Whom should you trust? We need to put our trust in some people, and maybe monitor more carefully some other people. Whom should we trust the most? Partly, it should be people we've had good repeated interactions with, but some as we trust people we don't know as well. Now, we can think about their ability, their benevolence, their integrity, we can think about how they've interacted with other people, we can look for information about their reputations. All of that's very good and important. I want to think about one other key feature that turns out to be really important in trustworthiness. Really trustworthy people, also happen to be guilt prone. Guilt prone is a personality trait. It's not about feeling guilt, it's about being prone and worrying about letting other people down. When people are prone to feeling badly about harmful behaviors, even when those harmful behaviors occur in private, that's guilt proneness, and people who are guilt prone turn out to be very trustworthy. If you think about, and there's a guilt prone scale, questions like imagine you're at a dinner party, you spill wine on the host's carpet, nobody sees it, how would you feel? Here's something that happened in private, it's harmful, would you feel guilty about that? Would you worry about that? Here's the idea. That is, some people are so worried about a harmful consequence. They're going to drink white wine away from the carpet, not red wine over the carpet. It's the person that's drinking the white wine away from the carpet that's worried about letting other people down, that is worried about harming other people, those people are guilt prone. They're going to work harder so they don't let other people down. It turns out these guilt prone people are very trustworthy. In studies that we've done, we found that highly guilt prone people are significantly more trustworthy than low guilt prone people. What I'm suggesting is that, it's far easier to assess guilt proneness than it is to directly measure or assess trustworthiness, and so we can think about guilt proneness as a way to figure out if this is somebody we should be jumping into a relationship with, if we should be trusting them, or really monitoring what they're doing more carefully. We also want to be aware of short-term relationships. The good thing about short-term relationships is that with review systems, we can transform short-term relationships into long-term relationships. You can think about Airbnb or Uber, they're seemingly single-shot transactions that have been transformed through a reputation system, into a long-term relationship. But if it really is a one shot deal, that's where we want to be most careful. We also want to be careful what's termed censored environments. Imagine you only see what people do some of the time. Imagine there's a Manager who travels a lot. Every time the manager comes into work, the staff is working furiously hard, and every time the manager leaves the office, they can't see what the staff is doing. Now, if the staff knows when the bosses around, they may work fiercely hard just when the boss is around, and goof off the rest of the time. That's a censored environment for the boss. The boss is only seeing some behavior. In those censored environments, the boss may make the inference that a, everybody here works really hard. Every time I've seen them in the office, they work really hard. But that's a censored environment and they may fail to appreciate what happens when they're not there. We want to think about if we're the boss, if we're only seeing some of the behaviors, and people know that they're being observed in those moments. It's like inferring a lot from an interview. We're interviewing somebody and they're on for that day or that hour, is that how they always are, or is that a censored environment? We want to be aware of censored environments. Then, of course, people who brag about cheating other domains, those are the people that you want to be very careful about. But those are some of the key ideas about in whom we should be placing our trust.
