elsewhere. It argues that taking citizens’ concerns seriously and addressing salient issues, building on a sense of togetherness, and caring about public trust should inspire a course of action at the global level. Insufficient progress along these dimensions has played a key role not only in Brexit, but also in the backlash against the multilateral world order underpinning globalisation.

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Responsible domestic robotics: exploring ethical implications of robots in the home

an article by Lachlan Urquhart (University of Edinburgh, UK and University of Nottingham, UK) and Dominic Reedman-Flint and Natalie Leesakul (University of Nottingham, UK)
 published in Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society Volume 17 Issue 2 (2019)

Abstract

Purpose
The vision of robotics in the home promises increased convenience, comfort, companionship and greater security for users. The robot industry risks causing harm to users, being rejected by society at large or being regulated in overly prescriptive ways if robots are not developed in a socially responsible manner. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the challenges and requirements for designing responsible domestic robots.

Design/methodology/approach
The paper examines definitions of robotics and the current commercial state of the art. In particular, it considers the emerging technological trends, such as smart homes, that are already embedding computational agents in the fabric of everyday life. The paper then explores the role of values in design, aligning with human computer interaction, and considers the importance of the home as a deployment setting for robots. The paper examines what responsibility in robotics means and draws lessons from past home information technologies. An exploratory pilot survey was conducted to understand user concerns about different aspects of domestic robots such as form, privacy and trust. The paper provides these findings, married with literature analysis from across technology law, computer ethics and computer science.

Findings
By drawing together both empirical observations and conceptual analysis, this paper concludes that user centric design is needed to create responsible domestic robotics in the future.

Originality/value
This multidisciplinary paper provides conceptual and empirical research from different domains to unpack the challenges of designing responsible domestic robotics. In doing this, the paper seeks to bridge the gap between the normative dimensions of how responsible robots should be built, and the practical dimensions of how people want to live with them in context.

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Digital government, public participation and service transformation: the impact of virtual courts

an article by Sarah Moore (University of Bath, UK) published in Policy & Politics Volume 47 Number 3 (July 2019)

Abstract

Governments around the world are building online infrastructures which they hope will become the main channels through which they interact with citizens. This new, globally dominant orthodoxy in policymaking is closely tied to design-thinking which claims that digital technology addresses the dual crises of state capacity and public trust.

Through an examination of virtual courts, this paper offers a critical analysis of the organising principles and the effects of the digital government revolution. It shows that virtual courts reconfigure the role of the public in ‘seeing justice being done’, leading to the emergence of a new ‘visuality of technocracy’.

However, it questions the claim that digital technology will transform public services and increase public trust. Creating new virtual spaces and interfaces is not a costless endeavour and, while it may make public services more convenient, it recasts citizens as passive viewers of justice and individual users of public services.

7 Ways Seeing a Therapist Is Better Than Talking to a Friend

a post by Jennifer D. Maddox for YourTango.com [via World of Psychology]



Ditch the notion that therapy sucks.

I’m a bit biased about the positive effects of seeing a therapist, but I often have a new client come to me and say, “I was so scared to come here today,” or, “Well, that wasn’t really so bad. I thought it was going to suck!” The truth is, seeing a therapist doesn’t have to suck, and if going to therapy does suck for you, find a new therapist.

There are so many people to choose from, so continue looking until you find someone who resonates with you, someone you respect and would want to have as a friend. Being very clear though, this person can never be considered a friend in any social settings, outside of the therapy office.

It’s a boundary violation and an ethical issue, but if you like him or her, as you would a friend, you’ll be more willing to talk and trust, to open up as a whole. Find someone you like and respect, and then start talking!

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Hazel’s comment:
Please note that the author of this piece is writing about the situation in the USA. All therapy is paid for either by insurance or directly out of your own pocket so choice is available.
If you are using the NHS service in the UK you take what you are given or lose any opportunity for therapy – at least that seems to be the situation in most areas of the country.

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When the Building Blocks of Emotional Healthiness Are Missing

a post by W.R. Cummings for the Childhood Behavioral Concerns blog [via the World of Psychology blog]



For a couple of months now, I’ve been working with my foster daughter on catching up in math class. She’s “significantly” behind her peers (and continues to fall further behind each month), but I didn’t realize just how deep the problem ran.

At first, I thought, “Okay, she’s not doing her homework. We can change that.”

And then I realized that she wasn’t doing her homework because she didn’t know how. I thought, “Okay so she doesn’t know how to convert decimals to percentages. No big deal. I’m a math teacher! I’ll just work with her on it until she understands.”

But she still wasn’t getting it.

So we backed up and started working on simpler concepts of splitting numbers into parts. But she couldn’t divide anything because she doesn’t understand how to do long division. So we backed up again to work on long division.

But then we found out she couldn’t do long division because she didn’t know her multiplication facts. At all. So we backed up again.

Long story short, we eventually discovered that she’s missing fundamental math skills, such as adding double-digit numbers, subtracting with regrouping, and organizing her thoughts on paper.

This problem started with missing skills from about first grade. She started falling through the cracks, academically, FOUR YEARS AGO and never caught up.

I realized pretty quickly how completely pointless it was for us to even attempt decimals when she didn’t know how to add. We had to go all the way back to the place where she started to get confused and rebuild that foundation.

Do you know what is exactly the same as being behind in math? Being behind in emotional healthiness and coping skills.

Adults often wonder how they can get their children/students to stop a certain behavior, but they often forget just how far the problem goes. Teachers are usually great about recognizing the skills that a student is missing, but I think sometimes it’s forgotten that those missing skills stem from an entire group of skills that might be lacking.

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How I Learned to Like and Trust Myself Again (and How You Can Too)

a post by Will Aylward for the Tiny Buddha blog


“Loving yourself starts with liking yourself, which starts with respecting yourself, which starts with thinking of yourself in positive ways.” ~Jerry Corsten

Useless. Hopeless. Broken.

This was how I saw myself.

I didn’t completely loathe myself, but I didn’t like myself either. At best, I tolerated myself.

I felt I had good reasons to.

I’d gotten myself into, as we say in England, a right old pickle.

If you’re not familiar with this charming expression, I had gotten myself into a big mess.

In my early twenties, over a painful period of about eighteen months, I’d gradually buried myself in personal debt with several pay-day loan companies.

The ever-growing pressure to pay off this debt played havoc on my mental health. I often found myself running into the work toilet to secretly have panic attacks, throwing water on my face like a madman, and reassuring myself that I wasn’t losing my sanity. I was suffering, and misguidedly, I’d convinced myself I would have to suffer alone.

To make myself feel better, each week I partied from Thursday through to Sunday, chain smoking and knocking back pint after pint of Guinness. Or anything else that was available. I wasn’t fussy.

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Why paying tax can be good news for companies

a post by Colin Mayer for the OUP blog

Building Glass Architecture by Mikes Photos. CC0 via Pixabay

For the past 35 years, Ipsos MORI, the UK market research company, has undertaken a survey of which professions in Britain people trust. Each year, they ask 1,000 people whether they trust people in different professions to tell the truth.

Every year, close to the bottom come business leaders, just above estate agents, professional footballers, journalists, and politicians, below trade union leaders and “the man in the street”, and usually even below bankers.

Mistrust in business is pervasive, persistent and profound.

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How I Learned to Trust Others by Learning to Trust Myself

a post by Kerry Campbell for the Tiny Buddha blog


“You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough.” ~Frank Crane

I’ve had trust issues for as long as I can remember, but didn’t realize it until after my divorce.

Divorce can be a traumatic experience, and in this case, it made me begin to take stock of my life. I began to reflect on my failed romantic relationships and why this was a repeat pattern for me.

I realized then that I never let people in for fear they will let me down, belittle or make me feel small, or otherwise diminish me in some way. I keep people at a distance, and this impacts my ability to have close, connected relationships.

I used to think I had trust issues because I grew up in a family where things were not “psychologically safe.” But I’ve come to realize there’s more to it than that.

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The curiously varied impact of recessions on political stability: New evidence

a column by Nathan Nunn, Nancy Qian and Jaya Wen for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Cultural values and beliefs have an impact on social and economic development, but the interplay between culture and political institutions is still not well understood.

This column examines the effect of trust on political stability in democratic and non-democratic regimes, specifically in the face of severe economic downturns.

It finds that democratic regimes with high levels of trust are much less likely to experience leader turnover than low-trust countries, while there is no effect among non-democracies, and that countries with higher levels of trust experience faster economic growth in the years immediately following a recession.

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Broscience: Creating trust in online drug communities

an article by Ola Røed Bilgrei (Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Norway) published in New Media & Society Volume 20 Issue 8 (August 2018)

Abstract

This study explores the social mechanisms involved in online community trust.

Drawing on interviews with members from two Norwegian Internet drug forums, the article illustrates how forum members evaluate the trustworthiness of online user-generated drug content, referred to as ‘broscience’.

First, the shared narratives and boundaries within the forums generated a sense of collective identity, where members defined their online surroundings in terms of community trust and collaboration.

Second, the subcultural argot within the forums helped members express a level of subcultural competence and authenticity, in which they were able to assess their credibility and initial trustworthiness.

Third, the reputation linked to online identities created expectations and predictability as a basis for evaluating members’ trustworthiness.

These findings touch upon the ambivalence of trust in an online setting and highlight the communal process that caused their ambivalence to be suspended, thereby enabling online community trust.

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The populism backlash: An economically driven backlash

a column by Luigi Guiso, Helios Herrera, Massimo Morelli and Tommaso Sonno for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

There has been some disagreement over the roots of the recent rise of populism in Europe. This column examines variations in exposure to economic shocks and in ability to react to them in different regions of Europe to show that the cultural backlash against globalisation has been driven by economic woes.

In regions where globalisation was present but that have benefited economically, there has been no such backlash and the populist message has retreated. The message is clear: if one wants to defeat populism, one must defeat first economic insecurity.

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I now understand a lot better what populism is and how it works or not as the case might be. I like my information visually so the charts and graphs from VOX please me and make the meaning of the words clearer.

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Seeking Health Information on Social Media: A Perspective of Trust, Self-Determination, and Social Support

an article by Yibai Li (Unversity of Scranton, Scranton, PA, USA) and Xuequn Wang (Murdoch University, Perth, Australia) published in Journal of Organizational and End User Computing Volume 30 Issue 1 (2018)

Abstract

In the past few years, social media has changed the ways that health seekers seek health information. However, despite the tremendous growth of social media applications in the health-care industry, trust is still among the biggest challenges for social media health services in gaining greater acceptance.

Drawn from previous literature on self-determination theory, social support, and trust, this study investigates people's intentions to seek health-information on social media. The authors carefully selected a sample from Italy with subjects who already had experience in seeking health information on social media.

The empirical results show that informational support, emotional support, and the satisfaction of people's autonomy and relatedness needs play an important role through trust in influencing people's health-information-seeking intentions on social media.

This study is among the first to adopt the theories of self-determination, social support, and trust to investigate people's intentions to seek health information on social media.

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What Is Revenge Porn?

a post by Kurt Smith for the World of Psychology blog

Break-ups can be difficult and often quite painful. But imagine that the person you loved and trusted for the duration of your relationship decided to take revenge on you for breaking it off. What does that look like? Well, there are a variety of ways that a scorned lover might express their resentment, but in today’s era of cyber-everything, revenge porn is becoming a tool of choice for many in their quest for vengeance.

Revenge porn has been defined by the government as “the sharing of private, sexual materials, either photos or videos, of another person without their consent and with the purpose of causing embarrassment or distress.” Often there will be additional personal information included with the images or videos that are published. This combination can leave a person feeling vulnerable and could possibly put them in danger. At minimum, it is psychologically damaging to the victim.

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3 Ways to Decide Whose Opinion of You Matters

a post by Joui Turandot for the Tiny Buddha blog


“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.” ~Coco Chanel

“You know, Joui, I really like how you look tonight. I always thought your style before was… just a little wacky,” smiled Harry, a man I’d met during a forced networking meeting. He then smirked knowingly, like he was doing me a great favor.

Inside I screamed.

As a stylist one of the biggest fears my clients mention when we discuss any big change is feedback, judgment, and shame from their peers. And they are right to be fearful.

People will have commentary, trust me. But while everyone has an opinion, not everyone has a clue.

So we must be extremely careful who we let give us feedback.

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Poverty and Participation in Twenty-First Century Multicultural Britain

an article by Emanuele Ferragina (CNRS and Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire d'Evaluation des Politiques Publiques (LIEPP), France), Mark Tomlinson (University of Sheffield, UK) and Robert Walker (University of Oxford, UK) published in Social Policy and Society Volume 16 Issue 4 (October 2017)

Abstract

Peter Townsend argued that poverty could be scientifically measured as a ‘breakpoint’ within the income distribution below which participation collapses.

This paper stands on Townsend's shoulders in measuring the level of poverty and participation by:

1. broadening his original measurement of participation;
2. using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) in conjunction with a new dataset including 40,000 households (Understanding Society, 2011; 2013); and
3. taking into account the multi-cultural/ethnic nature of British society.

We find that participation – defined as lack of deprivation, social participation and trust – reduces as income falls but stops doing so among the poorest 30 per cent of individuals. This may be indicating a minimum level of participation, a floor rather than a ‘breakpoint’ as suggested by Townsend, which has to be sustained irrespective of how low income is.

Respondents with an ethnic minority background manifest lower levels of participation than white respondents but the relationship has a less linear pattern. Moreover, the floor detected for the overall population is also replicated when combining all respondents from ethnic groups.

Full text (PDF 25pp)

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“And somehow it ends up on the Internet.” Agency, trust and risks in photo-sharing among friends and romantic partners

an article by Rebecca Venema and Katharina Lobinger (Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland) published in First Monday Volume 22 Number 7 (July 2017)

Abstract

Photographic practices and photo-sharing have become pervasive routine communicative acts in everyday life. Photo-sharing can be beneficial for maintaining and strengthening social relationships, but it also requires a careful reflections of trustful disclosure, intimacy, privacy and vulnerability.

Several scholars have found that conflicts regarding photo-sharing arise when assumptions regarding the “shareability” of pictures and an “appropriate” amount of photo-sharing differ. This demands for further insights into which practices are considered appropriate or inappropriate and for which reasons.

The present study explores norms and rules of taking and sharing pictures and examines how these norms are defined in close relationships, more precisely in romantic partnerships and friendships. It is based on 34 repertoire-oriented, semi-structured interviews that are combined with creative visual methods.

The analysis shows that trust, confidentiality and consent are the fundamental conditions for photo-sharing in close relationships. However, when it comes to negative causes and consequences of photo-sharing, trust and confidentiality are at the same time considered as unreliable and fragile constructs. Usually, the image-makers are held responsible for unintended sharing and re-sharing.

Further responsibility is ascribed to invisible agents and insecure technological structures, while other involved persons are not described as accountable agents. This implies that the fragility of trust in relationships needs to be anticipated in sharing processes. We argue that this necessitates further critical discussions of responsibilities, agency and trust in order to sustain the value and importance of close relationships in current digitally networked societies.

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Are U.K. Citizens Satisfied With E-Government Services? Identifying and Testing Antecedents of Satisfaction

an article by Vishanth Weerakkody (Brunel University London, Uxbridge, Middlezex, UK), Zahir Irani, Habin Lee, Nitham Hindi and Ibrahim Osman published in Information Systems Management Volume 33 Issue 4 (2016)

Abstract

Citizens’ satisfaction is acknowledged as one of the most significant influences for e-government adoption and diffusion. This study examines the impact of information quality, system quality, trust, and cost on user satisfaction of e-government services.

Using a survey, this study collected 1,518 valid responses from e-government service adopters across the United Kingdom. Our empirical outcomes show the five factors identified in this study have a significant impact on U.K. citizens’ satisfaction with e-government services.

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