Liars and Outliers (3 page)

Sociologist Barbara Misztal identified
three critical functions
performed by trust: 1) it makes social life more predictable, 2) it creates a sense of community, and 3) it makes it easier for people to work together. In some ways, trust in society works like oxygen in the atmosphere. The more customers trust merchants, the easier commerce is. The more drivers trust other drivers, the smoother traffic flows. Trust gives people the confidence to deal with strangers: because they know that the strangers are likely to behave honestly, cooperatively, fairly, and sometimes even altruistically. The more trust is in the air, the healthier society is and the more it can thrive. Conversely, the less trust is in the air, the sicker society is and the more it has to contract. And if the amount of trust gets too low, society withers and dies. A
recent example
of a systemic breakdown in trust occurred in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

I'm necessarily simplifying here. Trust is relative, fluid, and multidimensional. I trust Alice to return a $10 loan but not a $10,000 loan, Bob to return a $10,000 loan but not to babysit an infant, Carol to babysit but not with my house key, Dave with my house key but not my intimate secrets, and Ellen with my intimate secrets but not to return a $10 loan. I trust Frank if a friend vouches for him, a taxi driver as long as he's displaying his license, and Gail as long as she hasn't been drinking. I don't trust anyone at all with my computer password. I trust my brakes to stop the car, ATM machines to dispense money from my account, and Angie's List to recommend a qualified plumber—even though I have no idea who designed, built, or maintained those systems. Or even who Angie is. In the language of this book, we all need to trust each other to follow the behavioral norms of our group.

Many other books talk about the
value of trust
to society. This book explains how society establishes and maintains that trust.
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Specifically, it explains how society enforces, evokes, elicits, compels, encourages—I'll use the term
induces
—trustworthiness, or at least compliance, through systems of what I call
societal pressures
, similar to sociology's social controls: coercive mechanisms that induce people to cooperate, act in the group interest, and follow group norms. Like physical pressures, they don't work in all cases on all people. But again, whether the pressures work against a particular person is less important than whether they keep the scope of defection to a manageable level across society as a whole.

A manageable level, but not too low a level. Compliance isn't always good, and defection isn't always bad. Sometimes the group norm doesn't deserve to be followed, and certain kinds of progress and innovation require violating trust. In a police state, everybody is compliant but no one trusts anybody. A too-compliant society is a stagnant society, and defection contains the seeds of social change.

This book is also about security. Security is a type of a societal pressure in that it induces cooperation, but it's different from the others. It is the only pressure that can act as a physical constraint on behavior regardless of how trustworthy people are. And it is the only pressure that individuals can implement by themselves. In many ways, it obviates the need for intimate trust. In another way, it is how we ultimately induce compliance and, by extension, trust.

It is essential that we learn to think smartly about trust. Philosopher Sissela Bok wrote: “Whatever matters to human beings,
trust is the atmosphere
in which it thrives.” People, communities, corporations, markets, politics: everything. If we can figure out the optimal societal pressures to induce cooperation, we can reduce murder, terrorism, bank fraud, industrial pollution, and all the rest.

If we get pressures wrong, the murder rate skyrockets, terrorists run amok, employees routinely embezzle from their employers, and corporations lie and cheat at every turn. In extreme cases, an untrusting society breaks down. If we get them wrong in the other direction, no one speaks out about institutional injustice, no one deviates from established corporate procedure, and no one popularizes new inventions that disrupt the status quo—an oppressed society stagnates. The very fact that the most extreme failures rarely happen in the modern industrial world is proof that we've largely gotten societal pressures right. The failures that we've had show we have a lot further to go.

Also, as we'll see, evolution has left us with intuitions about trust better suited to life as a savannah-dwelling primate than as a modern human in a global high-tech society. That flawed intuition is vulnerable to exploitation by companies, con men, politicians, and crooks. The
only
defense is a rational understanding of what trust in society is, how it works, and why it succeeds or fails.

This book is divided into four parts. In Part I, I'll explore the background sciences of the book. Several fields of research—some closely related—will help us understand these topics: experimental psychology, evolutionary psychology, sociology, economics, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, game theory, systems dynamics, anthropology, archaeology, history, political science, law, philosophy, theology, cognitive science, and computer security.

All these fields have something to teach us about trust and security.
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There's a lot here, and delving into any of these areas of research could easily fill several books. This book attempts to gather and synthesize decades, and sometimes centuries, of thinking, research, and experimentation from a broad swath of academic disciplines. It will, by necessity, be largely a cursory overview; often, the hardest part was figuring out what
not
to include. My goal is to show where the broad arcs of research are pointing, rather than explain the details—though they're fascinating—of any individual piece of research.
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In the last chapter of Part I, I will introduce societal dilemmas. I'll explain a thought experiment called the Prisoner's Dilemma, and its generalization to societal dilemmas. Societal dilemmas describe the situations that require intra-group trust, and therefore use societal pressures to ensure cooperation: they're the central paradigm of my model. Societal dilemmas illustrate how society keeps defectors from taking advantage, taking over, and completely ruining society for everyone. It illustrates how society ensures that its members forsake their own interests when they run counter to society's interest. Societal dilemmas have many names in the literature: collective action problem, Tragedy of the Commons, free-rider problem, arms race. We'll use them all.

Part II fully develops my model. Trust is essential for society to function, and societal pressures are how we achieve it. There are four basic categories of societal pressure that can induce cooperation in societal dilemmas:

• Moral pressure
  . A lot of societal pressure comes from inside our own heads. Most of us don't steal, and it's not because there are armed guards and alarms protecting piles of stuff. We don't steal because we believe it's wrong, or we'll feel guilty if we do, or we want to follow the rules.
  
• Reputational pressure
  . A wholly different, and much stronger, type of pressure comes from how others respond to our actions. Reputational pressure can be very powerful; both individuals and organizations feel a lot of pressure to follow the group norms because they don't want a bad reputation.
  
• Institutional pressure
  . Institutions have rules and laws. These are norms that are codified, and whose enactment and enforcement is generally delegated. Institutional pressure induces people to behave according to the group norm by imposing sanctions on those who don't, and occasionally by rewarding those who do.
  
• Security systems
  . Security systems are another form of societal pressure. This includes any security mechanism designed to induce cooperation, prevent defection, induce trust, and compel compliance. It includes things that work to prevent defectors, like door locks and tall fences; things that interdict defectors, like alarm systems and guards; things that only work after the fact, like forensic and audit systems; and mitigation systems that help the victim recover faster and care less that the defection occurred.
  

Part III applies the model to the more complex dilemmas that arise in the real world. First I'll look at the full complexity of competing interests. It's not just group interest versus self-interest; people have a variety of competing interests. Also, while it's easy to look at societal dilemmas as isolated decisions, it's common for people to have conflicts of interest: multiple group interests and multiple societal dilemmas are generally operating at any one time. And the effectiveness of societal pressures often depends on why someone is considering defecting.

Then, I'll look at groups as actors in societal dilemmas: organizations in general, corporations, and then institutions. Groups have different competing interests, and societal pressures work differently when applied to them. This is an important complication, especially in the modern world of complex corporations and government agencies. Institutions are also different. In today's world, it's rare that we implement societal pressures directly. More often, we delegate someone to do it for us. For example, we delegate our elected officials to pass laws, and they delegate some government agency to implement those laws.

In Part IV, I'll talk about the different ways societal pressures fail. I'll look at how changes in technology affect societal pressures, particularly security. Then I'll look at the particular characteristics of today's society—the Information Society—and explain why that changes societal pressures. I'll sketch what the future of societal pressures is likely to be, and close with the social consequences of too much societal pressure.

This book represents my attempt to develop a full-fledged theory of coercion and how it enables compliance and trust within groups. My goal is to suggest some new questions and provide a new framework for analysis. I offer new perspectives, and a broader spectrum of what's possible. Perspectives frame thinking, and sometimes asking new questions is the catalyst to greater understanding. It's my hope that this book can give people an illuminating new framework with which to help understand how the world works.

Before we start, I need to define my terms. We talk about trust and security all the time, and the words we use tend to be overloaded with meaning. We're going to have to be more precise…and temporarily suspend our emotional responses to what otherwise might seem like loaded, value-laden, even disparaging, words.

The word
society
, as used in this book, isn't limited to traditional societies, but is any group of people with a loose common interest. It applies to societies of circumstance, like a neighborhood, a country, everyone on a particular bus, or an ethnicity or social class. It applies to societies of choice, like a group of friends, any membership organization, or a professional society. It applies to societies that are some of each: a religion, a criminal gang, or all employees of a corporation. It applies to societies of all sizes, from a family to the entire planet. All of humanity is a society, and everyone is a member of multiple societies. Some are based on birth, and some are freely chosen. Some we can join, and to some we must be invited. Some may be good, some may be bad—terrorist organizations, criminal gangs, a political party you don't agree with—and most are somewhere in between. For our purposes, a society is just a group of interacting
actors
organized around a common attribute.

I said actors, not people. Most societies are made up of people, but sometimes they're made up of groups of people. All the countries on the planet are a society. All corporations in a particular industry are a society. We're going to be talking about both societies of individuals and societies of groups.

Societies have a collection of
group interests
. These are the goals, or directions, of the society. They're decided by the society in some way: perhaps formally—either democratically or autocratically—perhaps informally by the group. International trade can be in the group interest. So can sharing food, obeying traffic laws, and keeping slaves (assuming those slaves are not considered to be part of the group). Corporations, families, communities, and terrorist groups all have their own group interests. Each of these group interests corresponds to one or more norms, which is what each member of that society is supposed to do. For example, it is in the group interest that everyone respect everyone else's property rights. Therefore, the group norm is not to steal (at least, not from other members of the group
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).