Trust – Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss

People, Profiles & Trust

• How is “human” changing?
• Technology is becoming more immersive and “around” us; technology pervades at smaller levels, too – during conversation we may still have distributed cognition eg mobile in our pocket.
• But we’re not just using this stuff as communication – we’re placing “ourselves” into these spaces – our profiles, etcetera.

Why do we need trust?

To not trust is to be paralysed.

• Trust is a balance between knowledge and ignorance
  • allows us to “place bets on the future”
  • allows us to orient ourselves in the world.

• Trust is a “reducer of social complexity”
• Trust comes in many flavors. Two distinctions they find useful: (?)
  • Calculus-based trust
    • Bringing forward the rational man within us.
  • Identification-based trust

Establishing trust:

• we use a profile to represent people.
• When you design the profile, you give the user tools to express things about their personality.
• Are we asking them to say things explicitly or implicitly?
• Explicit is very calculus-based: working things out based on the facts
• Implicit information leads to identification-based trust.

Cf: an explicit trust-scheme, with points, to your own hacked-together home page. The profile does everything for you – presents all the info up front. The home page does nothing for you, but I can still get value – trust-value – out of this (liking what they like, agreeing with their style)

Flickr photostream is, to an extent, representing us. We also have deep connection to our own images, but can find identification in other people’s images too. (Espec. pictures of us)

Trust is not just something you need with a new person, though; it’s something you have to maintain throughout relationships.

Restrictions – that create social ambiguity – can help to maintain these relationships. Eg: if I call someone on the phone, doing something at the same time; where do you put attention? Don’t want to be rude to friend, but don’t want to compromise our relationship. What do I do? Teenagers say “I’m low on credit”. But it doesn’t matter what the reason is – the fact is: you have to go.

their book

Performativity

• We need to stop arguing what economic model best represents economic activity. Take a step back: how are these models shaping and reshaping the markets in which they exist?
• The most commonly used formula for calculating a stock option. As the model got more accurate, more people on the trading floor used it… and the trading prices stabilised, because the model converges on the actual price. The model made itself true – this data is in all stock data.
• It’s not just a camera, a mere representation – it’s also an engine to drive the market.
• My user profiles are not only me performing representations – they are also performing me. Shaping the way I look at myself.

Do these profiles change how we think of trust?

Back to the RapLeaf profile – you start basing your judgment of other people on the rapleaf badge on their profile; it’s influencing how you read that profile.

What does this mean for designers?

• It’s not all about the “share” button or a “rate this” button.
• It’s about being really sensitive to what being human means, and what it means to work in relation to other humans.

Trust-form within the micro-society of (Wikipedia) is very much identity-based. There’s lots of trust built-in around the idea of systems being absent. The systems hint that the core Wikipedians can’t keep track of these things themselves; ratings start making people questioning their ratings and people get singled out as individuals. Wikipedia works well because it’s so not focused on the individual.

Wrap-up

• There are different trust forms and different ways of influencing trust.
• Profiles are performative.
• This leads to different trusting behaviours.
• Different trust forms are good for different things.
• But they all have one thing in common: they all reduce social complexity
• They enable participation and collaboration
• Getting the architecture right is hard
• Being sensitive is the key.