{"product_id":"the-truth-about-trust-isbn-9780142181669","title":"The Truth About Trust","description":"\u003cb\u003e“This one’s worth reading. Trust me.” —Daniel Gilbert, PhD, bestselling author of Stumbling on Happiness\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIssues of trust come attached to almost every human interaction, yet few people realize how powerfully their ability to determine trustworthiness predicts future success. David DeSteno’s cutting-edge research on reading trust cues with humanoid robots has already excited widespread media interest. In The Truth About Trust, the renowned psychologist shares his findings and debunks numerous popular beliefs, including Paul Zak’s theory that oxytocin is the “moral molecule.” From education and business to romance and dieting, DeSteno’s fascinating, paradigm-shifting book offers new insights and practical takeaways that will forever change how readers understand, communicate, and make decisions in every area of life. | \"[DeSteno] does an excellent job presenting evidence and deriving practical conclusions for how trust works in everyday life.\"\u003cbr\u003e -\u003ci\u003eScientific American Mind\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Smart, fun, and informative, \u003ci\u003eThe Truth About Trust\u003c\/i\u003e describes the most frightening, most wonderful, and most human thing we do: putting our fates in someone else's hands. This one's worth reading. Trust me.”\u003cbr\u003e —Daniel Gilbert, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard and bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eStumbling on Happiness\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Trusting others puts us at risk.  Yet failure to trust entails risk as well. The ability to navigate through this minefield successfully is one of life’s most valuable assets.  DeSteno provides by far the best account of what science has learned about how we do this. \u003ci\u003eThe Truth About Trust\u003c\/i\u003e is also a terrific read.”\u003cbr\u003e —Robert H. Frank, Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management at Cornell and bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Economic Naturalist \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Darwin Economy\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eThe Truth About Trust \u003c\/i\u003etackles some of the most important and challenging issues in life.  Psychologist David DeSteno takes a fresh look at fundamental questions, from gauging the trustworthiness of others to whether you can trust yourself.”\u003cbr\u003e —Adam Grant, Wharton professor and bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eGive and Take\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"Fresh insight into a necessary part of everyday life...In concise prose backed by engaging stories, the author addresses the pros and cons of common issues such as trusting a business transaction, using trust in learning situations and the need for trust in personal relationships.\" \u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e | \u003cb\u003eDavid DeSteno\u003c\/b\u003e is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he is director of the Social Emotions Group. He lives in Massachusetts. | \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePREFACE\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eCan I trust you?\u003c\/i\u003e This question—this set of four simple words—often occupies our minds to a degree few other concerns can. It’s a question on which we exert a lot of mental effort—often without our even knowing it—as its answers have the potential to influence almost everything we do. Unlike many other puzzles we confront, questions of trust don’t just involve attempting to grasp and analyze a perplexing concept. They all share another characteristic: risk. So while it’s true that we turn our attention to many complex problems throughout our lives, finding the answers to most doesn’t usually involve navigating the treacherous landscape of our own and others’ competing desires. When we’re young, asking why the sky is blue or why pizza can’t be for dinner every night, though sometimes seeming of equal cosmic importance, necessitates only the transmission of facts to answer. Wondering what exactly a Higgs boson is or whether anything out of the ordinary really happened at Roswell can, it’s true, keep the gears of the mind whirring. For most of us, though, attempts to find answers to these questions won’t keep us up at night. And while asking our financial advisor for the eighth time how to calculate compound interest might require stepping up our mental math, in and of itself, finding the answer is fairly formulaic. Bring the word \u003ci\u003etrust\u003c\/i\u003e into the equation, however, and it suddenly becomes a whole different story.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTrust implies a seeming unknowable—a bet of sorts, if you will. At its base is a delicate problem centered on the balance between two dynamic and often opposing desires—a desire for someone else to meet your needs and his desire to meet his own. Whether a child can \u003ci\u003etrust\u003c\/i\u003e her parents’ answer to her question about the color of the sky requires estimating not only their scientific bona fides, but also their desire to appear smart even if they really don’t know the answer. Whether she can \u003ci\u003etrust\u003c\/i\u003e them to make pizza for dinner, rather than simply ask why she can’t have it every night, relies on divining her parents’ willingness to uphold their promise to cook in the face of sudden needs to work late or to take an extra trip to the grocery store to refill an empty pantry. Whether you can \u003ci\u003etrust\u003c\/i\u003e scientists to tell you why searching for the Higgs or related subatomic particles is worth the huge taxpayer expense, rather than ask them to simply provide a definition for what the little particle is, means pitting everyone’s desire to acquire knowledge that can lead to a better world against the scientists’ related desires to pad their research budgets. The same logic even applies to trusting yourself. Think about it. Whether you can \u003ci\u003etrust\u003c\/i\u003e that you’ll invest your next paycheck for the long term as opposed to spending it immediately to purchase the newest iPad is quite different from figuring out how much money you’ll have in twenty years if you do choose to invest it. Whether we’re talking about money, fidelity, social support, business dealings, or secret-keeping, trust isn’t just about the facts. It’s about trying to predict what someone will do based on competing interests and capabilities. In short, it’s about gambling on your ability to read someone’s mind, even if that someone is your future self.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLike all gambles, though, assessing trustworthiness is an imperfect endeavor; there’s always a chance you’re going to come up short. Sure, most of us have theories about what signals whether people can be trusted. Do they stumble over their words or avert their gaze? Do they seem too “smooth”? Did they “come through” last time? The problem, of course, is that most of us have also had the all-too-frequent experience of being surprised when our guesses turned out to be wrong. We’re not alone, however; deception “experts” and security professionals haven’t proved much better. Until very recently, there’s been precious little evidence indicating that anyone can accurately determine if someone else can be trusted, especially if they don’t know the individual well.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eScientists have spent decades looking for markers of trustworthiness in the body, face, voice, penmanship, and the like, all to little avail. Forget what you see on television; it’s all science fiction. If polygraphs were foolproof, we wouldn’t need juries. After all, the list of famous criminals who were found guilty based on polygraphs doesn’t include the likes of CIA-spy-turned-traitor Aldrich Ames and “Green River Killer” Gary Ridgway, both of whom “passed” this physiological test. Likewise, there wouldn’t be a long list of people who had to endure false accusations based on failed polygraph tests—people like Bill Wegerle of Wichita, Kansas, who was initially suspected of being the BTK killer. Entertaining movies and television shows aside, the same criticisms apply to the use of facial expressions. If a single smile or twitch could accurately predict who could be trusted, all negotiations would occur under a spotlight with video recordings. Science, put simply, doesn’t yet have all the answers to unlocking the mysteries of trust. Still, finding the keys is of such importance that the business community and the military spend millions of dollars a year trying to do just that. In fact, current knowledge has been so limited that the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)—one of the central research units under the Director of National Intelligence—published a notice in 2009 specifically soliciting scientific proposals to develop new and more accurate methods to gauge a target’s trustworthiness.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis state of affairs raises some questions, however: If the need to trust is so central to humans, why is it so difficult to figure out who is worthy of it? Why after millennia of evolutionary development and decades of scientific inquiry are answers only beginning to emerge? To my mind, there are two good reasons. The first, as I’ve hinted, is that unlike many forms of communication, issues of trust are often characterized by a competition or battle. As we’ll see, it’s not always an adaptive strategy to be an open book to others, or even to ourselves. Consequently, trying to discern if someone can be trusted is fundamentally different from trying to assess characteristics like mathematical ability. Aptitude in math can be estimated from answers to specific types of problems. Unless the person is a genius trying to pull the wool over your eyes, there shouldn’t be any competing interests pushing her answers one way or another. As a result, her answers should, on average, serve as accurate indicators of her true abilities and be solid predictors of how she’ll perform in the future. With trust, neither of these facts is necessarily true. As we’ll see throughout this book, deciding to be trustworthy depends on the momentary balance between competing mental forces pushing us in opposite directions, and being able to predict which of those forces is going to prevail in any one instance is a complicated business.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe second reason why assessing trustworthiness remains something of an enigma is that, to put it bluntly, we’ve been going about it in precisely the wrong way. I don’t say this lightly, as many great minds have been focused on this topic for decades. Yet it’s also the case that this intense focus has led to a tunnel vision of sorts that often results in dead ends among the research community and simplistic expectations among the public. Everyone is looking for the one golden cue that predicts trustworthiness in all situations. Everyone assumes that trustworthiness is a fairly stable trait. Everyone believes that they know when and how issues of trust will affect them. The problem, though, is that they’re mostly wrong; trust just doesn’t work the way most people think.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHow do I know? I could say, “Trust me,” but that would defeat the whole point. I’m a scientist, so my goal is to convince you based on findings—not on opinions or testimonials. I should note that I haven’t spent my life as a trust researcher, a security professional, or a science writer. To the contrary, I spend my days running a lab focused on one primary theme: how and why emotional states guide social and moral behavior. It’s been an endeavor characterized by both great discoveries and never-ending questions. It’s one that has allowed my research group to plumb the depths of the best and worst humanity has to offer. Whether we’re uncovering the processes that give rise to dishonesty and hypocrisy or shedding light on the wonders of compassion and virtue, the task at hand always requires a lot of creativity and a willingness to go where the data lead. It’s also a job that requires a bit of humility. The longer I do it, the more I realize that the best way to answer perennially difficult questions is not to go it alone, but rather to bring the best minds from many different fields together to look at old problems in new ways. This is exactly the perspective that my group brought to studying trust, and it’s one that has allowed us to approach the issue with an entirely new perspective.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhy the interest in trust\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ein the first place? Primarily because the more we examined vacillations in emotions and moral behavior, the more we realized that trust often played a central role. Whether it’s wondering if a partner might cheat, needing to show that you recognize a responsibility to repay a debt, or desiring to signal that your abilities are up to the challenge, issues of trust rear their head. Jealousy and anger often stem from distrust of the loyalty of a partner. Showing gratitude stands as an efficient way to let people know you realize you owe them a favor. Quick flashes of pride can signal people that they can trust your competence. In short, much of human social life, and the emotions that revolve around it, invokes issues of trust in one way or another. Given this fact, my research group turned its lens on the dual aspects of trust—both how it works and whether and how people can accurately predict who is worthy of it. In so doing, we began an in-depth and novel investigation that traipsed across many traditionally separate fields of inquiry. In the end, what emerged are not only new insights into how to detect the trustworthiness of others, but also an entirely new way to think about how trust influences our lives, our success, and our interactions with those around us.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStill, of all the things I learned, one of the most profound—and the one I hope you’ll take from this book—is that trust isn’t only a concern that emerges at big moments in our lives. It’s not relevant just to signing a contract, making a large purchase, and exchanging wedding vows. Yes, these events certainly affect our lives in important ways and depend on trust, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Whether we realize it or not, issues of trust permeate our days from the time we’re born to the time we die, and it’s often what’s below the surface of consciousness that can have the greatest influence on a life well lived. Our minds didn’t develop in a social vacuum. Humans evolved living in social groups, and that means the minds of our ancestors were sculpted by the challenges posed by living with others on whom they depended. Chief among those challenges was the need to solve dilemmas of trust correctly. And it’s precisely because of this fact that the human mind constantly tries to ascertain the trustworthiness of others while also weighing the need to be trustworthy itself. Your conscious experience may not correspond with this fact, but again that’s because much of the relevant computations are automatic and take place outside of awareness.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs you’ll see in this book, trust influences more than most of us would have imagined. It affects how we learn, how we love, how we spend, how we take care of our health, and how we maximize our well-being. It not only affects our communication and comfort with others, but as our social worlds change from the physical to the virtual, the role of trust and its impact on our interactions will change as well. I invite you to come on the journey with me to find out exactly what we do and don’t know about the role of trust in our lives. Along the way, I’ll discuss not only work from my lab that bears on the issue, but also the work, views, and opinions of some of the best thinkers on the topic. From economists and computer scientists, to social media mavens and security officials, to physiologists and psychologists, it’ll be a wide-ranging journey designed to put the pieces together.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo accomplish this goal, I’ve loosely divided the book into four parts. The first two chapters will set the stage by laying out the fundamentals—what trust is, why it matters, how it’s physiologically embodied, and how we might profitably correct older ways of thinking about it. The next three chapters will explore the far-ranging ways trust impacts us—from how trust develops and influences children’s morality and ability to learn, to the ways trust or lack thereof shapes relationships with those we love, to how and why power and money have the potential to alter loyalties. The sixth chapter turns the tables from an examination of how trust affects behavior to the age-old question of whether and how we can actually detect the trustworthiness of others. Here, I’ll flip the old view on its head and open a whole new vista from which to explore trust detection. I’ll also point out some bugs in the system, thereby arming you to avoid succumbing to them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom this base, the final section—chapters 7 and 8—will move in a slightly different though no less important direction. Here, I’ll consider what all of the preceding means for two relatively novel realms when it comes to trust—realms where a partner isn’t exactly who, or even what, you’d usually expect. Can you trust a virtual avatar? A robot? An unknown person on Facebook? How trust works in a world of rapid technological advancement and virtual interaction—a world where the science of trust can be manipulated and used for good or ill with unprecedented precision—is the first theme I’ll explore. Consideration of the second realm, however, will require adopting a different focus. Rather than looking outward to decide whom you can trust, I’ll ask you to direct your gaze inward to ask what may be a more unsettling, yet in many ways a more fundamental, question for reaching your goals: Can you trust yourself? Although it’s true that cooperation and vulnerability require two parties, no one ever said that the two parties had to be different people. To the contrary, the parties can be the same person at different times. Can the present you trust the future you not to cheat on your diet by bingeing on chocolate cake? Not to cheat on an exam? Not to cheat on your spouse? Not to go gambling again?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese last questions highlight a nuance it’s important to remember as you proceed through this book. Each of us is never just an observer trying to ascertain whether someone else is to be trusted; we’re also targets of observation ourselves. The same forces that determine whether someone else will be honest or loyal also impinge on our own minds. Assessing the trustworthiness of another and acting trustworthy ourselves, then, are simply two sides of the same coin. Understanding how to predict and control the flip of that coin is what this book is all about. And as we close in chapter  9, we’ll see exactly why understanding trust matters as we explore the links between trust and resilience in an unvarnished way—a way that quite literally shows how trust, when used correctly, can be one of the most important tools to raise us all from ruin.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e1\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCHAPTER\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFUNDAMENTALS, FOIBLES, AND FIXES\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat Is Trust, Anyway?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt the most basic level, the need to trust implies one fundamental fact: you’re vulnerable. The ability to satisfy your needs or obtain the outcomes you desire is not entirely under your control. Whether a business partner embezzles profits that doom your corporation, a spouse has an affair that wrecks your marriage, or a supposed confidant tweets a personal factoid that ruins your reputation, your well-being, like it or not, often depends on the cooperation of others. These others, of course, have needs of their own: needs to pay for a new car that might push them to skim profits and fix the books; needs to have a more charged love life that might lead them to acts of infidelity; or needs to be popular that might cause them to supply some juicy gossip to their friends at your expense. It’s precisely where your needs and theirs diverge that trust comes into play. If each person’s goals were the same—in both nature and priority—there would be no potential conflict and thereby no need to trust. Such alignments of needs and desires only rarely occur, however. The social lives of humans are characterized by a never-ending struggle between different types of desires—desires favoring selfish versus selfless goals, desires focused on immediate gratification versus long-term benefit, desires stemming from the conscious versus unconscious minds. Only an overriding threat or an amazing confluence of random factors—what we’d otherwise call pure luck—can result in an exact mirroring of two people’s needs and goals at all levels.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTrust, then, is simply a bet, and like all bets, it contains an element of risk. Yet risk is something most of us could do without. Decades of research have shown time and again that humans are generally risk-averse when it comes to making decisions, and with good reason. Risk, by definition, implies the potential for loss, and who likes to lose? In fact, the aversion to loss is so deeply ingrained that our minds have developed a sort of bias in calculating preferences. Losing \u003ci\u003eX\u003c\/i\u003e amount of something—whether \u003ci\u003eX\u003c\/i\u003e is dollars, cars, or cupcakes—hurts more in absolute terms than gaining the same amount of \u003ci\u003eX\u003c\/i\u003e feels pleasurable. There is no absolute value; it depends on whether we’re winning or losing. Given an innate risk aversion, the question of why humans trust in the first place is an intriguing one. Why do we take the risk?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe short answer is that we have to. The potential benefits from trusting others considerably outweigh the potential losses \u003ci\u003eon average\u003c\/i\u003e. The ever-increasing complexity and resources of human society—its technological advancement, interconnected social capital, and burgeoning economic resources—all depend on trust and cooperation. Picture for a moment the familiar scene of a NASA mission control during any shuttle launch or space-probe landing. It’s a room filled with individuals, each hunched over a computer screen, working in consort to achieve what no single one of them could do alone. Each person, each link in the chain, has a small but central role to play, and each relies on the trustworthiness of the others to do their jobs. If a single individual fails to notice an important data point—whether it involves the pressure in a tank, atmospheric conditions, or the heart rate of an astronaut—the whole enterprise can be in peril. Everyone has to trust the others to do their jobs and do them well if the joint venture is to succeed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOf course, it’s not just amazing feats like space launches where trust plays a role. Trusting others also affects a majority of the everyday things we do, most of which we take for granted. We deposit our money in banks and let the bankers make decisions about how much and to whom they should lend it to help us earn interest. We let our kids go to school assuming that someone else will educate them so that we are freed to earn an income. We divide the labor in running the household so that we can accomplish much more than any one person could on his or her own. The examples are endless, but they all share a common thread: more can be achieved by working together than by working alone. That’s why we trust—plain and simple. The need to increase resources—whether they be financial, physical, or social—often necessitates depending on others to cooperate.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs we know all too well, however, not every instance of trust is always well placed. The financial crisis of 2008 is a case in point. People trusted the banks to invest their money wisely, but risky mortgage lending and credit-default swaps provided another classic reminder of the duality of human nature. The banks were taking incredible risks, even betting against the success of their own deals, with money from depositors—money they were entrusted to manage responsibly. The evening news regularly highlights breaches of trust in our schools ranging from administrators falsifying records to teachers abusing students. But here’s where the \u003ci\u003eon average\u003c\/i\u003e part of the reason for trust comes into play. \u003ci\u003eOn average\u003c\/i\u003e, more is to be gained by trusting others, as the aggregated benefits in the long term tend to outweigh the potential individual losses that come from misplaced trust. But there’s the catch: greater benefits \u003ci\u003eon average\u003c\/i\u003e don’t mean much when you’re the person who loses money, a spouse, or a solid and wholesome education for your child. Still, statistically speaking, trusting usually pays greater dividends in the long run. It’s this dynamic tension between the opposing costs and benefits that has shaped how our minds solve the trust equation at different moments in our lives—with respect to both acting trustworthy ourselves and assessing the trustworthiness of others.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIf you truly wanted to avoid the risks inherent in trusting other people while still benefiting from cooperation, there’s really only one route: transparency. If you could actually verify the actions of another, the risks, by definition, become lower. In fact, if you think you can’t trust a potential partner at all, transparency is the only way to go. Think of the classic image from the last crime drama you saw on television. Two criminals need to complete an exchange. What do they say? Usually it’s some variant of, “Open the suitcases and we’ll exchange them on the count of three.” They each want to see—to know for sure—that the other has the money, drugs, kidnapped person, or similar valuable. They also want to make sure that they don’t give up their prize without acquiring their desired object at the same time. In such cases, trust is completely out of the picture.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe problem, of course, is that the ability to verify actions isn’t always possible—a limitation that can occur for two main reasons. The first involves effort. Verification is onerous; it takes time and energy. The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) has to verify that no one is boarding a plane with a weapon, hence long airport lines. The mortgage company has to verify that you can pay your bills, hence the mounds of paperwork. And that’s just when we’re considering one person at a time. Imagine how difficult and costly it would be to run a business if an employer had to verify every action taken by a subordinate. Imagine how much time you’d have to spend watching hidden Web cams in your home if you wanted to verify that your spouse wasn’t cheating on you or your babysitter wasn’t stealing from you. One reason, then, that true verification directly constrains resource accumulation is that it limits the time and energy that could be devoted to other endeavors.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe second reason verifiability isn’t always feasible is that there can be a time lag—a delay between the exchanges. You invest money now expecting a future return. You help a friend move now expecting that she’ll help you move when your lease is up. Needs don’t always arise in tandem, which means that if people were only willing to act in a trustworthy manner when that trust was simultaneously repaid, nothing much would get done that required mutual support. Consequently, someone has to be willing to take the risk to be the first to invest money, time, or other resources, hoping that the partner will then keep up her end of the deal at a future point. As my friend and collaborator the economist Robert Frank often puts it, solving this commitment problem is one of the central dilemmas of human life. If no one were willing to trust and subsequently honor commitments, human society, as we know it, would cease to exist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrank’s focus on the challenges posed by delayed interactions is an important one for understanding how trust works. It clearly shows why complete transparency is often impractical. Without delayed reciprocity—the process by which we reap rewards after initially extending ourselves to help others—cooperation would be hamstrung. We’d only help those who could help us back in the here and now—a situation that wouldn’t be very efficient. Every time you needed help you’d have to find someone else who was also in need, to ensure that the mutual problems would be solved simultaneously. As a result, the age-old question of whether you could count on a person when you needed him would go right out the window.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt’s precisely because of such substantial, and sometimes impossible, constraints that trust becomes necessary. Without it, productive cooperation would be hard to come by. So, we trust at times; we really don’t have much of a choice. But once we leave the world of verifiability, we inevitably come across more selfish behavior and at the same time face greater difficulty in predicting who will show it. It’s not the case that honesty and loyalty will forever disappear without transparency. As we’ll see, a dynamic equilibrium between trustworthy and untrustworthy behavior will eventually result. Where that equilibrium settles, though, is flexible, and being able to predict it is what much of this book is about.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Fundamentals: What’s a Prisoner to Do?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhether you’re a head of state, CEO, or kid on the playground, situations involving trust share a common structure. Ultimately, your outcomes are intertwined with those of your partner, with success or failure often depending on each person’s best guess as to what the other will do. Although it’s surely true that the gravity of the objective consequences will vary, the fundamental nature—the underlying mathematics of the situation, if you will—remain the same. Different combinations of trustworthy and\/or untrustworthy behavior can lead to different magnitudes of gains or losses in metrics ranging from quantities of nuclear arms to hours of detention at school.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eConsider the following situation. Jack and Kate get sent to the principal’s office for trying to steal their teacher’s answer key. Although Jack and Kate did plot the theft, the evidence—though sufficient to get them in trouble—is still a bit murky with respect to who exactly did what. To get a better picture of culpability, the principal separates them and presents the same deal to each. Let’s start with Jack. If he is willing to incriminate Kate by squealing while Kate continues to remain silent, he’ll get a lighter detention sentence (one day) than will Kate (four days). If they both remain silent, the ability to decisively convict one or the other will be lessened; consequently, they’ll both serve a moderate detention (two days). However, if both Jack and Kate implicate the other (remember, Kate is being offered the same deal), they’ll each serve slightly less time than if only one is convicted (three days each), since they at least were willing to assist in the investigation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat should Jack do? Mathematically, the answer is pretty clear: he should rat on Kate. To see why, take a look at the table below. If Jack implicates Kate (i.e., defects on Kate) and Kate keeps quiet (i.e., cooperates with Jack), he gets one day of detention; he would receive two days if he, too, holds his tongue. Now, if Kate defects, it still makes sense for Jack to rat on her. In this case, Jack would get three days of detention, as opposed to four if he remained loyal to her. Defecting, then, makes perfect sense. It’s what game theorists call a dominant strategy—one that always leads to the best results for an individual irrespective of what the other person does.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere’s one last aspect to consider, though. Kate is mulling over the same deal at the same time, and Jack knows it. This simple fact alters the whole picture. Although the strategy of defecting is the best one to follow from each individual’s perspective, as it maximizes gain regardless of what one’s partner decides, it doesn’t always lead to the best outcome when fates are\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Plume","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48338553635045,"sku":"NP9780142181669","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780142181669.jpg?v=1769572662","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-truth-about-trust-isbn-9780142181669","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}