A 2009 article by social psychologist Roderick Kramer summarized the state of the human mind in many situations is trusting. That usually works well, but when a person is deceived and extends misplaced trust, it can cause serious personal damage. When millions of people are deceived, it can be catastrophic, even lethal. The article published in the Harvard Business Review. It addressed the matter of how Bernard Madoff managed to pull off a $65 billion Ponzi scheme and bilk many sophisticated wealthy people out of their money.
Kramer's description is good to keep in mind when considering how propagandists and demagogues deceive and mislead people, sometimes with lethal consequences for people and whole societies. This OP is to compliment the review of the book, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, that I posted a couple of days ago. One reason to focus on trust is that propagandists are well aware of the fact that if they can win people's trust via one of various tactics, their deceit is much more powerful and people are easier to polarize, leading to loss of trust.
Kramer writes:
“Madoff is hardly the first to pull the wool over so many eyes. What about Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and all the other corporate scandals of the past decade? Is there perhaps a problem with how we trust?
I think it’s worth taking another look at why we trust so readily, why we sometimes trust poorly, and what we can do about it.
In the following pages, I present the thesis that human beings are naturally predisposed to trust—it’s in our genes and our childhood learning—and by and large it’s a survival mechanism that has served our species well. That said, our willingness to trust often gets us into trouble. Moreover, we sometimes have difficulty distinguishing trustworthy people from untrustworthy ones. At a species level, that doesn’t matter very much so long as more people are trustworthy than not. At the individual level, though, it can be a real problem. To survive as individuals, we’ll have to learn to trust wisely and well. That kind of trust—I call it tempered trust—doesn’t come easily, but if you diligently ask yourself the right questions, you can develop it.
In short, we’re social beings from the get-go: We’re born to be engaged and to engage others, which is what trust is largely about. That has been an advantage in our struggle for survival.
Trust kicks in on remarkably simple cues. We’re far more likely, for example, to trust people who are similar to us in some dimension. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of this comes from a study by researcher Lisa DeBruine. She developed a clever technique for creating an image of another person that could be morphed to look more and more (or less and less) like a study participant’s face. The greater the similarity, DeBruine found, the more the participant trusted the person in the image. This tendency to trust people who resemble us may be rooted in the possibility that such people might be related to us. Other studies have shown that we like and trust people who are members of our own social group more than we like outsiders or strangers. This in-group effect is so powerful that even random assignment into small groups is sufficient to create a sense of solidarity.
So what does all this research add up to? It shows that it often doesn’t take much to tip us toward trust. People may say they don’t have a lot of trust in others, but their behavior tells a very different story. In fact, in many ways, trust is our default position; we trust routinely, reflexively, and somewhat mindlessly across a broad range of social situations. As clinical psychologist Doris Brothers succinctly put it, “Trust rarely occupies the foreground of conscious awareness. We are no more likely to ask ourselves how trusting we are at any given moment than to inquire if gravity is still keeping the planets in orbit.” I call this tendency presumptive trust to capture the idea that we approach many situations without any suspicion.
If it’s human to trust, perhaps it’s just as human to err. Indeed, a lot of research confirms it. Our exquisitely adapted, cue-driven brains may help us forge trust connections in the first place, but they also make us vulnerable to exploitation. In particular, our tendency to judge trustworthiness on the basis of physical similarities and other surface cues can prove disastrous when combined with the way we process information.
One tendency that skews our judgment is our proclivity to see what we want to see. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias. Because of it we pay more attention to, and overweight in importance, evidence supporting our hypotheses about the world, while downplaying or discounting discrepancies or evidence to the contrary.
A confirmation bias wouldn’t be so bad if we weren’t heavily influenced by the social stereotypes that most of us carry around in our heads. These stereotypes reflect (often false) beliefs that correlate observable cues (facial characteristics, age, gender, race, and so on) with underlying psychological traits (honesty, reliability, likability, or trustworthiness). Psychologists call these beliefs implicit theories, and the evidence is overwhelming that we aren’t conscious of how they affect our judgment. .... But they can cause us to overestimate someone’s trustworthiness in situations where a lot is at stake (for instance, our physical safety or financial security).
....researchers have identified two cognitive illusions that increase our propensity to trust too readily, too much, and for too long. The first illusion causes us to underestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen to us. Research on this illusion of personal invulnerability has demonstrated that we think we’re not very likely to experience some of life’s misfortunes, even though we realize objectively that such risk exists. .... The second and closely related illusion is unrealistic optimism.
As if all these biases and illusions weren’t enough, we also have to contend with the fact that the very simplicity of our trust cues leaves us vulnerable to abuse. Unfortunately for us, virtually any indicator of trustworthiness can be manipulated or faked. A number of studies indicate that detecting the cheaters among us is not as easy as one might think.”
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