Preliminary results are in from the 2008 General Social Survey (GSS), the gold standard for social science research, which asks about trust in the following institutions: the military, the scientific community, medicine, the Supreme Court, education, organized religion, banks/financial institutions, major companies, organized labor, the Executive Branch, Congress, television, and the press.
Since 1976, trust in all these institutions (other than the military) has declined, many of them markedly. And since 2000, trust is down for all except the military and education. Note: the polling was done prior to the financial crisis, which presumably has lowered trust in banks/financial institutions further, but nonetheless, trust in banks and financial institutions was cut by more than half from 1976 to 2008.
Trust in government which was around 75% in 1960 has plummeted, with the Executive Branch and Congress only having the trust of roughly one in 8 or 10 Americans, and the Supreme Court a bit more trusted (with roughly 1 in 3 Americans trusting it).
In the current issue of “Greater Good” magazine, Pamela Paxton (sociology, Ohio State) and Jeremy Adam Smith have a cover story “America’s Trust Fall” about the declines over the last generation in social trust and trust in American institutions. It’s a good overview of this topic.
But the issue also addresses other related issues of trust.
1.In Faces We Trust describes research of Alexander Todorov (psychology, Princeton) and colleagues showing how important gut instincts our to our trust judgments and to political decisions.
In one 2006 experiment, they gave participants small amounts of time—100 milliseconds, 500 milliseconds, and 1 second—to judge if a face was trustworthy. The researchers discovered that decisions made after 100 milliseconds were highly consistent with decisions made with longer time constraints, suggesting that …beyond those first 100 milliseconds, additional time for reflection doesn’t appear to change first impressions….
Follow-up research in 2007 tested whether these gut reactions had implications for politics. They showed experimental participants pictures of the winner and runner-up of various Senate and gubernatorial races that participants were unfamiliar with and asked, “Who is more competent?”
After only 100 milliseconds of exposure to the faces, participants chose the winning candidate for about 72 percent of the Senate races and 69 percent of the gubernatorial races. In other words, gut instincts were highly consistent with actual votes cast after many months of supposedly rational deliberation.
Similarly, a 2006 experiment by economists Daniel Benjamin and Jesse Shapiro revealed that people were remarkably able to determine the election outcome from watching silent 10-second clips of political debates. Ironically, experimental subjects were less likely to be able to predict the election outcome if they listened to the sound since it seemed to interfere with their gut instincts.
Researchers posit that these gut reactions and “thin slices” of information have deep evolutionary roots. “Neuroimaging studies reveal that trust evaluations involve the amygdala, a brain region responsible for tracking potential harm—something that probably came in handy on the prehistoric African savanna, where judging trustworthiness in a split second could well mean the difference between life and death.”
While these snap judgments appear to anchor our initial decision, experiments have shown that we engage in a series of internal subconscious arguments between rational thought and these gut feelings and that subsequent data can overcome our initial biases.
2. Brain Trust discusses what researchers know about the trust process from monitoring our brains. They discuss experiments that show that we often do not behave in self-maximizing ways out of a sense of trust or fairness.
“Familiarity breeds trust—players tend to trust each other more with each new game. So does introducing punishments for untrustworthy behavior, or even just reminding players of their obligations to each other.”
“These studies have demonstrated the strength of human trust, and that humans are truly worthy of this trust from one another. They have also improved our understanding of the social factors that determine trust. But two important questions remain: Is trust truly a biologically based part of human nature, and if so, what is it in the brain that makes humans trust each other?”
The article discusses evidence that oxyocin “greases the wheels of trust” but only when humans are facing other humans, not when they are playing against computers.
3. In Can I Trust You? psychologist Paul Ekman (a pioneer in determining who is lying from facial cues) converses with his daughter Eve. He discusses how an expert on lying, deception, and truthfulness tries to foster trust and trustworthiness in his daughter, why it is important, and what it takes.
He notes that he tried to avoid putting her in a position where she would lie, but instead asked leading questions encouraging her to disclose (e.g., “”Is there something on your mind? Is there something you want to talk about?” or “What happened the other night? I heard you come in late.”)
He notes the difficult role of a parent:
[Y]ou have to keep moving backwards. When parents start out, they are completely responsible for their child, who is totally helpless. As that child grows, you have to roll back, you have to grant control; otherwise, your child can’t grow. You have to be able to live with the fact that as you grant the child more autonomy, they will get into all sorts of trouble. But you ultimately have to leave it up to them.
He notes the importance of not simply trying to rely on the authority inherent in the parental role, but explaining the basis for actions and appealing to higher moral principles. And he urges parents to avoid “destructive compassion”: when you are so worried about your child that you over–control them and damage them. He tried to set an example by never lying in his own life, and tried to make clear that disclosure about trouble that the kids got into was part of their responsibility. Making obligations clear was important. His wisdom is summarized in Why Kids Lie: How Parents Can Encourage Truthfulness.
4. Psychologist Joshua Coleman describes how to reinstill trust in romantic relationships of couples who have had a falling out in Surviving Betrayal.
It is amazing the range of sophisticated and prominent investors brought down by Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme, including Stephen Spielberg, Dreamwork’s Jeffrey Katzenberg, ex-Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Elie Wiesel, Mort Zuckerman, and $3 billion invested by the Spanish bank Santander.
Obama 2.0: I was at an interesting roundtable yesterday on the Internet and Democracy where many in the group felt that as dramatic a role that the Internet played in the election of Obama, the potential for the Obama administration to take us to an entirely new level of citizen participation in governance, transparency and accountability is much higher. One of the participants was Beth Noveck, pioneer of the innovative Peer-to-Patent system, who is on the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform policy working group helping to advise Obama on transparency and accountability.
Craigslist for Service: The Obama campaign has been advocating during the campaign that we need a craigslist for service and it is even in the Obama platform. Craig Newmark, self-described customer service representative, and founder of craigslist partly says we have it already and it’s called VolunteerMatch, but he also talks about his vision of other ways people can serve.
Voter Turnout: I previously posted updated turnout figures here, but Michael McDonald of GMU has slightly revised upward his turnout estimate to 61.6% to 131 million. This still makes it the highest for 40 years, since 1968. McDonald notes that these “preliminary” numbers could creep slightly higher but are essentially settled. [See McDonald's blog post here.] Curtis Gans, the other major scholar in this field, has not revised his earlier estimates, and McDonald continues to believe that 2008 represented more of an increase in voter turnout than Gans. By Spring we’ll get Americans’ self-reports of voting on the CPS November supplement. The Associated Press reports that early voting hit a new high, with about 41 million people, or over 31%, voting before Election Day (vs. 22% in 2004). Voter turnout increased substantially in newly competitive states like Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina, which all went for Obama for the first time in decades and turnout also rose in Republican states with large black populations, such as Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia. North Carolina saw the biggest increase in turnout, rising from 57.8% in 2004 to 65.8% in 2008, driven by a large African American population, and competitive elections at the gubernatorial, Senatorial and presidential levels.
Sandy’s theory is that 50,000-100,000 years ago, humans lacked language, yet still managed to communicate with each other through “honest signals” (ancient primate signaling efforts which developed biologically to communicate our intentions, our trustworthiness, our suitability as a collaborator, whether we were bluffing, etc.). When language was introduced, it didn’t over-write or eliminate these honest signals but evolved to be synergistic with these signals. While we focus much more on language, these signals are measurable (Sandy’s group developed machines to read these signals) and often equally or more effective at predicting various behaviors than language. Sandy’s research aims to shine a light on this powerful channel that we know less about.
Sandy notes that such data from electronic ID badges (sociometers) and specially-programmed smart phones, can give us a “god’s eye” view of how the people in organizations interact, and observe the “rhythms of interaction for everyone in a city”.
What are such behaviors?
Sandy’s group at the MIT Media lab focuses on 4 of them, although there are probably others (laughter, yawning, etc.).
INTEREST, shown by activity. An autonomic response. For example in children, this is evinced by jumping up and down or in dog’s by barking or wagging tail.
ATTENTION, by looking at influence. Evidence of thalmic attention. Sandy observes that people actively following in conversations break in faster than they could with normal attention spans. Shows that they are processing the conversation and discussion as it goes along and predicting the right time to break in.
EMPATHY, as shown by mimicry. This is evinced by mirror neurons, which are observable in infants as young as 3 hours old that can imitate a mother sticking her tongue out. People who evince higher levels of mimicry are seen as more empathic and more trustworthy. For example, they had computerized agents trying to sell an unpopular policy to students; in the cases where the computerized agent mimicked the body movements of the experimental subject with a 4 second delay, the computerized agent was 20% more successful in selling the policy to the experimental subject and the subject was unaware that he/she was being mimicked.
EXPERTISE, as shown by consistency. This a function of the cerebellar motor.We assume that people who can do things more smoothly are more expert because of the number of actions that need to be simultaneously coordinated.
What do these honest signals predict?
These are only some of the examples:
-Computers attentive to these honest signals (and ignoring the content) were as successful in predicting from pitches by entrepreneurs which business plans would be judged by business school students as successful.
- Effective sales pitches: listening to the first few seconds of a telephone sales pitch (without listening to the language) but listening to tone, timing, etc., the computer could predict with 80% accuracy which would be successful calls.:
-Success in speed dating: monitoring the female’s signals predicted 35% of the variation in which couples exchanged their phone numbers, and this was significantly higher than any other factor researchers could find.Interestingly, the men’s signals were not predictive, but somehow men must have been able to subconsciously pick up on the women’s signals, because in almost all cases the men didn’t ask for phone numbers where it wasn’t reciprocated by women.
- They also found that honest signals predicted depression, predicted who was likely to be successful in negotiating for a pay raise, job interviews, who was bluffing at poker, etc. Successful individual-level traits: they found that the most successful folks with these “honest signals” were ones who were high in activity, high in influence (others were more likely to mirror their communication styles then they were likely to mirror others’) high in “variable prosody” (their pitch varied and they sounded open to ideas), and high in body language dominance (i.e., they were more likely to directly face another person and others were more likely to not face them square on). They were often far more successful in these “honest signals” than they were aware of.
Organizational effectiveness
Sandy notes that unlike an MRI, one can hook up an entire organization to these sociometers and absorb micro-second by micro-second, and the results are highly predictive. But the challenge is that while the people who exhibit these highly successful individual traits are useful to organizations, they are usually in “connector” roles for organizations, with star-shaped patterns of communication, where ideas flow through these individuals. While this speeds up the decision-making process, it actually impairs the brainstorming process. Sandy’s group is experimenting with devices to see if making participants aware of the dynamics of a team can influence their behavior in a positive manner. They have shown with some experiments (Japanese-American teams designing Rube-Goldberg-type projects, and distance teams) that it can change people’s behaviors in a positive manner. The challenge will be to see if the group’s behavior can be more connected at the brainstorming phase and more “star-shaped” at the decision-making stage.
Sandy noted that they have been able to extract many properties of the social networks using smart phones: from a combination of where people are (GPS), when, and communication flows (who they talk to and when). He noted some interesting experiments to observe the flow of nurses in a nursing ward, or the flow of taxis in San Francisco, or communication (e-mail and face-to-face) between departments in a German bank. They are now at the stage of trying to get whole dormitories or parts of the city of Boston using these smart phones to try to track social networks and patterns in these data. (I’ve written about digital traces before.)
How could these flows of people be used:
-Traffic: one could monitor, for example, delivery vans coursing through the road networks and by observing flows slower than typical, spot emerging traffic problems.
-Urban tribes: Sandy noted that by monitoring flows of taxis, you can distill separate patterns of interconnected places. In other words people who live in this neighborhood, work in this area, go to these restaurants, go to these nightclubs. (You are not actually monitoring individual people but patterns of association. This is equivalent to Netflix telling you that people who like “The Firm” also like “Michael Clayton”.) Or one can even find sub-patterns in a neighborhood:e.g., locations from which people regularly are returning from nightclubs at 3 or 4 AM.
-You can then use these patterns to “find people like me”: based on your own patterns (where you work, where you live, etc.), the system could tell you where many people in your neighborhood shop, go to dinner, or hear music.
- Lending: one major bank told Sandy that credit scores are not very good (except at the high end) in predicting repayment rates on loans.Banks would love to use behavioral information (who is at nightclubs late at night, who goes to work early) to predict repayment rates.
- Health insurance: similarly one could imagine rates tied to activity levels (who was jogging or getting enough sleep or…)
- Germs: they want to use these devices to watch the spread of germs through social networks.
Privacy issues
The above examples of health insurance and lending make one understand why there are clear privacy implications. Do we want banks or health insurers knowing what we are doing (going to nightclubs) to set our rates? Will this be used to impose behavioral bases for “red lining”, where people in certain areas (like the old red lined areas) don’t get loans because of some behavior of theirs that is correlated with low repayment rates? Does it make any difference if these people can supposedly change their behavior?
-Sandy thinks we should move from company owning the personal data and sharing with no one or only sharing if an individual didn’t say it was confidential to the person owning the data and being able to decide how it gets used and whether the owner gets compensated for such use.
-There are clearly issues here about how the decision is framed? Does the individual truly understand why certain marginal information is so useful to a bank or insurer? And there may be negative externalities for all, even if you don’t choose to share your information with these companies?
Sandy’s research also raises questions about what happens when you start incentivizing people in companies based on these behaviors, or you start teaching people about these hidden “honest signals”. Do people start learning how to display these honest signals and dupe people who are not as aware of this (e.g., mimicking others to increase sales or do better in negotiations). If so, do people start focusing on these behaviors (like mimicry) and consciously teach themselves not to be swayed by this? Do companies find that people who pretend to be connectors (to get a pay raise) are actually less valuable to companies than the people who do it naturally (and are unaware they are doing this)?
See interesting related story in NYT, “You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. Should You Care?” (John Markoff, 11/30/08), mentioning Alex Pentland’s work among others and discussing the SF taxi example.
“The easy answer is the obvious one: crowdsourcing (see also description later in post). The action of a few million hyperconnected individuals resulted in a massive and massively influential work: Wikipedia. But the examples only begin there. They range much further afield.
“Uni [University] students have been sharing their unvarnished assessments of their instructors and lecturers. Ratemyprofessors.com has become the bête noire of the academy, because researchers who can’t teach find they have no one signing up for their courses, while the best lecturers, with the highest ratings, suddenly find themselves swarmed with offers for better teaching positions at more prestigious universities. A simply and easily implemented system of crowdsourced reviews has carefully undone all of the work of the tenure boards of the academy.
“It won’t be long until everything else follows. Restaurant reviews – that’s done. What about reviews of doctors? Lawyers? Indian chiefs? Politicans? ISPs? (Oh, wait, we have that with Whirlpool.) Anything you can think of. Anything you might need. All of it will have been so extensively reviewed by such a large mob that you will know nearly everything that can be known before you sign on that dotted line.
“All of this means that every time we gather together in our hyperconnected mobs to crowdsource some particular task, we become better informed, we become more powerful. Which means it becomes more likely that the hyperconnected mob will come together again around some other task suited to crowdsourcing, and will become even more powerful. That system of positive feedbacks – which we are already quite in the midst of – is fashioning a new polity, a rewritten social contract, which is making the institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries – that is, the industrial era – seem as antiquated and quaint as the feudal systems which they replaced.”
He suggests that these e-connections and contributions can in effect tell us which restaurant can be trusted to eat at, which professor we can entrust to teach us a class. In principle, one could use this to also pass on social reputation with pictures and names for community residents who had behaved in an untrustworthy manner so others could avoid them. On its face it sounds like a persuasive argument and part of a strand that suggests that the new technology can always out-do what we used to do. Assuming the software is effective at eliminating shills (as eBay or Amazon had to contend with — writers or sellers getting fake users or affiliated users from giving them great reviews), these kind of crowdsourcing techniques can be helpful. Yelp’s recommendations about restaurants are often good; and Amazon’s recommendations are instructive.
What can’t these invisible, helping e-networks do? 1) get at the truth with contested theories of what happened; 2) tell you whether you should value A’s comments more than B’s (although in principle the software could rate the comments by friends in common or their reputation); 3) actually be useful for things beyond spreading information (trust, reciprocity, social support, etc.).
Pesce goes on to point out that the technology does have limits. Technology brings us together in anarcho-syndicalism and offers the potential for community. But what limits its effectiveness is that we have a collision between the e-crowd and community and community requires us to work together. We want to copy and mimic what others have done, but that requires each of us to act for the good of others.
“But [our] laziness, it’s built into our culture. Socially, we have two states of being: community and crowd. A community can collaborate to bring a new mobile carrier into being. A crowd can only gripe about their carrier. And now, as the strict lines between community and crowd get increasingly confused because of the upswing in hyperconnectivity, we behave like crowds when we really ought to be organizing like a community.
And this…is..the message I really want to leave you with. You … are the masters of the world. Not your bosses, not your shareholders, not your users. You. You folks, right here and right now. The keys to the kingdom of hyperconnectivity have been given to you. You can contour, shape and control that chaotic meeting point between community and crowd. That is what you do every time you craft an interface, or write a script. Your work helps people self-organize. Your work can engage us at our laziest, and turn us into happy worker bees. It can be done. Wikipedia has shown the way.
And now, as everything hierarchical and well-ordered dissolves into the grey goo which is the other thing, you have to ask yourself, “Who does this serve?”…I want you to remember that each of you holds the keys to the kingdom. Our community is yours to shape as you will. Everything that you do is translated into how we operate as a culture, as a society, as a civilization. It can be a coming together, or it can be a breaking apart. And it’s up to you.”
What Pesce doesn’t discuss is “social capital.” This seems to be missing from his remarks. Some of us may serve others in real space or electronically through the goodnesss of our hearts. We’re do-gooders or e-do.gooders. But others of us need to understand that these social ties hold us accountable to the group. They make us more likely to do things for others because we are hardwired to provide more for people inside our circles than outside our circles. That’s why we give more to our family than to strangers and help friends more than we do a tribe half-way around the world. Social ties redefine our sense of ‘we’.
It’s hard to believe that exhortations to do good on the Internet, as important as they are, will achieve the optimal amount of communal action. That is, after all, why commons are overgrazed and oceans are overfished. Because too many in society realize that there is more to be had from overgrazing and overfishing now rather than letting someone else do it.
Social capital can also help police social norms (of working for others, of contributing, of not taking more than one’s share). Experimental evidence shows that fairness also seems hardwired into our brains. We are willing to punish others in experimental Ultimatum or Dictator Games from behaving in a selfish manner, even when it means that we the punisher gets less.
Definition: A company outsourcing a job traditionally served by employees and fills it through an open call to large undefined group of people, generally using on the internet. People best qualified to do the job are not always the person that one would first think of to assign a job in a corporation.
CrowdSourcing builds upon The Wisdom of Crowds; in it, Howe identifies 4 ways in which groups can produce better results than individuals: collective intelligence, crowd creation, crowd voting, and crowd funding.
From BusinessWeek’s review of the book: “In the first [category], collective intelligence, companies including Dell and gold-mining group Goldcorp ask people inside and outside the company to help solve problems and suggest new products, such as Dell’s Linux-based computers. The second model, crowd creation, is used by businesses such as Current TV and Frito-Lay to create news segments and video ads. People vote for their favorite T-shirt design at apparel maker Threadless’ Web site, thereby illustrating crowd voting. Startups SellaBand and Kiva use the last model, crowdfunding, to underwrite new music labels and fund microloans to individuals.
“Howe’s best example is iStockphoto, a startup that is undermining the established stock-photo business. The community began in 2000 as a vehicle for hobbyists who wanted to trade their pics. Two years later, iStock began selling photos for 25 cents each to cover bandwidth costs. Clients flocked in, and in 2006, Getty Images bought the enterprise. Now, with 60,000 part-time photographers and illustrators on board, 3.5 million images in the bank, and 2 million customers, iStock is the world’s third-largest dealer of images.
“Howe sweeps away certain misapprehensions about such activity. While it’s true that most people who are involved don’t get paid, they still need incentives. At iStockphoto, that comes in the form of workshops in which people meet and share expertise. And Howe warns that not all crowds are created equal. For example, he suggests that sports teams would do better to use fantasy-league enthusiasts rather than scientists to handicap up-and-coming athletes. Perhaps the hardest lesson for businesses is the importance of including people with whom you don’t ordinarily work. Organizations reinforce similar approaches and inside-the-box thinking. When you’re looking for something truly different, the crowd can lead you down a less traveled path.”
While Howe praises this rise of the ‘virtual crowd’ — you used to have to actually assemble a crowd to benefit and now gee-whiz you can do it on the internet — I wonder whether despite benefits to corporations or individuals (like cheaper pictures on iStockPhoto or better predictions of what ads will work), we’ve lost the social capital inherent in actual crowds or the social capital built from these old-line processes.
If we are migrating to more CrowdSourcing we ought at least pursue what we do (at a minimum via the Internet) to actually bring this virtual crowd together (making creating e-events, maybe creating communities of interest as was the genesis of iStockPhoto, maybe if the virtual crowd is large enough, breaking it down by zip code and encouraging and facilitating pieces of the crowd getting together in real space). What’s good for the goose is not always so for the gander, and CrowdSourcing is likely to lead to cheaper outcomes (for example photos) and often better, more democratic decisions, it portends to exacerbate the real losses we’ve seen in our true communities over the last generation.
10/7/09 update: Facebook, through Facebook Connect, now uses crowd-sourcing for foreign language translation, getting users to vote on which user-supplied translations are best for various phrases. More here:
An interesting study by sociologists Jennie Brand (UCLA) and Sarah Burgard (Univ. of Michigan) found that workers who laid off even once are 35% less likely to be involved in community or social organizations than workers who have never been jobless.
The plus is that this study (the high quality Wisconsin Longitudinal Study) tracks Wisconsin high school graduates for decades from their graduation in 1957. The caveat is that this group was almost entirely white Americans so it is hard to know whether this applies to a New York or an L.A.
What’s especially troubling is that it doesn’t appear to be a simple explanation of people who are jobless temporarily disengaging from community to find a new job. The scholars found that those who had been jobless had lower levels of civic engagement decades after they were laid off, and this “civic gap” remained relatively stable. Author Brand describes them as being on lifetime lower civic trajectory across a range of civic activities, from joining book clubs to participating in the PTA and supporting charities.
Their study tracked six forms of civic engagement: churches; charitable organizations; youth groups or community centers; business or political groups; professional organizations; and social or leisure organizations, such as country clubs or sports teams. The average participation of respondents decreased over this period, consistent with the trends highlighted by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone. But the 25% of workers in the study laid off between 1975 and 2005 dropped faster (statistically significantly) in all categories other than business or political groups, and professional organizations. The declines were largest on participation in youth groups or community centers. The only group that seemed somewhat exempt from these effects were those that were involuntarily let go in their later years (after age 53), when they could recharacterize this as ‘early retirement.’
Brand admits she doesn’t know why job displacement has this long-term effect. She suspects it might be one of three causes: 1) those who are laid off are depressed and often downwardly mobile; 2) there may be embarrassment or shame with job less that causes people not to interact with others; 3) there may be bitterness or a loss of trust in others that comes from the implicit social contract being torn asunder that causes long-term withdrawal.
The study (“Effects of Job Displacement on Social Participation: Findings Over the Life Course of a Cohort of Joiners”) will appear in the September issue of Social Forces. See earlier research report on this.
Brand’s study grew out of her interest in the rapidly growing practice of companies laying off Americans (see Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American, 2006) and work by my colleague Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone, 2000, and Better Together, 2004) on social capital and civic engagement.
Given the looming economic recession/depression(?) this obviously doesn’t bode well for longer-term civic engagement. Although it’s also worth noting that the Long Civic Generation that came of age through the Great Depression and two World Wars has been far more civic and socially engaged their entire lives than the generations that preceded or followed. We hope that the next Administration can work together with businesses, non-profits, religious leaders, and civic leaders to think about how to spur greater civic engagement in this period of far less economic security and confidence.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the interesting Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.
The book is nominally about a former Himalayan mountain climber (Mortenson) who narrowly escapes with his life and decides to dedicate his life to bringing schools to the poor communities surrounding the Himalayas. It has flavors of *Mountains Beyond Mountains* or Steve Reifenberg’s “Santiago’s Children” (excerpt here). It’s a tale of a first world do-gooder learning from the wisdom in the developing world.
But at a deeper level it’s all about the importance of social connections and social capital. Indeed the title refers to social capital. One of Mortenson’s mentors in Himalayan life (Haji Ali) tells him:
“If you want to thrive in Baltistan you must respect our ways.” he says locking up Mortenson’s account book, his level and his plumb line since Mortenson’s relentless pacing and efficiency and whip-cracking is driving the natives crazy. “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die….Doctor Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea. We may be uneducated. But we are not stupid. We have lived and survived here for a long time.”
From Three Cups of Tea’s descriptions of Mortenson’s harrowing experiences in Waziristan to the appreciation the book gives one for the need of Mortenson to thread the alliances of tribes and determine whom can be trusted and to actively build ties, this book has lots to say about the global importance of social capital in the task of improving the lot of these Baltis or social development more generally.
For a distillation of the tale of bringing a school to Korphe (the first of Mortenson’s schools), read here. Read a harrowing excerpt from the book.
People were almost 50% more likely to lie in e-mail messages than in traditional pen-and-paper communications, according to two new studies co-authored by Lehigh’s Liuba Belkin. [And earlier research showed that face-to-face communication was even more trustworthy.] Moreover, individuals felt more justified in lying via e-mail.
The paper, “Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining.” was reported by Liubia Belkin (Lehigh), Terri Kurtzberg (Rutgers) and Charles Naquin (DePaul) at the August annual meeting of the Academy of Management.
Bubkin points out that there is a lot of e-mail in the workplace and “[a]nd in an organizational context, that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and, as we saw in our study, intentional deception.”
In a prior study, the three co-investigators found that e-appraisals of peers were more negative than those done in writing which the authors concluded was consistent with the current study in showing that accountability is lower online.
The study asked 48 full-time MBA students to divide $89 between themselves and another unknown party, who only knew that somewhere between $5 and $100 had been given to distribute. It was an Ultimatum Game where the receiving party had to accept whatever amount to them. The MBA students reported the amount that they were giving to the other person and ‘how much they had to distribute.’ Students reporting using e-mail lied more than 92 percent of the time, while those using pen-and-paper lied slightly less than 64 percent. Not only did pen and paper users distribute more to the other party, but they felt less justified in lying. The authors surmised that people may lie more via e-mail because they falsely perceive the written documents to be more ‘legal” and permanent. In a follow-up study, they learned that this justification with lying by e-mail was determined before they chose how much to share with the other person.
The authors noted: “”Overall, the lower degree of social obligation found in the use of e-mail versus paper, coupled with ambiguity for communication norms and lack of formal rules, procedures, and expectations regarding e-mail, may allow individuals to tap into a sense of psychological justification for their deviant behaviors (such as deception) more easily online than in the paper mode.”
In a second, related study of 69 full-time MBA students, they found that MBA students still lied, regardless of how well they identified with the recipient, although they lied less if they identified more with the other person.
The authors note that other recent studies have found e-mail to be associated with lower interpersonal trust, more negative attitudes, and, a greater penchant for “flaming”—sending messages that are offensive, embarrassing, or rude.
Cites: Naquin C.E., Kurtzberg, T.R., & Belkin, L.Y (2008, forthcoming) “Online communication and social dilemmas: How communication media influences interpersonal trust, cooperative behavior and perceptions of fairness,” Social Justice Research Journal.
- Naquin C.E., Kurtzberg, T.R., & Belkin, L.Y (2008) “Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining” (Paper, annual meeting of the Academy of Management, August 2008)
These are unprecedented times for our economy (at least since the Great Depression). No one would have predicted several years ago that we’d see the federal government forced to take over the two largest mortgage holders (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae), the largest worldwide insurer (AIG), and 3 of the 5 largest investment banks forced either to sell at bargain-basement prices, declare bankruptcy or get government assistance (Merrill Lynch; Lehman Brothers; Bear Stearns, respectively).
Underlying the well-working of the whole economic system both at the micro and macro level is trust. Other scholars have written about this before, most notably James Coleman in his 1988 discussion of Jewish diamond merchants in New York (“Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital“); the merchants’ interconnecting networks and interpersonal trust allowed them to freely lend diamonds to each other for examination and ensure that the bags were honestly returned. The social networks helped ensure that any short-term gains to be made through dishonesty would be swamped by being shunned in the future when one’s poor reputation spread through these networks.
When trust starts to dry up, these well-oiled financial systems can become remarkably rusty and liquidity and access to capital can dry up amazingly fast. At the same time on Tuesday that AIG was trying to get billions pumped into their operations, they had a remarkably hard tapping credit; the benchmark inter-bank LIBOR rate (used to peg many variable rate mortgages) literally nearly doubled in one day.
One of the spectacular ways in which one sees trust underlying our economy is in bank failures. While some bank runs are driven by fraudulent activity by the bank that suddenly cause everyone to question whether their assets’ security, normally we live with the fiction that our assets are there for us. In reality of course, our bank deposits aren’t sitting in the bank, but the bank has lent out our money to make more money and to be able to pay us interest, meet their expenses and make a profit. The banks keep some small reserves to cover the expected levels of daily withdrawals, but these are desperately inadequate when we all decide to do this at the same time and the banks can’t get our cash back fast enough from borrowers. As “It’s A Wonderful Life” styled it, ‘Don’t Look Now, but there’s Something Funny Going on at the Bank, George.’
The FDIC tried to help create trust after the Great Depression by insuring our deposits up to $100,000, hoping that this would avoid runs on banks, although we are learning that this too depends on trust. There is some mounting evidence that the amounts FDIC maintains are not really adequate for a big financial meltdown. The FDIC used up one sixth of their total reserves just paying out to IndyMac depositors when that bank went under this summer. While the FDIC can raise premiums that banks pay for this insurance, at some point they run the risk that these higher payments will in turn make more banks unprofitable and force them to liquidate as well.
The economy is becoming like the veritable sausage axiom, don’t pay too much attention examining how it’s produced.
Note: HybridVigor has an interesting post that concludes from the financial meltdown in 2008 that “Markets depend on trust, but self-interested egoists don’t engender trust.” More specifically, “When it comes to social trust, free markets are freeloaders. Free markets are most efficient when a high degree of social capital exists, but the “flaw” Greenspan alludes to is simply the friction between egotism and trust. It turns out that trust, not egotism, is what keeps a market in check. But markets today encourage risky, self-centric, and flamboyant behavior. The Laws of Relation predict that relationships set up in this way result in everyone being worse off.”
Note also that David Brooks has a related article 4-5 months after this post called “An Economy of Faith and Trust” (1/16/09)
There has been a host of research and experiments (some reported on here and on the Saguaro website) about cooperation with strangers and punishing of defectors (cheaters) in order to restore the culture of cooperation.
A recent article by Benedikt Herrmann (University of Nottingham), Simon Gachter (economist at University of Nottingham in England) and Christian Thoni (University of St. Gallen in Switzerland) suggests that social scientists may have been skewed by where the research took place. Most of the research on cooperation and altruism has occurred in indvidualistic societies, but most of the world’s people live in collectivistic societies.
Herrmann et al find (using data from the World Values Survey) that the more a country’s citizens support the rule of law and civic cooperation (disapproving of tax evasion, welfare abuse and fare-avoidance on public transport), the more positively they respond to being chastised by others for their stinginess. In contrast, in more collectivist countries, there is less altruism displayed and social punishments (done to send a chastising signal against non-cooperation) are more likley to strike back in revenge than mend their scourgeful ways.
In collectivist societies that stress interdependence and pursuit of group goals, people cooperate with those inside their network (families and friends) but are less likely to cooperate with strangers. Conversely, as Gachter explains “In modern, market-based [individualistic] societies, group boundaries aren’t very important…You have to be able to cooperate with unrelated strangers.”
The research makes me think that we may have certain set points that induce us to cooperate a certain amount with strangers. Push us too hard to cooperate, and we wind up trusting strangers less to return to this set point. Raise individuals in a more individualist society and they may be more expressly cooperative with strangers to get to this set point. We found similar results with levels of bridging social capital in communities. In places with greater diversity, it looked like people held back on making bridging social friends from what one would expect randomly; put in more homogeneous settings, it looked like people went out of their way (relative to the numbers of people of other races) to form racially bridging friendships.
The book is nominally about a former Himalayan mountain climber (
