| Title | Who You Gonna Trust? How Power Affects Our Faith in Others | |
| Date | Thursday October 08 2015, @04:46AM | |
| Author | cmn32480 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the ghostbusters dept. | ||
Typically, when asked, many people will be reluctant to admit that they would place blind trust in somebody who is in a high-power position. Too many stories of politicians and top executives abusing their power run through the media. Making oneself vulnerable to such power holders thus doesn't seem like the sensible choice.
Rational actor theories agree with this anecdotal wisdom: they suggest that people will be trustworthy toward someone else only if being so is instrumental in maintaining that relationship. Given that powerful people tend to have many partners to choose from, they place – relatively speaking – less value in any particular relationship, reducing the likelihood that they will behave in a trustworthy fashion.
In other words, powerful individuals can afford to betray others – they can always find new people to work with. Rational actor theories further assume that the less powerful party to an exchange will predict this behavior and, as a result, place less trust in their more powerful counterpart.
However, our research shows that this is not the case. In fact, we observe exactly the opposite pattern. Over a wide variety of different experimental paradigms and measures, we find that less powerful actors place more trust in others than more powerful actors do. That is, trust is greater when power is low rather than high.
Our problem is that we trust powerful people too much.
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printed from SoylentNews, Who You Gonna Trust? How Power Affects Our Faith in Others on 2024-04-19 19:05:37