 So in my research, I look at dilemmas of trust and the different types of strategies that people apply in dilemmas of trust and I'm really happy to follow the previous talk because I think I agree with a lot of the major points that our behavior is really shaped by context that we tend to focus on information that's really salient and we tend to do things that are really easy and That these tendencies have really important implications for how we think about trust and how we deal with this problem of trust and betrayal Okay, so I'm really interested in how trust happens And I think it's an important question to study because trust plays a really big role in Many different types of decisions. We can see trust in consumer behavior in Organizations and even a large-scale the effects of trust on societies and governments This is a really exciting time to be studying trust So right now there are new companies like uber Airbnb and freelancer Which create opportunities for us to trust in total strangers We had the opportunity to trust strangers by letting them into our homes taking or giving rides from them or hiring them for jobs and Unlike really recently We can now engage in these types of relationships with people who we have no direct social connection with and so taking advantage of these Opportunities require some sort of trust in the other person Trust also plays a really important role in the adoption of new technologies So if you read a lot about tech You'll see so many articles about self-driving cars and autopilot systems in the news These are really exciting and potentially these mean real gains in efficiency and actual gains in safety too But in order for consumers to use a new technology like a self-driving car, they have to have trust So trust in both the product that it'll work the way that it's supposed to But also trust in the company and the people who design the product So when we look at a product like Tesla's autopilot, we have to trust that they're able to fix these problems Which may occasionally lead to crashes or other issues with its functioning We can also zoom out and talk about the role of trust at the national level This is a map of Europe with countries labeled based on how trusting they are in general You can't really see it But the Netherlands does pretty good on this scale although not as good as some of the northern European countries Economists have argued that trust at the national level is key to economic growth If you live in a country where people trust each other It's easier to form new relationships to build partnerships to find investors It's greases all of the wheels of economic growth Now What makes trust such a compelling problem to study is that although it creates a lot of opportunities It's also very fragile So take the example of Volkswagen They've spent decades building a reputation as a reliable and trustworthy company And now in the past year with this recent scandal aside from the financial fines and Government penalties that they'll have to pay they have a huge loss in their reputation And this is something that even after they fire the people responsible and they correct the policies and improve their product That they can't immediately recover from One bad experience can have a really long-term effect on how people perceive the company Volkswagen isn't the only example This is Elizabeth Holmes the CEO of Theranos Theranos was a medical science startup in the US It's worth about seven to nine billion and it promised to revolutionize medical testing By conducting blood tests based on a single drop of blood About a year ago. They realized or began an investigation Into the practices of this company and found that they didn't meet a lot of basic clinical standards and Elizabeth Holmes was actually barred from being responsible for a lab for two years Now this was a huge violation of trust First of all, it was a violation of the trust of investors But second of all it was also a violation of trust of all the people who relied on their products for medical testing They were using poor standards We can also talk about the downside of The reverse of national trust national corruption this is a map of corruption around the world and we see that there this is a major issue and being part of a society where there's Institutional corruption makes it hard for individuals to participate and it makes it really hard for governments to use resources effectively So I think that trust is a really good example of a wicked problem because it creates so much value And it's so central to our lives, but it's so fragile and difficult to maintain Now researchers in psychology and economics have argued that really the key to understanding trust is betrayal In economics Studies have found that people treat dilemmas of individual risk-taking Different from dilemmas of trust So as soon as another person becomes involved in the interaction we approach the situation differently and in fact if you hold Outcomes and probabilities the same people would rather engage in individual risk-taking than social risk-taking and researchers have argued that this preference for Individual behavior is related to betrayal aversion that people are particularly sensitive to the experience of betrayal Now this meshes with a lot of research in social psychology Which argues that people are particularly sensitive to negative social experience that we have a Fundamental need to belong and maintain close relationships and when this need is threatened through a negative social experience We have a very strong reaction If you look at the way that people describe social pain, there's overlap with how they describe physical pain Many languages have concepts like hurt feelings that when somebody does something mean to us This evokes a reaction. That's very similar to physical pain And actually if we look at data from neuroscience when we experience something negative socially It activates many of the same areas in our brain that physical pain activates We seem to be hardwired to be sensitive to betrayal and negative social events so We need trust to thrive as individuals and organizations, but we're very sensitive to betrayal So what strategies do people use to try to solve dilemmas of trust? To answer this question researchers like me like to conduct studies using a basic situation called the trust game in The trust game you have two participants who might be students at Tilburg University They might be online workers and they make decisions in a sequential game Player one has a choice between going to the left and ending the game with the guaranteed status quo Or going to the right and trusting player two Now if player one trusts player two Player one's outcome is in player two's hands and player one becomes vulnerable Player two has a choice between reciprocating that trust which is beneficial to both parties or Betraying the trust which is really bad for player one, but really good for player two Now this basic situation is really appealing to researchers like me because it captures two of the basic elements of trusting behavior One when we show trust in another person we make our outcome vulnerable to them We give another person control over our well-being an outcome and To it's not a form of mechanical or individual risk-taking It's based on our expectation of what another human being will do and so trust is really about this problem of mind reading How do I predict what player two will do in this situation and is it worth it for me to accept that vulnerability? Now I'll talk about three ways that researchers have found to encourage trust in this situation And we'll talk about whether or not these are actually ideal solutions to the problem of trust The first one is to reduce vulnerability and uncertainty If you want to encourage strangers to show trust in each other You can do this by imposing external monitoring So having someone monitor the interaction and punish bad behavior or by instituting a formal contract and agreement about how each person will act These are really good strategies for encouraging trusting behavior But they have some downsides first of all if You use external monitoring or formal contract. There's no opportunity for goodwill to emerge between the two parties If player two is being monitored and does the right thing Player one will think that player two is only doing this because they have to because they fear being punished or Because they want they have to uphold a contract There's no chance for player one and player two to develop a long-term relationship or intrinsic feelings of goodwill second Contracts and monitoring are inefficient So they require time and effort in order to make the agreement and to enforce them So these can be solutions, but using these external structural solutions means that we end up with some less efficient interaction We still don't get that success of player one and player two being able to sort of Develop genuine feelings of trust and reciprocity with each other second player one can use social cues when we meet someone for the first time we very quickly and Very effortlessly judge them using a number of cues We look at someone we see how old they are how they're dressed What type of expression is on their face and we form of an in impression of their dispositions? So we form an opinion very quickly about whether someone is trustworthy or gives us a good feeling or not People really love to do this and they're very confident about their ability to do it well But unfortunately study suggests that people are rarely much better than chance at forming impressions of total strangers We can see someone's face and even if you're presented with a face for 40 or 60 milliseconds You'll quickly judge if this person is trustworthy But these judgments are very rarely able to predict a person's real behavior in a real-life situation We also might look to emotions People believe that positive emotions predict positive behavior and negative emotions predict negative behavior But actually negative emotions like sadness and anger are often associated with trustworthy or good behavior So we can judge and identify emotions and others But we often make mistakes in how those emotions influence behavior Third we focus on salient outcomes If people are rational calculators and they're thinking about dilemmas of trust and risk-taking they should focus on two things outcomes and probabilities But when we think about trust we tend to really prioritize outcomes and ignore probabilities The reason we do this is that outcomes are really salient When we imagine what it feels like to be betrayed we have a really strong emotional reaction to this idea We know we can anticipate how upset we'll feel how angry how hurt and how Frustrated with ourselves we are when we're betrayed and this information this emotional response that we have to betrayal is Much larger in our minds than the actual probability of being betrayed So we think about how bad it would be to be betrayed by someone But we don't always consider how likely it is So even if there's a really small chance of betrayal The possibility of being betrayed even if it's tiny can have a big impact on our behavior So what can we do? How can we make better trust decisions? I'm gonna give you three suggestions which are based on my line of research in this area First I'm gonna suggest that you should ignore your intuition when you meet people Ignore the voice in your head that tries to use superficial information to form an impression Ignore the idea that when you look at someone that you can judge the measure of their character Let go of this idea that you can tell if someone's a good person or a bad person to interact with based on how they look Because oftentimes when we see somebody will make incorrect judgments Second and mirroring the last talk Think about the situation So Trustworthiness is not a categorical Factor it's not something that there are people who are always trustworthy or never trustworthy. It depends on the situation That means that if you're interacting with somebody in a dilemma of trust Your challenge is to try to look at their incentives and try and see what's in it for the other person How much does this person gain by being selfish and betraying me? Is it a lot? Is it a little bit? If you manipulate incentives, you can make anybody trustworthy or anybody selfish just like the colleagues in the economics department and third is Distance yourself Now arguably The trust plays a special role in our decision-making because we're very sensitive to social information Now this special role of social context may not always be helping us And it might be better to think of trust as a more general example of risk-taking Don't let yourself be overcome by the emotions associated with betrayal. Try to think of trust like any other gamble view it from a distance so To summarize sort of what I have to say about trust and betrayal I think trust is really central to both individual well-being and Societal functioning. It's really important for groups For governments for organizations. It's really important for people to be able to form these Relationships based on trust But people are really sensitive to betrayal and this fear of being betrayed can lead to some sub-optimal Decision-making in some situations and it can lead us to not always make the best choices But we can improve our decision-making by trying to focus on different types of information and That although trust is a wicked problem. We can do better with it So thanks