Technology is making it easier to trust strangers
This article was taken from The WIRED World in 2016 -- our fourth annual trends report, a standalone magazine in which our network of expert writers and influencers predicts whats coming next. Be the first to read WIREDs articles in print before theyre posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
During a recent family dinner to celebrate the engagement of my cousin Anthony, the happy couple ceremoniously picked up their phones and deleted Tinder, the dating app on which they met.
"Weve gone from hook-up to chuppah in less than six months," Anthony declared in his toast. Intrigued, I asked them how many messages they exchanged before they met face-to-face. It turned out they had sent more than 150 texts to each other, over the course of three days.
"I started to share genuine things about myself that I would normally keep hidden for some time," his fiancée told me. "I felt like I didnt just know him, but actually trusted him."
Anthony and Emily essentially met the person they plan to spend the rest of their lives with by swiping right. Their engagement represents not just a digital-age acceleration of intimacy but a world in which the speed and nature of trustis being fundamentally redefined.
Tinder and other dating apps are a green shoot in our understanding of how trust formed between people online can transfer into the real world. On the flip side, we are in the early stages of seeing how real-world interactions could change trust online. Take Alan, a 42-year-old Airbnb guest I recently met, who was highly sceptical of renting a home from a stranger. The place turned out to be much better than he expected.
"The experience changed my assumptions," says Alan. "I was clearly wrong."
That one good travel experience could effectively be the gateway to persuasion, positively influencing Alans trust in the online world and changing his behaviour around everything from believing strangers reviews on products and services to trusting cryptocurrencies that have no traditional entity to trust.
A new trust framework is emerging, fuelled by social, economic and technological forces that will profoundly change not just how we are trusted in the world, but how we view trust in the world.
Understanding of, and research into, the interaction between technology and trust is still in its nascent stages.Stanford University sociologists Paolo Parigi and Karen Cook are studying communities that include couch-surfing and dating sites.
"We have some preliminary research confirming the idea that peoples levels of trust towards others can be modified through the experience of participating in this relatively new form of collective action," says Parigi. "If confirmed in subsequent research, the implication is that trust can be engineered and that technology can play a crucial role."
As I researched platforms that depend on person-to-person trust, I saw that there is a common pattern. In the first layer, people have to trust that a new idea will work and is safe. The next layer is trusting the platform or third party facilitating the exchange. And the third layer is trusting the other user. I call this process the trust stack.
Take the French long-distance ride-sharing startupBlaBlaCar, now connecting more than two million drivers and passengers every month. At the outset, you have to dismiss the warning most parents give their kids: never get in a car with a stranger. You trust that ride-sharing is a safe idea. Then you trust the platform will not only weed out the bad apples but will help you fix any problems. Finally, you trust the driver and passengers that you will share a ride with will be good, honest people.
Over time, people open up to changing their behaviour the more they live in these trust structures. So sharing a ride with someone you dont know can become as normal as driving alone.
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As people go through the trust stack in different areas of their lives, the process and comfort of using online/offline trust to make decisions accelerates. A BlaBlaCar user is likely to be more open to finding a lawyer on a marketplace such as UpCounsel than going with a bricks-and-mortar firm. Digital tools are raising our levels of trust in others in ways that are speeding up the disruption of an old norm and accelerating the adoption of new ideas.
This is a threat to big organisational systems -- universities, corporations, banks, healthcare, even licensed taxi associations -- that have depended on people placing value in the belief that traditional safeguards and centralised guarantees will keep them safe and render goods and services reliable.
As this traditional institutional trust framework continues to crumble, it creates fertile ground for technology-engineered decentralised trust directly between people.