THE first thing bought on eBay was a pair of ice skates. They came with a handwritten note: “I hope your daughter enjoys these as much as my daughter did.” It made Zak’s day.
As someone who studies the neurological basis of trust, Zak knew exactly what was going on. Feel-good chemicals had flooded his bloodstream, changing how he felt about a stranger over the internet. But that didn’t stop him leaving a shining review.
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Human interactions are built on trust. We trust others to hand over the goods when we pay them. We trust banks with our money and doctors with our lives. We trust governments to run our countries and newspapers to tell us how they are doing it. The more trust in a society, the better it fares. Put another way: without trust, society would collapse.
But something strange is happening. Public trust in our institutions has plummeted in the past decade. Nearly half of people in the US , according to a poll carried out in June. In the UK, trust the press. And yet we are putting more trust than ever before in people we meet on the internet. The sharing economy is booming. It is normal to invite strangers to sleep on our sofas, meet us for dates, pick us up in their cars and look after our pets. The internet has brought us to a tipping point, fundamentally changing who we trust and why. Technology allows us to make informed decisions and vet individuals. But should we really be letting our guard down?
Trust is a human instinct that is essential to our survival. It first evolved when we lived in small tribal groups, and probably provided benefits in times of conflict. Groups that were better at working together – more trusting – were more likely to survive than less cooperative rivals.
“All societies are based on trust because you can’t do everything yourself,” says , who studies online trust at the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK. “At some point you have to trust someone to keep the fire going.”
The trouble is, trusting groups can always be exploited by untrustworthy individuals. Putting your trust in someone puts you at risk, it makes you vulnerable. “Trust is the bridge between the known and the unknown,” says at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School.
Given the ever-present possibility of betrayal, how do we manage to cross the bridge? The hormone oxytocin plays a critical role. Known for being an all-round social fixer, it kicks in to make us feel good when we put our faith in others.
Zak has been studying the effect of oxytocin on trust for 15 years. In a series of experiments, his team at Claremont Graduate University in California measured blood levels of the hormone in people playing a game in which they had to cooperate with strangers to win money. Each player was given a sum of money and could choose either to keep it or give some or all of it to a second player. They, in turn, could choose either to reward the first player’s generosity by returning a portion of the cash or keep it all for themselves.
“All societies are based on trust – you can’t do everything yourself”
The traditional view in behavioural economics is that only a sucker trusts others because your trust won’t be reciprocated. But Zak’s blew a hole in that idea. In the initial study of 38 people, who knew that they were being trusted by the other player, participants shared more than half of their money, on average. Indeed, most people responded in kind when others trusted them – an effect that was directly tied to a surge in oxytocin. Almost everyone – 95 per cent of people in those first studies – showed a bump in oxytocin when others trusted them. Zak has now run the tests in hundreds of people. “It’s a near-universal response,” he says.
Later studies confirmed the influence of the hormone: when players were given synthetic oxytocin in a nasal spray, they handed over more cash than those given a placebo.
Our oxytocin response to cues such as body language and smells takes about a second to kick in. This lets us make snap judgements about who is and isn’t trustworthy. “We’re hyper-aware of the social environment we’re in,” says Zak. “When we meet someone new we just get a sense – ‘Oh, this guy’s great’ or ‘I don’t know, I’ve got a bad feeling about this person’.”
All of this is fine for a society based on face-to-face interaction, as ours was for tens of thousands of years. Then came the industrial revolution. “We realised that trust didn’t scale to international trade,” says Botsman. So we invented proxies. Trust started to flow through intermediaries like insurers and lawyers. The local manager became the face of the big bank; our trust in them extended to the organisation. Just as we had put more trust in friends of friends, reputation came to stand in for direct knowledge in fostering our trust in institutions. Eventually, marketing teams became adept at creating brand personalities that encourage us to anthropomorphise faceless corporations.
And more recently, companies have been fronted by celebrity founders like Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. Zuckerberg often addresses his billion-plus users in video messages, for example. When Facebook was criticised for dismissing claims that it played a role in the 2016 US presidential election, it was Zuckerberg who issued a personal apology.
In the past, it was easier to put our faith in institutions because their failings were hidden from view. Then came the internet. Global scandals like the 2008 banking crisis, the US National Security Agency’s over-reaching surveillance programme and Volkswagen’s emissions-test cheats spread around the world in hours and were dissected by millions online. Of course distrust in big institutions predates the internet, but technology has made it an international sport. It is easier than ever before for leaks to become common knowledge.
And there are many more sources now. Opinion is no longer shaped only by journalists, experts or state authorities. With constant access to a deluge of information, rather than putting our trust in the institutions our peers also trust, as we once did, we’re now trusting our peers instead of those institutions.
With the curtains pulled back and gossip in full flow, people start to question the entire system. “The cycle of questioning and doubt puts trust in a precarious place,” says Botsman. This erosion of trust becomes contagious and spreads quickly. “Fear and suspicion are its enemies,” she says.
So how is it, in this climate, that companies which rely on people placing their faith in strangers are thriving? The trick seems to be forging links directly between individuals, while appearing to cut out the institutions.
When many of these companies started out, they could still rely partly on existing social connections. You might stay at an Airbnb based on a personal recommendation, for example. But as they expanded, it became more and more crucial to encourage trust between users.
It was eBay that made people realise you could trust someone online. “I remember talking to colleagues who said it was never going to work,” says Floridi. Many assumed trust required more than a few typed words of assurance from a stranger. “It’s like taking away the handshaking and keeping only the verbal agreement,” he says. What the internet offers instead is information.
Companies like , and – which put you in contact with strangers you may choose to invite into your home – have managed to foster trust in a new way. “Our objective is to provide a platform that lets people provide each other with information that will strengthen their relationship,” says , CEO of TaskRabbit. Information comes in the form of profiles, pictures, personal details.
“Normally, I wouldn’t want a stranger knowing where I live,” says Zak. “But we have so much information about that person and they have so much information about us we can both make pretty informed decisions.”
In most situations we are more likely to trust a stranger if we have something in common, such as age, gender or background. But online ratings override that tendency. In a 2016 study, and colleagues at Stanford University in California interactions between Airbnb users, consisting of requests to stay and acceptances by hosts. They found that hosts with better reputations – measured by the number of positive reviews – were contacted by a more diverse group of people than hosts with less-established reputations, who were more likely to be contacted by people from a similar demographic. So the reputation system can help overcome ingrained biases. A similar pattern was found for hosts accepting guests.
“Trust is going down in most places but we’re seeing people trust each other more,” says Nick Shapiro, the global director of trust and risk management at Airbnb.
In fact, many of these companies have come to realise that trust itself is their product. That is why Airbnb created a department dedicated to trust and risk management – and brought in Shapiro, who has worked for the CIA and has a background in security, to head it up.
Hawking trust between individuals requires some sleight of hand: we are more likely to trust people at a distance when they are backed up by trustworthy organisations. We trust strangers on Airbnb far more than strangers on a marketplace such as Craigslist, for instance.
The safety net
The organisations most adept at fostering trust in strangers do so in various ways – by providing guarantees or insurance policies if things go wrong, or policing who we connect with to begin with. For instance, Airbnb checks all hosts and guests aren’t on terrorist, sanctions or regulatory watch lists, and also runs background screening for things like prior felony convictions or sex offender registrations. For every reservation, they run an automated risk assessment that evaluates hundreds of signals to flag suspicious activity before the people they have introduced ever actually meet. “It’s constantly being tweaked,” says Shapiro. “It gets smarter every single day.”
Airbnb can also tell if you are who you say you are. After a spate of account takeovers, where usernames and passwords stolen from other sites were used to log into accounts, the company acquired a start-up called Trooly to avoid scams. Trooly’s software digs through the digital trail we all leave behind – from social media to police records to the dark web – to determine how trustworthy we are. The company even claims its software can predict how an individual is likely to behave. Is this person going to trash your house? “It might completely freak us out, but it does help weed out who is not trustworthy,” says Botsman. “It takes us full circle back to one-to-one connections on a scale that was never possible before.”
By filtering out bad actors, the system provides users with a pool of vetted individuals. It resembles the way we are more likely to trust friends of a friend – they are vouched for.
Where does that leave us? “In a few years’ time, people will just call what we do the normal way to get things done,” says Brown-Philpot. It may be that these systems help to ratchet up trust levels across society by lowering our guard. We are being conditioned to get into a stranger’s car or post ice skates to a person who has promised to pay you, says Zak.
A major concern is that we will become overly dependent on digital platforms to manage trust for us. “People trust people, not institutions,” recently said. That is misleading. We trust people online because of the institutions – Facebook included – that make it possible.
If we continue to outsource trust in this way, we must also ask: how reliable are these new institutions? For instance, London’s transport authority has not renewed Uber’s operating licence in part because the company allegedly failed to report a series of sexual assaults to the police. The accusation directly threatens to shake Uber’s network of trust.
“We may end up with a shallower kind of trust – not making the leap of faith”
By allowing internet companies to determine the trustworthiness of others, we no longer need to rely on our own instincts. “With more information we don’t need to trust with blind faith,” says Floridi. “We can take people at face value because we can check up on them.”
That’s no bad thing. But we may end up with a shallower kind of trust: if something is completely transparent, you never have to make the leap of faith. “You’ve actually given up on trust,” says Botsman. When online companies ramp up their security and assurances to protect their users – and themselves – from harm, we no longer need to build mutual trust, says Coye Cheshire at the University of Berkeley, California. He argues that we are left with a paradox: the systems put in place to foster trust between strangers online may undermine the need for trust in the first place.
Of course, the truth is, like our instincts, these systems are not foolproof. Bad apples can sneak by the algorithms just as they dupe us. So we need to take care not to simply offload decisions about who or what to trust on to algorithms (see “In bots we trust”), and subject the companies that write them to the same level of scrutiny as the institutions we have so recently come to mistrust. Democratic governments may disappoint and betray us, but we can hold them to account at the voting booth. Private companies trading in trust must be held to account as well.
“One of the things we need to realise now is that efficiency and speed are in fact the enemy of trust,” says Botsman. “But that’s really difficult to do in an age when we want a car in two minutes and a date by lunch time.”
In Bots We Trust
With robot companions, self-driving cars and decision-making software on the horizon, we could soon be putting our trust in machines as much as other people. A key part of making these new relationships work will involve finding ways for autonomous machines to communicate their intentions better.
Without the eye contact between a driver and pedestrian, self-driving cars will need other ways to signal what they are about to do, for instance. One option might be to put LED displays on car windscreens that tell people when the car has spotted them. Similarly, finding ways to make decision-making software more transparent will be crucial if we are to trust them to make medical diagnoses, for example.
Yet many of us already have intimate relationships with our gadgets. “I love my iPhone and neurologically that looks pretty similar to me loving my dog,” says neuroeconomist Paul Zak at Claremont Graduate University in California. So perhaps a bigger worry is that we will end up being too trusting. A study last year found that people will follow a robot in an emergency even when it is clearly leading them the wrong way.
Letting our guard down could be dangerous. “Misplaced trust is the biggest threat to society,” says Rachel Botsman, author of Who can you trust?
This article appeared in print under the headline “In what? we trust”
