The Last Word On Nothing

When we deposit our money at the bank, when we drop our kids off at school, when we prepay for a future service, we are exercising the trust that has been encouraged in human nature by thousands of years of fruitful cooperation. But not every human we encounter will be trustworthy.

According to The Truth About Trust, a new book by social psychologist David deSteno, the motivations that pull us between self-interest and loyalty to others are highly volatile, strongly reacting to emotions like gratitude and pride. De Steno runs a lab that investigates the impact of emotions on moral behavior.

If trustworthiness seems like a stable trait, discernable through reputation, that’s only because we assume a stable situation as well. The truth is in the incentives. “The question should not be ‘Is he trustworthy?’” argues the author. “It should be: ‘Is he trustworthy right now?’”

After a brief primer on the relevant game theory (the Prisoner’s Dilemma and other measures of trust), there’s a breeze through oxytocin and polyvagal theory, some of the biological bases of our trust machinery. But de Steno really gets into his comfort zone with living, interacting people and the strange ways in which they behave.

The ultimate trust relationship – a spousal bond – allows the partners to relax the exchange-based accounting we apply when doing favours for other people and simply enjoy communal cooperation. In the lab, the difference between couples who have made this mental shift toward collectivism and those who have yet to dive in wholeheartedly is stark. When correct answers to test questions will be rewarded individually, 90% of couples early in their courtship choose different-coloured pens, while 75% of the committed, communal ones write in the same colour and trust the other to give them their due.

The more self-sufficient we are, the less we are vulnerable to betrayal by others, and the less trusting we need to be. De Steno makes a dishearteningly convincing case that power does indeed corrupt – immediately, just as soon as the mental calculations can be made under better social status conditions or newfound money.

For example, naming some random person a leader makes them a hypocrite in an experimental setting. They’re more likely to feel entitled to break rules but condemn others for doing so. And when required to lie, they get away with it far more often, breezing through their fibs with no sign of discomfort, compared with control subjects, who are often caught in their dishonesty. Even a taller avatar in a video game can give the player a sense of dominance that spills over into subsequent cheating in a trust game.

We are quite good at intuiting how trustworthy someone is going to be, even if we have no conscious access to the information we are using. If someone looks tired, we invest less trust in them, as if we’ve consciously recognized that fatigue reduces self-control. Forget the shifty eyes and micro-expressions you’ve seen on Lie To Me. If we’re going on still photos of faces, we make ready judgments, but they’re likely wrong. We need dynamic, whole body cues to make accurate predictions. It comes down not to one facial tic in isolation but to a constellation of cues.

The more frequently someone leans backward, crosses his arms, touches his face and fidgets with his hands, the less we expect him to act honorably — and the less honorably he is, indeed, likely to act — but we experience this calculation simply as a hunch. DeSteno and his colleagues confirmed this set of factors experimentally using a cute, emotionally-expressive android called Nexi from MIT’s Personal Robots group.

The increasing sociality of technology carries new prospects for exploiting – for good or ill – our natural trust machinery. Take for example an Avatar that is trying to sell you something online. The Avatar’s face can be morphed with your own, which image is often available on your Facebook page, such that the Avatar is 40% you: Just below a perceptible resemblance. The research shows you are more likely to like and trust that You-like Avatar.

Trust is a bet we make about where on the scale from immediate self-interest to long-term bonding the other’s motivations lie. Will they act like Aesop’s ant and defer gratification to solidify a bond with you, or will they take the role of the grasshopper and take advantage of short-term temptations? If they seem to have integrity, we throw our lot in with them and assume they will come through in meeting our needs. That is, assuming we trust in their competence as well.

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