The age of data - the death of trust?

Swiss Re Institute, IBM Research and Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute are teaming for a series of technology-focused virtual events. The second just took place, with experts discussing a world increasingly governed by numbers – and how quantification impacts trust.

The first event in the series looked into the limits of data anonymization and featured Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Assistant Professor at the Imperial College London as well as Jeffrey Bohn, Swiss Re Institute's Chief Research & Innovation Officer. Visit here for an article, reporting back from the event, and here for the recording.

Part two in the series took place once more both virtually, and at the new Swiss Re Institute's studio – and moderated again by Florian Inhauser (who keeps reminding me just how much of a difference it makes when you have a moderator who's on top of things, prepared, alert, entirely professional and at the same time entirely human. Always a pleasure. This time around we had with us Steffen Mau, Professor of Macrosociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and Jakub Samochowiec, Senior Researcher at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. These days, data collection is pervasive. Seemingly every move we make is recorded is some shape or form. Our phones, our watches, our cars – everything's connected and collecting data 24/7. What follows, of course, is curation. Data has value and once it's refined, that value can be realized in a myriad of ways from good to bad and every shade in between. Whether the collectors are governments or retailers or insurers – all of that data collection and curation has an impact on society – and at the very core of it, it impacts trust.

Professor Mau began with one of the more unsettling examples of data use we currently hear a lot about – the Chinese government's Social Credit System. By collecting data from everyone everywhere, the government aims to create a system that then continuously tracks and measures people's trustworthiness – something that then generates an individual's social score. Your personal score is set to impact your life, set to impact your everyday behavior, because the realities will be clear and simple – with a good score, you benefit, with a bad score, you're left out. The professor said that, while the Social Credit System is a sinister example, it illustrates the trend towards quantification. The professor shared examples of quantification around the world (among them what he calls "self-quantification" – when we measure ourselves with devices like FitBit).

"If you have a number for a phenomenon, for a person, for a specific characteristic, you can easily distinguish between more or less, or between better or worse."

Numbers, Professor Mau says, create orders of worth. Now where's the connection between quantification and trust? Trust facilitates cooperation, allows us to take risks and reduces complexity … however, as he said in his talk, trust is also a "weak form of knowledge", something that's somewhere in between knowing and not knowing.

He then posited three theses: 1) that quantification produces trust (which is the idea of the China model – by forcing people to change behavior, society will move from a place of little trust, to one where there is complete trust thanks to the system in place); 2) that quantification actually removes trust from the equation, that, in a quantified world, trust is no longer necessary; 3) that quantification undermines trust. He shared examples for each – and I won't spoil them here – just follow the link to the recording (starting at min 15:00) … so, which is it? Professor Mau put it this way:

"Whatever can be measured, will be measured. The process of quantification does not need trust – because trust is the absence of control, and quantification is always related to control."

Jakub Samochowiec brought a different spin to the conversation – he argued (and illustrated with several studies) that we consistently underestimate the trustworthiness of others. He began by saying that quantification can improve trust and that it can also undermine it. He suggested that by the very act of controlling it is implied that control is needed. He shared results from different studies and those were both thought-provoking and cautionary. For example: When people requesting financial support from the government are scrutinized in detail before being deemed eligible, the study shows that those people will become less trusting. They then assume that people can't be trusted if all of that controlling is necessary … and they then begin to trust less, as well.

On the positive side Samochowiec showed how much more we actually could trust each other. Relaying the insights from a global study of "losing wallets all over the world" – researchers discovered that there are clear differences as to where people contact owners of lost wallets to return them – according to the study, the best place to lose (and have it returned) a wallet is in Switzerland, the worst in China. With regard to China and its aforementioned Social Credit System, Samochowiec suggested that because of cultural differences such a controlling system may not be nearly as much of a concern for Chinese people as it would be for Swiss people.

He referenced another Swiss study that showed how we consistently expect less when it comes to trust, and how we could consistently receive more. There was even a local study focused on COVID-19. People were asked how much trust they put into Swiss citizens to responsibly handle expected measures. Initially, there was little trust – but just after two weeks, trust levels were much higher. Here's the key element – it is, unsurprisingly, experience. When people saw how others around them acted responsibly, they began trusting more. Another study saw the same happening with "home office" working – something that was still often mistrusted pre-pandemic times. But with the new norm forced on everyone, mistrust was soon dispersed as people continued to deliver on their priorities even while working from home. In closing, Samochowiec suggested that we have to be wary of introducing new control measures into societies with high trust levels and strong social capital.

"Introducing such control measures could actually undermine the trust we have."

What followed was a in-depth Q&A, many more insights and I'll leave it to you to watch it here. Overall, the conversation left me, unfortunately, with the notion that trust is on its way out of the picture. It's great to see that, as human beings, we have a tremendous trust capacity and make use of it a great deal. On the other side, data collecting and refining will continue to dramatically grow – and more and more of it will be used to improve, to measure and to control. In that sense – I see Steffen Mau's 2nd thesis as our future wherever in the world technology is pervasive (and that's increasingly everywhere) – and that is that data will replace trust. This century will see trust relegated to a quaint notion between individuals, partners, friends, family ... beyond that, trust will be a thing of the past.