MING: Good afternoon,
my friends. My mane is Ming, and
I'm delighted today to introduce my friend the
renowned social psychologist David DeSteno and the author
of this book, "The Truth About Trust." I first got to know
David-- thank you, Dana. I first got to know David
through his highly innovative work in studying the
science of compassion, which is a topic I'm very
passionate about. David and his lab, they
are renowned for devising very creative
methods in studying how emotional states
affect behavior. And they are also known
for studying moral behavior in real time. Real time, not fake time like
the other labs, real time. David is most
interested to figure out how to foster prosocial
behavior all around the world. And he told me that
in summary his work can be summarised in three
words, vice and virtue. Vice and virtue, there's one
that I prefer over the other. And with that, my friends,
let's please welcome my friend David DeSteno. DAVID DESTENO: And
thank you for having me. It's a real honor to be
with you here and share this work with you. And as you can probably
guess by the title today, I'm going to talk about trust. I think it probably comes
as no surprise to you that issues and dilemmas
of trust pervade our lives. Trust determines who we want
to work with, who we love and who would marry, who
we trust to learn from, who we'll go to for support. Now, we all can
remember the big stuff, the times trust really matters. Is a new business partner
going to be trustworthy, or is he going to skim profits? Is a spouse being
faithful or unfaithful? Is a child using drugs even
when she swears, trust me. Trust me. Trust me. I'm not. But issues of trust aren't
just about those potentially momentous situations. Issues of trust pervade
our common daily life. Will my neighbor remember and I
trust him to really feed my dog while I'm away, or am I going to
come home and the dog's hungry? The mechanic, is he
really being honest when he says my car need
a new transmission? Was the salesperson when I
bought this suit really honest when he told me it
makes me look thin? You can tell me. I don't know. I won't comment on that. But whether it's big
or whether it's small, what all of these issues have
in common is a simple dynamic. They really depend on trust. And we know the more
we trust individuals, we can gain a lot
more by working together and cooperating. But in reality, as you
probably can guess, trust is a double-edged sword. Yes, we can gain more
by working together. That's why we have trust
in the first place. But trusting somebody also makes
us vulnerable to that person. It means that our outcomes
are dependent on them being competent, on them
having integrity, on them working with us. And so given that trust is
so central to human life, you would hope, you would
like to think that we really understand how it works, that we
can make really good decisions about who we should
trust or whether we're going to be
trustworthy ourselves. But I'm here to tell you we're
not really good about that. And until recently, the
science underlying that hasn't been really
good about it. And so in some ways, that's
what led me to write this book. As a scientist, I
really wanted to work on correcting a lot of
the misconceptions that are out there to empower
people to make better decisions but also so
that we can work together to nudge us all to nudge
society to become more trustworthy and
cooperative overall. So to do that, you
have to start like you would with anything else. You have to get rid
of the misconceptions and figure out how
trust really works. And so that's what I want to
talk about today in general. In the book, I talk
about lots of issues that I'm not going
to talk about today. We talk about
issues of how trust affects learning and
academic success. One of the best predictors
of a child's academic success isn't how much they
like their teacher. It's how much they
trust their teacher. And they trust
that the teacher is competent in telling them
and giving them information. We talk about how trust
affects our relationships and especially
romantic ones and how it can function to smooth out
the bumps in those in ways that operate even below our
conscious awareness to keep harmony
with those we love. In the book, I talk
about how trust is affected by power and money. There's great work
out there showing that people's trustworthiness
tracks socioeconomic status. This is work by my
friend Paul Piff. He's a psychologist
at Berkeley where he shows that higher
SES correlates to increased untrustworthiness. But really it's not
about being in the 1%. It's not a birthright of the 1%
that makes you untrustworthy. It's simply about
money and power relative to those around you. And so any of you, if
we put you in a position even for 10 minutes where you
feel elevated sense of power, it becomes a lot more
difficult in some ways to actually be trustworthy. And also how and when
can you trust yourself? It's already February. A lot of New Year's resolutions
have gone by the wayside, so if it's a good thing to know. But today what I want to talk
about is three broader themes. And the first is what does
it mean to be trustworthy and how can we understand how
trust operates within ourselves and our own trustworthiness? The second is can
we actually detect whether somebody else is
going to be trustworthy? In some ways, this has
been the holy grail of governmental research
and security research. And we've been pretty bad at it. But I have some new
data I want to share with you that
suggests we can do it. And then finally, the
question that's probably closest to my heart in the
work that I normally do, which is, how can we increase
trustworthiness and thereby increase our own and each
other's resilience around us? So let's start with
the first question. Most of us, when we
think about trust, we think about it as
this stable trait. A person's trustworthy
or they're not. But I want to convince
you that that's probably not the best way
to think about it. That's not how it really works. Growing up, we have this idea
that it's a typical motif, right? You see it in
cartoons all the time. There's an angel on one shoulder
and a devil on the other, and they whisper into your ears. And if you grow up
listening to the angel, well then you're going
to be a good person. You're going to be trustworthy. Everybody is going to love you. Everything's going to be good. There's just one
problem with that. And that is if you actually
look at the scientific data, it doesn't really hold up. What we've learned over
the past decade especially in psychological science is
that people's moral behavior is a lot more variable than
any of us would have expected. And it's a lot more
influenced by the situation. And so if you want to
control your own behavior and predict the behavior
of those around you, you need to realize that
it's not a stable trait. You need to understand how
it's affected by the situation. And so my model for
understanding trustworthiness, it's better to think of it
as a scale, the old school type of type with
the plates that go up and down as opposed
to a digital one. In any one moment, your mind,
whether you know it or not, is weighing two types of cost. It's weighing costs and
benefits in the short term versus costs and benefits
in the long term. And those usually correlate
with what's good for me in an expedient fashion right
now versus what's good for me to do even if it costs me in
the moment to built a reputation and to build social
bonds in the long term. And depending upon the
situation, which decision you choose can change
from moment to moment. You can think about it. If my friend Ming
loans me money, in the moment if I don't pay
him back, well, I'm ahead. I've profited in the short term. But long term, it's
probably a poor decision because he's not going
to give me money again. I'm going to get a reputation
as being a cheater. But if I can get away
with it, my mind, unbeknownst to me and my own
moral codes that I endorse, will try to push me to
be a bit untrustworthy. And so I want to
suggest to all of you who think this
can't happen to me and that you are
completely honest and trustworthy and wonderful,
it can happen to any of us. And let me show you an
example of how it happens and also why you probably
don't think it's true of you even though it is. So the first issue is how do
you study trustworthiness? I can't really walk around with
a clipboard and say, Cindy, are you a trustworthy person? Because what people will
probably say is they'll do one of two things. Either they know they're
not and they'll, yes I am. Because who wants
to say I'm not? But what happens
more frequently is they think they are, and
they predict they will be, but when push comes to shove,
time and again our behavior isn't what we expect. And so the way that we have to
study trustworthiness is not by asking people or looking
at their past reputations but by staging events
in real time as opposed to fake time where we can
actually see when push comes to shove, what will
people actually do when real rewards
are on the line? So let me give you an
example of how we do this. So we set up an experiment
in our lab to look at this, and it's rather simple. We bring people into the lab. These are normal
community members or even undergraduates
from the Boston community all known to be
trustworthy people. We bring them in
and say, look, we've got two tasks that
need to be done. One is really long
and onerous and it's these terrible logic
problems, and circling letters E, and random digit
strings, and all the things that you would feel like is
a big waste of your time. Or you can do a fun photo
hunt on the computer. Here's a coin. I want you to flip the coin,
and whatever one you get, it will determine whether you
do the photo hunt or the logic problems. And whichever one you
don't do, the person sitting in the next
room is going to get. And we're going to trust you
to do this the right way. Is that OK? They say sure. And then we let them go. What do you think happens? A lot of people just assign
themselves to the good task. Any guesses for how many? 80%? Close, 90%. We've done this
many, many times. So it's not a fluke finding. We've done it in our lab. Other people have
copied the methodology. 90% of people-- well
they do one other thing. Some of them don't
flip the coin and just say, oh, I got the good
task when they come out. Or some of them, because we
have them on hidden video, flip the coin repeatedly until
they get the answer they want, which is the same as
not flipping at all. But they feel better
about themselves. And so these are people
who we asked them before, if you don't flip the
coin, is that untrustworthy? They said, oh, it would
be terribly untrustworthy. But they do it. And if you ask them
when they come out, we have them rate on a
computer how trustworthily they just acted. So here higher numbers
mean higher trust on a one to seven scale. So when they're judging
themselves doing this, they're above the midpoint. So they say, yeah, it was OK. I was trustworthy. If you take those same
people and you now have them watch
somebody else do this, they condemn the person for it. That person was not trustworthy. When I did it, it was OK. When that person did it, they're
definitely not trustworthy. Now, the interesting
thing about this is these were people
who are normal people. And so when we see people
like Lance Armstrong or Bernie Madoff, you think, oh,
it's something wrong. Those people are morally
corrupt and untrustworthy. No, well, yes what they
did was untrustworthy. But the same process-- on
a smaller scale, of course, and we can only study on a
smaller scale in the lab-- happens with us. It happens with any of you. Now, the question is, well,
why don't we realize this? Why don't we learn to
stop trusting ourselves? Well, the reason why is our mind
whitewashes our own behavior. So if you ask these subjects,
why did you not flip the coin? They'll say things. They'll create stores like,
well, yeah, I should have, but today I was late
for an appointment. And if I'm not there,
somebody depending on me. And so it was OK. So they'll create all
kinds of justifications for why it was OK for
them in the situation and how it doesn't
reflect on the fact that they're an
untrustworthy person but they can be untrustworthy. Now, in some way
that's a good thing. It has to be adaptive,
because if any of us felt like we couldn't
trust ourselves, that alternative is much worse. Because it means we're not going
to save money for the future because we know future us is
going to go blow it a casino. We're not going to diet
and take care of our health because we assume
three days from now I'm going to gorge on ice
cream or chocolate cake. We're stuck with ourselves. If somebody else
is untrustworthy, we can stop
interacting with them. We can't stop
interacting with ourself, and so we need to
trust ourselves even when we make mistakes. So that's OK, but
what I'm here to do is to help you
try and learn that so that you can decrease
the probability that you're actually going to
make those mistakes. But what I haven't
told you yet is that there's any evidence
that people actually recognize what
they did was wrong. So let me give you an example. So in psychology
we had this method which is called cognitive load. And it's a way to kind of tie
up people's mental resources so they can engage
in rationalization. And the way it works
is we give them random digit strings of
numbers, say like seven digits. And you have to
remember these digits. So what we're doing is you'll
get a string of numbers, and you'll have to say
7-6-5-4-1-0, 7-6-5-4-1-0, and then you'll have
to answer a question, how trustworthily
did you just act? And you have to remember
these numbers because I'm going to have you
enter them in a minute, and you've got to
get them right. And so what this does
is it ties up your mind. It prevents your mind from
engaging in rationalization. So when we did this
experiment again, and we have 90% of people who
did cheat even though they said they wouldn't, what you
find is on the white bars on the bottom, those who
were under cognitive load, there's no difference in
how you judge yourself or how you judge others. And those are
significantly less. You see yourself
as less trustworthy than when you have the
time to rationalize. So the second, the
moment that you're committing the transgression,
your mind knows it. You feel in your gut. You feel that pang of guilt. But what happens
is you don't want to think of yourself
as untrustworthy. And so your mind engages
in this rationalization. The good you tamps away,
tamps down the guilt so that it can create
a view of you. Well, I had a
reason, and it's OK. And I am trustworthy. So the point is to
remember that all of us, even if we think of
ourselves as trustworthy, I'm sure most of you in
general are trustworthy, but your mind is making
these calculations. Here when we gave them
anonymity-- or at least they thought they
were anonymous. They didn't know we have them
on hidden video-- their mind's impulses for short-term
gain created a story. It pushed them to say, well,
I can get away with it now. Even not consciously,
it just pushes them to make this decision
as an impulsive way. And then they justify it because
the long-term consequences they believe are not
there, because they believe they're anonymous. Let's turn to the
second question. The second question
is, can I trust you? How do you figure,
how do you determine that question about somebody? Now, as we all
know, human society flourishes when we
cooperate with each other and when we trust each other. The problem is if
one person doesn't uphold his or her
end of the bargain, that person can gain
at the other's expense. And so what you have is a very
dynamic yet delicate balance that we every day have to
navigate through and optimize our outcomes. If we make the wrong
decision over and over again, we're going to have a problem. So here what we try to do is we
try to use people's reputation. Now, as I just told
you, reputation isn't a great predictor,
and so often we're wrong. But the problem that
confronts us other times is sometimes we have
to decide if we're going to trust somebody new who
we don't know anything about. And we don't know
their reputation, yet we're negotiating with them. What do you do there? You have the opportunity
for establishing a long-term relationship
or you have the opportunity for being screwed over in a
way that you couldn't predict. And if you're wrong, well,
time and time again that's going to cause you
a lot of problems. It's a very non-optimal
outcome to be wrong. So given all that,
it would be nice if we could actually
detect if somebody else was going to be trustworthy. Now, as I said at the
beginning of this talk, people have been looking
for the Holy Grail of what signifies deception
or untrustworthiness for a long time. Is it a true smile? Does that mean I can trust you? Is it shifty eyes? Does that mean I
can't trust you? And the TSA spent $40
million on this program to look for these
single microexpressions that in GAO testimony
before Congress has been shown to
be utterly useless. And the problem is I think the
reason why we haven't found how we can detect trustworthiness
is we've been going about it in really the wrong way. There is not going
to be one marker. There is not going
to be one golden cue. Cues to trustworthiness are
going to be subtle and dynamic. Why is that the case? Well, it's very adaptive
if I'm standing here and you're looking and
me and all of a sudden I see a major threat
behind you to show fear. Because that lets you know
even without turning around very quickly, there's
something dangerous there. But trust isn't
something that you want to communicate very
easily or untrustworthiness. Why? I mean, imagine if
you're trustworthy person and you had a clear tell. It's like walking around
with a big T on your forehead that says, I'm trustworthy. What would happen? Everybody would want
to cooperate with you, more of them so they could
probably take advantage of you because they know they could. Or if you were untrustworthy and
you walked around with a big U on your forehead, well,
everybody would ignore you. And nobody would
cooperate with you. And your outcomes would be poor. And so trust signals have to
be played close to the vest. We have to interact
with each other. I can get a feeling for you. You can get a feeling for me. And then we can decide and
reveal our cards very slowly. So they're going to
be subtle and dynamic. They're also going to be
the context dependent. What signals trust in any one
specific culture may vary. What signals trust in any
one situation may vary. Think about it. There's different
kinds of trust. There's integrity. So can I trust that
you're going to do the best job you can to help me? Are you meaning well toward me? That's different than
trusting your competence. If you don't have the
competence to help me, all the intention in the
world is going to be useless. And so the cues I look for for
competence versus integrity may be very different, and
we have to think about that. But the main reason
why I think we haven't found the cues to trust is that
they're going to occur in sets. I mean, think about it, right? If touching my face means I'm
going to be untrustworthy, if I do this, am I doing
that because I've got an itch or because I'm
going to cheat you? Don't know by one thing. You can't tell. The only way you can begin to
read cues to trustworthiness is to look for them occurring
in sets so you can disambiguate the meaning of any single one. And that's what the field
typically doesn't do. And so I'm going to quickly
tell you about two experiments that we did to show
how trust can be read. The first one is
kind of exploratory. We threw out everything
that we had known before, and we simply started to try
and identify what cues actually predict real monetary
trustworthy behavior and to demonstrate that they
do this in an accurate way. And the second part was
designed to actually confirm in a very tightly controlled,
highly precise way that these are the
cues that matter. And I'll show you what I
mean by that in a second. We have an exploratory phase
and a confirmatory phase. So how did we do
this I will start with the exploratory phase. What are candidates for
signals related to trust? Well, we brought 86
people into the lab and we put them into dyads,
which are groups of two. The only requirement is you
couldn't know the person with whom you were
now going to interact. We gave them five minutes
to have a get-to-know-you conversation. You could talk about
anything you want. We gave them a list
of topics, but they could talk about
anything they wanted. And you're going to play a game
for real money, a game that pits self-interest versus being
trustworthy, communal interest. And I'll show you how the
game works in a second. And then we gave
them topics to start, but they could talk about
anything that they wanted. So we brought them in. They simply sat
across from each other at a table, half the subjects. And we had three cameras
on them that were time locked so we could record
every single gesture, every single cue they made. Now, we also had another
group of subjects who conversed in
their get to know you in separate rooms
over Google Chat or Gchat-- any type
of internet chat. And the logic for this is the
same amount of information is being exchanged
in the conversation, but in one condition
you have access to the person's nonverbal cues. In the other you don't. And then we brought
them into separate rooms if they weren't in
separate rooms already. And we said, you're
going to play this game. We gave each of
them four tokens. And the tokens are
worth $1 to each of them but $2 to their partner. And so this game is
called the give some game. And it's a nice analog
for self-interest versus communal interest. Because if you
want to be selfish, you can try and get the other
person to give you all of his and give nothing. And that means you'll have
$12 and he'll have nothing. But the most trustworthy
thing to do if you really implicitly trust each other
and want to benefit each other is to exchange all you
have at the same time, because then you all
started with four and now you have eight. And so we had people
making real decisions and we paid them accordingly. And we also had
them tell us what they thought their
partner was going to do. Now, the nice thing about
it was whether or not you talked to your partner
over an internet chat or face to face, the amount
of trustworthy behavior didn't change, which is nice. I think it's because people
are now becoming very used to communicating over
internet mediated platforms. And so it's not like
being face to face made people more trustworthy. There was people who
were cheating and being cooperative at equal
levels in both cases. But here the axis is error,
the amount that you were off. And so lower bars mean accuracy
in terms of absolute value. If you were in the presence
of the other person, your guess for how
much that person was going to be trustworthy or
cheat you in absolute dollars was significantly greater. So what this tells us is that
people are picking up on a cue. There is some information there
that your mind is gleaning from body language,
whether you know it or not. And so what we did
next was we ran models of all these possible
combinations of cues to see what would matter. And the model that
predicted untrustworthiness the best consisted of four
cues, touching your hands, touching your face, crossing
your arms, and leaning away. If you think about it,
what does this really mean? Well, we know from the
nonverbal literature that fidgeting with
your hands and touching your face repeatedly is
usually a marker of anxiety and not feeling comfortable. Crossing your arms
and leaning away is a marker of I don't
want to affiliate with you. Put them together,
what does it mean? It means, I don't really
want to be with you. I don't like you. And I'm nervous
because I'm going to screw you over in a minute. And so none of these cues
predict it on their own, but together they did. So the more often you saw a
partner show this set of cues, the smaller number of tokens
you expected that person to share with you, which meant
the more selfish you thought that person was going to be. And the more often you
yourself or any subject emitted this four set of
cues, the less trustworthy you actually were, the
more tokens you kept and tried to get from the
other person without sharing. And so in some sense, what we're
showing is ground truth here. These cues are predicting
actual financial cheating versus cooperative behavior. Now, the most
interesting part about it was if you asked our
subjects, so what did you use? They had no idea. Or they would suggest
it was other cues that didn't predict anything. Yeah, I showed you they
were more accurate when they saw the person. And they adjusted their numbers
and guesses accordingly. So what this means is your
mind is using these cues even though you're not
aware of what they are. It's still building
intuitions with them. But how do you know
those are the right cues? People are doing lots of things. How do I know that when
I'm crossing my arms, it's not that my left
pupil is dilating and that's the magic cue. Well, being scientists, we
needed to have precise control. No matter what actor
I had, I couldn't get them to have
exceedingly precise control of every expression
they're emitting. So what do you do? You need a robot. So this robot, her name is Nexi. She was designed and created
by my collaborator Cynthia Breazeal at MIT's Media Lab. And so we simply used Nexi. And I'll show you a
video of it in a moment. But the experiment was simple. We repeated the same
thing we did before, except we replaced one of
the people with the robot. So now you're talking
to this robot. And the robot will emit the
cues and express the cues that we think signify
untrustworthiness or not in a very, very precisely
controllable way. The robot was controlled
by two people, one who was the voice of the robot,
the other who would control whether or not
she made the cues. Because you don't want
the same person doing it, because they might give
cues in their vocal tone. And because I know a lot
of you are engineers, I'll give you a quick
idea of how this worked. The one person here
you can see who is sitting in front
of the computer, there's a webcam on her face. As she moves her head,
it's gotten by the webcam. The robot's head
moves in real time. She's wearing a mic
here, so as she speaks, it picks up the phonemes
and the robot's mouth moves in real time. The next person controls
whether the robot gives these untrustworthy
cues or other similar cues. And the third person is
our robot mischief person who basically controls
and monitors the system. Because every once in
awhile, it would go haywire and the robot would like
it's doing something crazy, like it's possessed
or something. It would break down. But normally it worked
wonderfully and just fine. And so we had participants,
65 participants from the community. We brought in 31 of them. We showed that we
had seen the cues that Nexi meant untrustworthy. The others didn't. Here's a picture of
it crossing its arms. Here's a picture of
it touching its face. I'll show you a
video in a second. So the first part is people
have to get used to the fact that they're talking to a robot. So we had this kind of
part where they just acclimated to it. And here's what that looks like. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] NEXI: So my name's Nexi. What's your name? KIM: My name's Kim. NEXI: Kim? It's very nice to meet you. KIM: You too. NEXI: To get started
today, why don't I tell you a little
bit about myself? KIM: OK. NEXI: I was born and
built at the MIT Media Lab two years ago. So I guess in human
years, I'm pretty young. But in robot years,
that's more like being 20. KIM: (NERVOUS LAUGH). DAVID DESTENO: So you can see
she's a little uncomfortable. In fact, we had to put that
black barrier on the bottom because people
were afraid it was going to go Terminator
on them and kill them. So we needed that
little barrier. But they quickly acclimated
to this, as you'll see. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] KIM: That's basically
all I do for fun though. I don't have a lot of time. NEXI: Did you grow up
in Upstate New York? KIM: Yeah, I did until I was
18, when I moved out here. NEXI: It seems
like that must have been a big transition for you. KIM: It was. It was a really big transition. But I kind of decided that it
wasn't the life that I wanted. DAVID DESTENO: So they
would self disclose. We heard about pets dying
and all these things. One person kept asking the
robot if it believed in God. That person was hard. But for the most
part, people behave. And just so you can tell
what it looks like face on, I'll just show you
a 10-second clip. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] NEXI: We all share
a big, open room. There are lots of
cords and gadgets. So it's probably
not like your house. But it's home for me. Why don't you tell me
about where you're from? MAN: Well, I was born in
Lawrence, Massachusetts, and I had a residency
in Somerville right now. I've been doing residential
the past four months. DAVID DESTENO:
And so we then had them play this game
with the robot. We told them, look, the robot's
got an artificial intelligence algorithm that it's going to
decide how much money it wants to give you and how
much money it thinks you're going to give it based
on how the interaction went. It didn't, but that's
what we told them. And then we asked them
questions about how much they trusted the robot, et cetera. So what happened? So to make a long story short,
what happened is these are, for those of you who are
mathematically inclined, these are standardized
regression coefficients. When Nexi made the cues that
signaled untrustworthiness in the human to
human interactions, people reported
trusting it less. Now, the important
thing is they didn't report liking it less,
because I was worried, oh, they just might think
it's doing something weird. No, they liked it equally,
but they trusted it less. Now, that's important, because
to me that makes it real. Because we all have
friends that we like who we wouldn't
trust with our money. And so OK, and the
less they trusted it, the fewer tokens they
predicted Nexi would give them, basically meaning they
thought Nexi was going to be selfish and cheat them,
and the smaller amount of money in that game they
actually gave it. And so what this
tells us is that we know these are the cues
because we manipulated them with exact precision here while
nothing else was happening or things were happening
that we could control. And so cues to
trustworthiness can be imperfectly assessed,
but better than chance. And so the TSA starts
to need to look for cues in sets in a
context-dependent way. But in some ways, the more
interesting part of this is that what it suggests is that
technology is now good enough that the mind will now
use these cues to ascribe moral intent to robots, or to
avatars, or to virtual agents. So while you may not
get it from R2-D2, you will probably get it from
Wall-E. See, I'll hear aww. Wall-E is not
human in the least, but he has enough human
characteristics in the eyes and in the hands
that he can move them in a way that pings our
mind's mental machinery to make us feel
trust, or warmth, or compassion toward him. So what does this mean? It's a whole Pandora's box,
because in some ways it's good. So for people like Cynthia who
want to design these robots and she's working
on the smaller ones so that they can
actually accompany kids for medical treatment
where parents can't go. Think radiation treatments
for kids with cancer. They can go with the children. They'll seem more
trustworthy, more comforting. But like any other science,
it's not good or bad. It depends on the uses of
the people who want them. We all know trust
sells, so if I'm a marketer, what does this mean? It means that I have the perfect
trustworthy or untrustworthy person that I can show you. Because in a human, stuff leaks. No matter how much we're
going to try and control it, which is why we could pick
up on untrustworthiness. There is no leaking here. We can control everything. And so as we're conversing more
and more with automated agents and avatars, our trust is
going to be manipulated in ways that we could never
have known before or that our mind is not
ready to defend against. OK, finally, the last
part of the talk, how do we go about enhancing
trustworthiness and enhancing the compassion and
resilience of each other? To let you know just
how powerful this can be and how quickly trust can change
and compassion can change, let me give you of
my favorite examples. Some of you may know this story. It's called the Christmas
Eve truce of World War I. So it was 1914, and
the British were fighting the Germans
outside of Ypres, Belgium. And it had been a long
and a bloody battle. And they were each in
their trenches separated by the no-man's land in between. And on Christmas
Eve, as the Brits looked across the
no-man's land, they started to see lights appear. And then they started
to hear songs. And at first, they
didn't know what they were because
they were in German, and they didn't speak German. But then they soon
recognized the melodies. And what they were
were Christmas carols. And what happened
next was amazing. The men came out
of their trenches, and they started
celebrating together. They started
exchanging trinkets. They started talking about their
families, showing pictures, celebrating. Now, these were
men who hours ago were trying to kill each other. And no one would have ever
trusted if I walked out, was an open shot,
I couldn't trust that you weren't
going to shoot me. They always had shot
each other before, but here they were
celebrating with each other in a very communal way, by
their own words, very amazing. Here we were
laughing and chatting to men who only a few hours
before we were trying to kill. Now, if that's not a big change
in how trustworthy somebody can be, I don't know what is. So the question is, how
do we display such trust and compassion in one moment
and such cruelty the next? Because if we can
understand that, then we can do
something about it. But to answer that question,
what we have to realize first is how do we address
a different one? How do we identify
who is worthy to help? The world is full of more people
than we could possibly help. Not that we don't
want to help them, but it could be overwhelming. And there's this phenomenon that
we know of in psychology called compassion fatigue, which
is when you're confronted with people over and over
and over again who need help, you begin to dial it down. I have this experience
that I'm not proud of when I go with
my daughter to New York, and we're walking by, and
there was a homeless person. She was like, daddy,
help this person. And then I realized
that in that moment, I'm completely
ignoring this person, because it's a common thing
that I face all the time. And if I stopped to try
and help every person, it would be overwhelming. And so we have to
understand how our mind goes about deciding whose
pain is worthy to feel, who it's worth to help,
and who it's worth be trustworthy toward. And once we understand that,
then we can figure out, OK, how do we increase
the number of people to whom we should feel that? Well, one way that I think
our mind does it is it uses a simple metric. And that metric is similarity. So it comes back to this
is Robert Trivers, who was the discoverer of reciprocal
altruism, which is basically the idea, why do we help
people in the biological sense? It's I scratch your back today. You'll scratch mine tomorrow. In some ways, that's
what similarity is. When there's a lot of people
who need my help, going back to that equation of short-term
versus long-term gain, who should I help? Who is it worth
it for me to help? What your mind does
shaped by evolution is it decides the person who is more
similar to me is the person that it's worth helping,
because that's more likely the person who's going to pay
me back and be around later. At least initially
that's how it works. And so what we wanted
to do was to see how deeply embedded
this bias is. If I said to you, if an American
soldier's on the battlefield and he comes across an
American soldier and a member of the Taliban and both of them
are suffering the same wounds, who is he or she going to
feel more compassion for? And if I said the
American soldier, you might not find
that surprising. But what I want to
argue is that it's not dependent on
longstanding conflict. It's this unconscious
computation that your mind makes. And so we tried to strip
that down to as basic a level as we could. And we did that
by using something called motor synchrony, which
is people basically moving together in time. You see it in the military. You see it in conga lines. You see it lots of places. You see it in lots of rituals. And the idea is that if two
people are moving together, that's a marker that for
here and now, their outcomes, their purposes, their
goals are joined. And so we wanted to see
if we could actually show this effect at that level. So we brought people
into a lab, and they thought it was a music
perception study. So they sat across
from each other. And there was
sensors on the table, and they had earphones on. They didn't talk. All they had to
do was as you hear the tones in your
earphone, tap the sensor. And so it was constructed
so that the two people would either be tapping in
time or completely randomly and out of time. That was it. Then what happens is
they see the person they were tapping
with get cheated. This party is staged,
but they don't know it. They believe it's real. They see this person get
cheated in a way that makes that person have
to do a lot of extra work that they shouldn't
have had to do. And then what happens
is we give them a chance to decide if they
want to go and help that person and relieve that
person's burden. And that's what we look at. So what happens? We asked the people,
how similar were you to that person in
the experiment? The simple act of tapping
your hands-- they didn't talk. They didn't do
anything-- made them feel that they were more
similar to the other person. Now, if you ask them why,
they'll create a story. They'll say, oh, I think
we were in the same class. Or I think I've met
this person somewhere or we share the same goals. They don't know. They never talked to
this person before. None of that was true. But because they
had this intuition that they felt
more similar, they had to create a story for it. How much compassion did
you feel for this person when they got cheated and
got stuck doing this onerous work that they weren't
supposed to do? Remember, in both cases,
the amount of suffering is exactly the same. Yet they feel more
compassion for this person if they were just tapping
in time with them. How many wanted to
go help this person? This I found truly amazing. 6 out of 34 people
would say, oh, I'll go help that
person who was harmed and cheated versus 17 of 35. We had a threefold difference. When you tapped your hands
in time with this person, 50% of them said,
I want to go help this person who was wronged. That's a huge effect
if it's scalable. How much time did
they spend helping? These are seconds. So if you tapped your
hands with this person, you spent a lot more time
knowing that everything you did would relieve that
person's burden. And if you look at
it-- again these are regression coefficients--
if you tapped your hand in time with this person, yes, you
felt more similar to them. And yes you like them more. But what actually predicted
the compassion you feel? Not how much you like them but
how similar you felt to them If you tapped with them,
you felt more similar. That predicted how
much compassion you felt toward them even
though the level of suffering was the same objectively. And the amount of compassion
you felt for them directly predicted how much time,
how much effort you put into relieving their pain. Now, what this suggests is that
compassion and trustworthiness are flexible. Because if you're going
to be trustworthy to me, that means you're
going to sacrifice your own immediate outcomes to
benefit me like these people did here. Can I trust you to help me? Can trust you not
to shoot me back with the Brits and the Germans. Where I live, what
this means is trying to solve some of the
more contentious things we have in Boston, which
is Yankees versus Red Sox. But what that means
basically is not thinking about your
new neighbor as the guy who hates the dreaded Yankees. Think about him as the
guy who likes Starbucks as much as you do. If you can actually retrain
your mind to find similarities that you have with
people, it will increase your trustworthiness
toward them and the compassion that you feel toward them. When you think
about social media, there are tremendous
ways to do this. We can use the computational
power of social media in ways to connect
people that have never been connected before. Think about things like profiles
on Facebook or other things. We have vast knowledge of what
people like and don't like, what they've done
or haven't done. Perhaps what you can do is
find what people in conflict have in common very
rapidly in the background and surface that
information to them. And if you do, then
it should function in just the same way
as tapping your hands. There's nothing magic
about tapping your hands. We've done it with wearing
the same wristband colors, et cetera. Anything that you can do
to highlight similarity with someone will
make your goals seems more joined, which will
increase the compassion you feel to them if
they're suffering, which will increase
how trustworthy you are toward them even in ways
that don't involve compassion. So at Google, I'm really
interested and open to talking with any
of you about if you have ideas about using
the computational power that you all have to kind
of nudge trustworthiness and compassion in the world. But that's all kind
of a top-down way. This is a way that we
have to remind ourselves, OK, think about this person
as similar to me or not. It will be nice if we had a way
that could make it automatic, a way that works from the
bottom up so that we don't have to stop and
remind ourselves. And one way that
we can do this-- and I know it's an idea
close to Ming's heart, and I'm really
honored to be here to be able to talk with him
about it-- is mindfulness. If you read the paper
or know anything about mindfulness,
what you'll know is that it is enjoying
a renaissance. And we know it does all
kinds of wonderful things. And probably many of
you have more experience with it here thanks
to Ming's course. It will increase
your creativity. It will increase
your productivity. It's good for your health. It'll lower your blood pressure. It'll even increase your
scores on standardized tests. These are all good things. But if you think
about it, it's not what it was originally
designed for. If you look at what
Buddha said or many of the other ancient
meditation teachers-- well this is a quote by Buddha. I teach one thing and one only. That is suffering and
the end of suffering. There weren't LSATs
and GMATs back then. So all these other things that
meditation does are wonderful, and they're great. But one of the main purposes
was to foster compassion and end suffering and to increase
our being good to each other and being trustworthy
to each other. And so what we decided
to do was actually put that idea to a test. And so we brought
people into the lab. These were people who had
never meditated before. They were members of
the Boston community. And they were all equally
interested in meditation, doing a class for eight weeks. We assigned half of
them to actually take a mindfulness class
led by a Buddhist lama. And they also would go
home during the week with MP3s created by the lama
that they would practice. The other half were
put on a wait list. So this way we had groups
that were equally interested in medication, because you
might imagine that if we just recruited people who
wanted to meditate, they might have been
different types of people in the first place. So both groups were equally
interested, but only half of them actually got the course. The other half got it
after we did the measure. After eight weeks, we
brought them back to the lab. Now, they thought
they were coming to have their memory, and
their executive control, and all these cognitive
measures tested, which we did. But before we did those, what
we really were interested in is what was going to
happen in the waiting room. And so in our waiting
room, we had three chairs. Two were filled by actors and
the third was for the subject. And so when the subject arrived,
what did the subject do? Well, all them
except one sat down. We couldn't get that other guy
to sit down no matter what. But most of them sat down. And then a third actor
would enter the room. This person was on crutches,
had one of those foot boots you wear when
your ankle is broken. And as she'd walk down the
hall entering the room, she would kind of wince
in pain and looked noticeably uncomfortable. And she'd enter the room,
and there weren't any chairs. And so she'd lean
against the wall. And the question was,
what would the person do? The actors were told to busy
themselves in their iPhone and to not pay attention. Now, in psychology we call
this a bystander effect where this really
limits helping. If you're in a
situation where you see somebody in pain and
other people aren't helping, that tends to decrease
anybody's odds of helping, because you say, oh,
it's not a big deal or maybe I shouldn't help. And so this
situation is one that makes being counted on that
you're trustworthy to come and help the lowest
it possibly can. So what happens? So people who were in the
control group, only very small percentage of
them helped, like 16%. Among those who meditated,
50% of them helped. That's a threefold increase. And that's a threefold
increase in the situation that is designed to
actually work the most against your willing to help. Now, if that can happen
after eight weeks and if that is scalable,
that is a huge, huge effect that you can count
on other people. You can trust them that
they're going to help you. Now, why does it work that way? It works that way because
one part of mindfulness is this idea of equanimity. And that means realizing
that I am similar to you, and you are similar to me. Friends are enemies, are
enemies can become friends. And what that does
is it trains the mind to see us all as
valuable and interlinked. And it breaks down
the categories that we put on each other of
we're different in religion. We're different in sports
teams you like, et cetera. And I think that's why it works. And then it becomes automatic. It does the same thing that
my little tapping example was doing. And so when it comes down to
it, really what I want to say is that in the end,
it's trust or it's dust. And what I mean by
that is without trust, our ability to be resilient as
a society is exceedingly low. And so how can we build it up? Anything we can
do to nudge it up is important to being resilient. In the fall of 2012, I don't
know how many of you remember out here, but on the East Coast,
super storm Sandy hit New York. And it was a devastating storm. And there are neighborhoods
that still aren't recovered. But the AP did a great study. Controlling for the amount
of damage that occurred, they looked at what was the
single most important predictor of a neighborhood's resilience. The single most
important predictor was how much neighbors
trusted each other. How much they know
that the other person they could count on them,
that that person was going to have
compassion for them, that they were going
to work together. The neighborhoods that
were higher in trust were the neighborhoods
that got up and running in terms of commerce,
and support, and social services
faster than anything. And that's why I say in the
end, it really is trust or dust. If we don't trust,
we're harming everybody. But of course there were people
in neighborhoods who price gouged and who did
things they shouldn't. And so really my message in the
book is, yes, trusting is good. We should all trust. But trusting wisely is better. And so it's my hope that any
of you who read this or come into contact with this work,
it will empower you to think about the way trust
actually works and the forces
that impinge on it to make better decisions
about who you can trust but also how to foster
trustworthiness in yourself. And I thank you so much
for listening to me. MING: Thank you, my friend. We have time for questions. Anybody have any questions? AUDIENCE: Two fairly
related questions, in the earlier test
about looking for cues, so I'm just wondering
how you came to the domain of
different things you were looking for
that could conceivably be a cue in your analysis. Because you could say whether
the pinkie is touching the hand and the hand's
touching is or not. And then along with
that, with whether you were going into it starting
off focused on physical cues or if you were also
considering the types of issues that were brought up in
conversation, which could then play into the
talking with a robot or talking over the internet. DAVID DESTENO: So let me
do the second one first. We were primarily
interested in physical cues. There's lots of work
out there as well on linguistics and
the type of phrasing that people use as
well as vocal tone. We weren't looking for those. It doesn't mean that
those don't matter. And so I'm not saying these
are the only cues that matter, but these are
sufficient to predict. The more that we know
about, our accuracy will go. But we were interested in the
actual physical, biological motion cues. How did we get them? We simply started with
the brute force method, was looking for
individual cues that had some predictive
ability at all. Because even if they're
not predictive greatly on their own, they have to
have some predictive power on their own. And then we would begin
to do is to assemble different subsets just trying to
maximize the amount of accuracy that we can predict. So it was a very
bottom-up approach. And then once we
have those four sets, those predicted the
greatest amount of variance in people's selfish
monetary behavior. Which is then why,
again, it was really important to use the robot. Because you're right. This was a correlational method. Who knows what we
could be picking up. Maybe on every time I cross
my arm, it was my pinkie. And so we could actually
manipulate it with precision with the robot to validate it. MING: If you could put
a pinkie down here, it's not trustworthy. That's what I
learned from a movie. AUDIENCE: Let's see if I
can word this the right way. It seems like the
general conclusion from the research
or your conclusion is you're saying we should
be more trusting of others, like sort of the hope
for the better world. And the question is, is there
also then some drive for people themselves to be trustworthy? Like in the example you
gave in the beginning about people in a marriage,
one cheated on the other, is it to say, put that aside. Trust that person. Or is there some other
conclusion in that sense? DAVID DESTENO: It's
a good question. What we know from
all the-- so people like Martin Nowak at Harvard
is a straight mathematician, evolutionary biologist. And so they run these
fantastic models. And what we know
is that if you are untrustworthy in the short
run, you will profit immensely. But over time, that profit
then starts to go down. And so in the long run,
people who are trustworthy profit the most in terms of
everything and even as a group. And so we know that's
the better outcome. But if you can be untrustworthy
and not get caught, you're going to profit. So how do we try
to balance those? And so what we're
trying to do is to make everybody
want to be more trustworthy but at the same
time also make better decisions. It will be impossible
to have a world where everybody is trustworthy. Because if everybody's
trustworthy, you stop even
looking and caring. You just automatically
say, yes, I'll trust you. And then if there's a mutation
or whatever that causes people to be more
untrustworthy, they're going to profit like crazy. Until then everybody
starts caring, and so it's always going
to be in an equilibrium. The question is, can we
increase the set point for trustworthiness
to a higher level? And so it's about increasing
your own trustworthiness but about deciding if you can
trust somebody else wisely. So yes, if you know
absolutely nothing, it's better to trust than
not trust in the long run in terms of quantifying the
benefits that can happen. But it's certainly
not as good as making an informed correct decision. And so my hope is to try
and open people's eyes to how trust really
works so that you can make better decisions. AUDIENCE: So similar to that
question, trust over time, have you done any research
into how analysis of trust has to change, how
much it needs to be dependent on data changing? Like the first study was on
the initial get to know you, how much I trust
you as a person. And then the question is
later on, something happens. How much should future events
be added into that evaluation? DAVID DESTENO: You mean
at what point will I change my judgment of
whether I can trust you? It's dependent on
a lot of things. It's often dependent on the
magnitude of what you have held up your end for
what you haven't. But I guess my
argument is that you need to look at each situation
if it's important and new. Because even somebody who
has been always trustworthy, if the costs and
benefits change-- the reason they're always
trustworthy is the cost and benefits are rather stable. Take that person and change
the cost and benefits either by dangling a reward
that is immense in front of them or giving them anonymity
so they won't get caught, like our people,
and they'll change. So I think there's not
a clear time frame. I think we all adjust
at different rates depending upon the magnitude. But my message is no matter
what you think, consider the situation. If it's somebody
you always trusted, consider has their
power changed? Has anything else changed? Because they may not want
to be untrustworthy just like our subjects
did, but they will be and construct
a story for why. AUDIENCE: Hi and
thank you for coming. I have a question actually
kind of related to that. So have you done any study
in how people's relationship long term potentially changes
how sensitive or not sensitive they are to social cues? I can imagine
someone who perhaps does all of the social
cues that you mentioned in terms of lying, but perhaps
like a brother and sister, for example. They've gotten numb
to it over time, and maybe they can't
pick up on it anymore. Or do you have a sort of sense
of how long-term relationships can change how people
pick up on that? DAVID DESTENO: Two
things on that, we haven't done
that work, but what we know from the nonverbal
literature in general is that people have a what
are often termed accents. So there's a kind of
panhuman way of doing it. But then different cultures
or even different families or individuals will have
modifications of that. And so the longer
you are with someone, you can learn that
for this person, this is that person's
tell in some ways. And it will be some
combination of these. But other things added to that
will increase your accuracy for that person. But another thing in terms
of long term, what does trust do, it's beneficial. So there's great work
done by Sandra Murray. She's psychologist who studies
romantic relationships. And one thing that the trust
does in our relationships is it smooths out
the bumps, as I said. So we've probably all had times
when our significant other does something and
it makes us go hmm, whether it's you think the
person's flirting with someone or they're working
late or what is it. Well, if you inherently
trust this person, at a very nonconscious level,
that trust erases that hmm. It just gives you an intuition
that everything's fine. And if you trust that
intuition, that's good. Because lots of times
we'll do something that we're not trying
to be untrustworthy. It's just an inadvertent thing. But if a person interprets that
as, oh, you're untrustworthy, it can start you into
kind of a death spiral. And so the good thing
about trusting someone over the long time
in a relationship is that it helps
smooth out those bumps so there aren't mistakes made. So that one person doesn't
interpret the other person as flirting or doing
something with somebody else that they shouldn't have. Now, if they keep doing
it, well, then you're going to know it's real. But that's a benefit
of trust long term. MING: Thank you, my friend. So the book is "The
Truth About Trust" available where
books are sold, also available at the
back of this room. And David will be
around to sign books. And my friends, David DeSteno. DAVID DESTENO: Thank you all.
