Crowds may be wise, but they’re not always trustworthy.  Gwen Sharp reports on French game show audiences’ sense of fair play, willingness to help, and readiness to mislead.

Via Tyler Cowen, an interesting paper (ungated PDF here) comparing trust in the Arab Middle East (Jordan, Saudi, UAE) and in the United States:

“Mechanisms aimed at mitigating the cost of betrayal, such as damages or insurance provision, seem to work better in the United States, and arrangements focusing on preventing the occurrence of betrayal, such as a punishment threat, have greater impact in the Arab Middle East.”

Lots of interesting results.  Folks in the UAE needed longer, more sustained displays of trustworthiness before they were willing to trust.  High rates of insurance (reduced cost of betrayal) crowded out trust for Jordanians, but not Americans.

I found the results for punishment particularly interesting.  Saudi Arabians increased their trusting behaviour when there was some system for punishing defection (from 47% with no punishment system to 68% when some form of punishment system was used).  By contrast, a punishment system crowded out trust for Americans.  With no punishment, 77% of American participants trusted their partner.  When a system of punishment was used, under 62% trusted their partner.

Hard to know if this is driven by cultural values (Arab middle-easterners approach trust issues differently as a cultural difference), or as the result of some structural variable (for example, widespread corruption in Saudi Arabia erodes generalized trust).  It would be interesting to run these analyses with some attitudinal variables as covariates and see if the effects persist.

Link: Trust is good for your health.

Eric Barker notes some recent research linking trust to physiological well-being, an effect mediated through reduced anxiety.  Trust more, worry less, feel better.

“Conservative politicians can credibly commit that they will not compromise while liberal politicians cannot. As a result, liberals compromise more than conservatives.”

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution shares some interesting Gallup data on conservative and liberal Americans’ attitudes toward compromise.  Liberals are open to compromise in order to accomplish things; conservatives are more prone to stick to their guns even at the cost of getting things done.

I’ve talked before on my blog about the power of harsh public rhetoric; the ideological resolve of American conservatives likely gives their leaders a significant advantage in negotiation (particularly when facing counterparts whose constituents are amenable to compromise).

What I’m curious about in this is what drives the pragmatism of American liberals and the resoluteness of American conservatives.  One explanation would be that it is a product of the specific political situation and structure in the United States:  The configuration of coalitions, the degree of risk associated with cooperation, the appeal of the status quo, and so on.  Paul Quirk has a very nice APSR article that describes this perspective on policy conflict (gated, I’m afraid.)

Another is that it simply reflects underlying and enduring dispositional differences.  American liberals and conservatives differ in terms of their social dominance orientation, as well as a host of other personality variables (including openness to experience and tolerance of uncertainty).

I suspect that the solution to this social problem (or whether it is indeed solvable) will differ depending on what mechanism (structural or dispositional) underlies the attitudinal difference in the Gallup data.

The hidden arbitrage opportunities of coffee-shop power outlets, via SMBC.

Paul Kedrosky recently linked to a list of trusted and distrusted industries prepared by Harris Interactive.  His comment?

Trusting companies always strikes me as a largely indefensible anthropomorphic exercise in [the] first place.

But compare these two lists, and you start to see that people’s institutional trust isn’t just a matter of projecting their trust in individuals within a given profession onto the institution/industry.

71% of the Harris Interactive respondents don’t think hospitals are generally honest and trustworthy.  Yet only 5% of the Gallup respondents think that doctors have low or very low honesty and ethicality, and only 1% think of nurses as dishonest or unethical.  Hospitals are devious, untrustworthy places… filled with honest, fair-dealing employees.  Same with filling a prescription:  Only 11% of Harris respondents would trust a statement from the pharmaceutical industry, but 71% of Gallup panelists think pharmacists are honest and ethical.

These contradictions are found in a wide range of places.  Professors are highly trusted (PDF, see pg. 5) but trust in universities has declined precipitously (PDF, see pg. 588).

I think people have better judgment than Paul gives them credit for – they’re not just anthropomorphizing organizations.  Their judgment reflects their recognition that organizations are more than the sum of their parts, and are influenced by powerful forces beyond the aegis of the individual.  A company made of trustworthy, honest folks can behave in untrustworthy, dishonest ways, and institutional trust is more complex than simply aggregating personal trust.

Photo:  lgorlando

The Stuxnet virus was a sophisticated attack on the Siemens control systems used by Iran’s nuclear programme.  Its payload was code that damaged centrifuge arrays by speeding up their rotation rates.  

But a recent article (via Daring Fireball) emphasizes another impact of the virus:  It created costly suspicion and distrust.

One additional impact that can be attributed to the worm, according to David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Studies, is that “the lives of the scientists working in the facility have become a living hell because of counter-intelligence agents brought into the plant” to battle the breach. Ironically, even after its discovery, the worm has succeeded in slowing down Iran’s reputed effort to build an atomic weapon.

Trust is a human system as valuable (and vulnerable) as computer systems, as this story illustrates.

The TSA (Transportation and Security Adminstration, or, as I’ve heard them described in the wake of their ‘enhanced patdown’ policy, the Testicle Searchers of America) just keep getting hammered by reports of untoward, unprofessional and downright illegal behaviour on the part of its staff.  In the past couple weeks, I’ve read a number of stories describing questionable searches, humiliating patdowns (one leaving a cancer survivor with a urostomy bag soaked in his own urine), and, most recently, this story about a security consultant being detained (illegally, from the sounds of it) for taking pictures.

Steve Saideman blogged recently about the principal-agent problems between the TSA and its army of frontline employees, concluding that the expanded powers of the TSA would inevitably draw a small group of people to whom expanded powers are appealing:  

“With the need for thousands of folks to do the screening, there will be a percentage of individuals doing the job that are too enthusiastic for whatever reasons (zealots about the effort, touchy-feely people, folks who get off on power and humiliating others, people who like using public power to get away with stuff they cannot).  There may not be hundreds of these people, but more than one?  Probably.  Once you get lots of people touching other people, you increase the odds that something will happen that is not supposed to happen.”

There is certainly something to this argument.  Like other quasi-law-enforcement professions, employment with the TSA is likely appealing to those who are high in social dominance orientation (SDO).  As the TSA’s reputation for gestapo tactics increases, the effect on who’s attracted to employment there and who sticks around will probably be enhanced.

But the TSA’s employees aren’t all power-hungry, dim-witted junk-gropers.  In fact, I’m willing to guess that many of the atrocious abuses described in the press were carried out (or at least passively observed) by perfectly lovely folks who (outside of work) you’d have no reservations about inviting to dinner.  Last time my partner and I flew through LAX, for instance, our carry-ons were screened by a wonderfully good-natured TSAer, who chatted and joked with us as he did his job.

So why does the TSA fail so spectacularly?  Here’s my speculation about one of the causes.

I will start with the indefensible position:  TSA agents aren’t given enough discretion.

I can hear you already:  ”But they have too much leeway already!  They ride roughshod over travellers on a whim!”  But what I’m arguing is that TSA agents seem to lack meaningful latitude in how they pursue the TSA’s aims (I’ll get to the abusive kind of leeway in a bit).

Consider how almost all of these Nightmare At The Metal Detector stories end:  With a phalanx of TSA middle managers all phoning their boss, and their boss’ boss, looking for an answer about what to do.

TSA agents have all the wrong kinds of latitude.  They lack the ability to exercise discretion when it counts.  They lack the ability to use their judgment about how to balance their security aims with efficiency, compassion and other criteria. They act like people who care more about adhering to policy than accomplishing anything of substance.  

Researchers showed more than thirty years ago that this kind of low decision latitude is a source of work strain.  Particularly in the lower rungs of an organization, one of the ways people protect themselves from such strain is through depersonalization — being cold, detached, callous or indifferent to those you encounter in the course of the job.  Follow that?  Low job latitude, strain, depersonalization.  

In other words, if you place people in a job where they have little meaningful autonomy, they tend to burn out, and when they burn out, they use the little autonomy they do have to act as petty tyrants, treating people without dignity and compassion.

This all gets entrenched and reified, as I described above, as people who dislike this environment select themselves out, and those who find it appealing (the zealots, the power-hungry and the excessively handsy) are drawn in to the agency.

First, you create the assholes.  Then, the assholes are drawn to you.

“Recently, second-generation forgiveness scholars like Ryan Fehr have pushed the field in new and surprising directions. In one study, Mr. Fehr, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Maryland at College Park, looked at the relationship between forgiveness and creativity.

First, Mr. Fehr and his colleague Michele J. Gelfand had participants recall an incident in which they either forgave or failed to forgive someone during a routine daily interaction. The researchers then asked the subjects to draw a picture of an alien from another planet.

What the researchers found is that people who failed to forgive drew less creative aliens. That matters, the researchers say, because it suggests that failing to forgive creates additional “cognitive load”—that is, it uses brainpower that is then unavailable for other tasks. Remarkably, just remembering a negative past incident takes a significant toll on those cognitive resources.”

The Sorry Scholars, Chronicle of Higher Education.

Customs and Border Protection agent: Any meats, fruits, vegetables or other food to declare?

Me: Yes. Several packets of Tim-Tams.

CBP agent: Tim-Tams?

Me: Yes. They’re these chocolate biscu–

CBP agent, interrupting: Oh, believe me, sir. We know what Tim-Tams are.

(A 5-minute discussion on the merits of various Tim-Tam flavours then ensued)