A sociologist’s guide to trust and design

This post first appeared on Ethnography Matters



Designing for trustworthiness



Reputation: implicit and explicit

Knowing who to trust can be helped along by reputation cues – something that has become increasingly popular as a way to gauge competence on the Web today. There are two ways to build for reputation: implicit mechanisms, where we expose different variables relating to a person’s contribution, for example “number of edits” versus explicit mechanisms where we ask others to rate people based on their experience working with them.

Implicit reputation design is challenging, says Cheshire.

“It means that we’re guessing “likely associates” of particular behaviors or outcomes. For example, in online Q/A forums, we know that showing one’s tenure on the site (“member for 5 years”) and/or number of contributions (“4353 posts”) can imply lots of things. But out of context this could be (either) a 5-year spammer or a 5-year expert who is fairly active.

Explicit reputation systems are often seen as a solution to this challenge since it means that real people are filling in missing context by giving an up/down rating on the person or content. But, this in turn creates a collective action challenge since you need people to take the time and effort to do the ratings – which is why we often want to find a way to use the earlier ‘implicit’ information in the first place!”




Designing for interpersonal trust


  1. Repeated interactions between parties over time
  2. Acts of risk-taking
  3. The presence of uncertainty


Betrayal (when someone says they will do something and then doesn’t follow through) is something often attributed to systems. But again, these are actually issues of credibility, reliability and security because the systems do not betray us, but people who build, maintain, and support them might, says Cheshire. When designing crowdsourced platforms like Ushahidi or Wikipedia, this becomes a really important to distinguish. We need to design the system to be secure and to enable participants to make good decisions about who to trust, but we can’t magically ensure that people will trust one another through that system.

Cross-cultural differences in trust and trusting

Cheshire also found that cross-cultural differences matter when it comes to trust. Looking at the same trust game in the US and Japan, they found that players could choose how much to entrust to their partner, as well as whether to return anything entrusted to them. Individuals were partnered with either the same fixed-partner or a new, random partner on every trial. They found that Americans took more risks and trusted their partners more than did the Japanese– even in the random-partner exchanges. They also found that the opportunity to choose the level of riskinvolved in trusting another helped improve the level of mutual cooperation for both American and Japanese participants.

In new research just completed in Romania and the US, Cheshire found that regional/societal differences do exist and can be rather large but that the experience of building trust can essentially erase the effect of region or disposition to trust. Developing systems that enable trust to be built among people is really essential to his work. In the end, Cheshire is driven by the need to understand how trust can be repaired.


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