Trust, Truth, and Technology: How Media Are Shaping the Way We Trust One Another

Trust -that foundational belief in another’s truth and reliability - has been the essential glue of human communities since time immemorial, and continues to be what holds us together in our daily social interactions. Until recently, communities were small enough that trust was built up face-to-face and through shared social bonds - familial, social, and commercial. But today, with human interaction mediated so regularly by technology, there are more opportunities for people to deceive one another. In fact, trust may be one of social media’s most serious casualties. What is it like to live in a world where we can’t be sure that the person we’re communicating with is who she says she is?

Jeff Hancock is just one of the researchers at IRiSS whose work now involves studying the constant stream of data captured as a result of online human activity. While social science experiments were once routinely conducted with small numbers of human subjects, and survey research drew on the responses of a few thousand individuals, social scientists are now analyzing terabytes of data to develop our understanding of such human behavior as trust and deception.

Speaker: Jeff Hancock, Stanford