How do you know if a person is worth trusting? Psychologist David Ludden tells what you should pay attention to when communicating with unfamiliar people.
Trust is the foundation of society. We trust not only those we know well, but also strangers.
The waiter brings food to the restaurant and believes that we will pay after we eat it. We put in long hours at work in the belief that we will get paid at the end of the month. And we drive on the green light because we believe that the cross traffic will stop because of the red light.
Communicating with family members, close friends and colleagues, we feel who and how much we can trust. This is because we talked a lot with them and were able to test their reliability. But what about when you need to decide whether a stranger is trustworthy? Research by psychologist Jean-François Bonnefont and colleagues has shown that intuition itself is a fairly reliable guide in assessing a person’s reliability, but not absolutely reliable.
In the laboratory, it is possible to assess the reliability of a person using a trust game in which the principal and trustee take part. We give the trustee $10 and say that he can keep the money for himself or give it to a trusted person. We explain that in the case of transferring money to a trusted person, the amount will triple. After that, the principal can either take all the money or share it with a trusted person.
The optimal scenario is complete loyalty. The trustee gives the trustee all the money, it triples, and the trustee divides it equally, giving $15 to the trustee. In other scenarios, the trustee either keeps $10 and the trustee gets nothing, or takes the $30, leaving the trustee with nothing.
The game of trust helps not only to decide whether to trust a person, but also to understand how the decision was correct. When real money is at stake, the principal must evaluate the trustee as accurately as possible.
The trust game is widely used in economic decision making research and faithfully reflects the process of making decisions about reliability in real life.
Bonnefon and colleagues tried to find out what information and how much is needed to form an intuition about the reliability of a person.
1. Personal communication is the most informative. The scientists found that if participants were allowed to chat for half an hour before the game, the trustee acquired the ability to fairly accurately predict the trustworthiness of the trustee. In half an hour you can learn a lot about a person: hear how he talks, watch body language, facial expressions and behavior and draw conclusions.
2. Gestures are more informative than speech. The researchers decided to test what would happen if the trustee simply watched the trustee communicate with another person. In other words, can he determine reliability without making personal contact?
The experiments were carried out under two conditions: half of the trustees watched a video with the participation of a trusted person with sound, and the other half — without sound. In both cases, the trustees fairly accurately predicted the reliability of the trustee. Thus, it is the body language that matters, not the words.
3. A photo can tell a lot about a person., if the photo is not too bright and we see only the person’s face in it. The less detail in the photo, the better.
Scientists were interested in the following question: can the principal predict the reliability of a person only from his photograph? This is where things get interesting. If trustees saw color photographs of proxies that showed clothes and hairstyles, they were less likely to predict the trustworthiness of these people than if they were shown a close-up face (only eyes, nose and mouth) and the image was black and white and dim .
How can less information (small, soft, black and white photograph) lead to more accurate conclusions than more information (full size, detailed, color photograph)? The conclusion is obvious: too bright colors and numerous details distract from the main thing. It is the face, namely the eyes and mouth, that reflect the emotional state.
A dim image forces the viewer to rely on intuition, while sharp images suggest a more rational approach.
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Intuition is more reliable than a rational approach in making social decisions. If you don’t have time to get more information about a person, trust your intuition. It’s better than nothing.
But don’t ignore contextual cues, like sentences that sound too good to be true. Fools never run out, goes the old adage. But you don’t have to be one of them.