Stranger danger has been poisoning generations of kids. They are taught to distrust pretty much everyone who isn’t their mom or dad. If they’re ever lost, they are told not to ask the nearest person for help (God forbid!), but to hunt for a mother with children, or perhaps a police officer. I guess a pregnant police officer would be the jackpot.
But now comes an admittedly tiny study suggesting that people who trust people are the luckiest, or at least the most discerning, people in the world. (Try singing THAT, Barbra). Rather than getting duped again and again, they seem more able to figure out when they’re really being lied to, and give everyone else — the vast majority of folks — the trust they deserve.
As the PsyBlog reports:
We intuitively believe that being cynical is an advantage in detecting lies. Or so Nancy Carter and J. Mark Weber found when they asked a group of MBA students whether people high or low in trust would be better at detecting lies in others (Carter & Weber, 2010).
The results were as we’d expect: 85% thought low trusters are better than high trusters at lie detection.
But Carter and Weber weren’t completely convinced that cynics area the winners when it comes to seeing the truth.
…so they measured how trusting 29 participants were and had them watch videos of a staged job interview.
In these videos, interviewees had been told to do their best to get the job, but half were told to tell three lies in the process.
These videos were then shown to participants who rated the honesty of the interviewees, along with how likely they would be to hire them.
Surprisingly, it was those highest in trusting others that emerged as the superstar lie detectors. High trusters were more sensitive to deceit and more accurate at detecting which of the interviewees were lying.
Now imagine we start raising kids to never trust their gut — always assume the worst. Why, you’d get people afraid to open the door. Cops being called when a stranger hands kids a cake from his car. The media reporting suspicious “incidents” (complete with maps) when nothing actually happened, or warning parents about men in vans when the men (and the vans) were not doing anything wrong.
In other words, you’d get a society that it would over-react to almost anything and anyone.
Hmm.
Bottom line? Teaching kids that the world is mostly a good place, with mostly good people will help them more than teaching them the opposite. Giving others the benefit of the doubt is a smart, safe way to live. -L
…
When you assume everyone is lying, you can\’t tell when someone is being truthful. No surprise there!
Trusting your gut is a good thing as long as it was tuned right. Crying danger over everything will mess up your gut feeling and it will cry danger all the time. But if you don’t do that it should be able to pipe up when the time is right.
Exactly. When you hear of people who correctly detected that a so-called “trusted” person or “pillar of the community” was sexually abusing children, the person always says “I trusted by gut” and will then receive a barrage of kudos from the media along with suggestions to everybody to just “trust your gut” when it comes to detecting child sexual abuse. The problem with that is they don’t consider the other 10 people who may have “trusted their gut” and ended up falsely accusing an innocent person.
I’m sorry folks, before I turn in my good friend OR loved one for sexually abusing a child, I want to make damn sure he’s doing what I think he’s doing before I turn him in. Now if I’m absolutely sure he was abusing that child, I will definitely turn him in. Otherwise, I’ve got to see concrete evidence or I will risk ruining his life for nothing and shattering our lifetime friendship as well as turning the kid’s life upside down too. It’s not as easy as the “experts” make it sound.
MY gut….
Then again, if it takes over hundred victims till someone contact police or at least removes that person, then maybe someone should have been quicker in reporting and taking accus at ions seriously.
The ignored signs were not “gut” either.
I think that trusting “gut” is nonsense anyway. The gut is first signal and then one should work of figuring out where gut comes from, attempt to verbalise it and follow reasoning to logical conclusion.
Exactly, but for some people, the gut is the first AND the last signal or specifically speaking, it’s the ONLY signal for some people. Not good!
Actually this study doesn’t surprise me. There are people who are skeptical of EVERYBODY and trust no one. Statistically speaking, most people CAN be trusted so the person who is chronically skeptic will be wrong most of the time. But the “naïve” people who believe that most people can be trusted will be spot-on when they finally do meet someone whom they can easily see cannot be trusted.
Right on!
Love to see more studies on this.
The logic seems reasonable, but I still wonder about naive people actually being able to perceive lies better. Perhaps it is just the extremely naive people, whereas the ones who are not so naive as rather just willing to give most people the benefit of the doubt till proven otherwise?
Patrick, I think you are confusing “naive” and “trusting.” They are not synonyms. The study did not say that naive people were better at discerning, but those who are trusting… which, to me, means to give trust first until you have a reason not to trust, rather than the other way around. I have always been a trusting person, but I am far from naive.
Exactly! I have been called naive because i believe in trusting people until they give me a reason not to. But that doesn’t mean I trust everybody with my car, my house key, and my personal information. It means I don’t assume that they’re dishonest without a reason. And the reason doesn’t have to be overwhelming, it just has to be…. a reason.
But a person who needs no reason to distrust, will have no mechanism for sorting the trustworthy from the untrustworthy. Since you can’t actually go through life literally disbelieving everything everyone says, no matter how cynical you are, the result is simply an inability to sort it out.
It makes sense to me. Outside of specifically taking psychology courses, we learn about human behavior through the experience of human interaction. The less trusting we are, the less we are inclined to interact and we lose the experience gained from studying (even if unconsciously) human behavior. The younger a person is when they start interacting with diverse groups of people, they are gaining an advantage in understanding how people behave. This will equip them down the road to discern people’s intentions and make better choices about who to associate with.
I love this. But–sorry, this is a pretty big “but”–reporting a result based on a 29-person study is the same mistake that makes people think “I read about a kidnapping in Portugal so my kid is probably about to be kidnapped.” People seriously need to understand that small-number results are not predictive of anything.
But I would love to see a larger study, and I hope it would have the same result!
I think that the study is right. It practically means that a person, who used to trust everybody, had been disappointed so many times, that he/she just starts to be more cautious. Therefore, they learn how to detect lies more efficiently than others who are suspicious generally in the first place.
A lot of the observations here line up with what has been documented with “conspiracy theorists”. Something I personally have noticed is that these types often dismiss or completely overlook ordinary explanations that would be compatible with their overall point. A good example prev covered by FRK would be the panic a couple years back over “p@edophile” icons turning up on toys and pizza shops and such. Logically, if there was a well connected criminal element using the symbols, it would only make sense for their allies to use the same images for no purpose but diversion. It would have made even more sense to feed authorities a false and particularly sinister interpretation of the images to distract from actual usage in more routine criminal activities.
My gut says the study is correct.
So I am a very trusting person, and in the corporate culture I work in it’s affected me negatively a few times. BUT, when I encounter someone who is lying, I get a distinct feeling of unease. It’s easiest to explain it by saying it feels like a used car salesman is trying to sell me a lemon of a vehicle.
It’s happened with salespeople, of course, but also watching politicians, business owners, etc. I can tell something is off, even if I don’t understand what exactly it is.
I’ve since read a couple great books on detecting liars, and I understand that I’m keying off the subconscious cues people give off when they lie (like blink rate, or the amount of movement their bodies have, the words they choose).
And there is a difference between trusting and naive. Sort of like there’s a difference between being an introvert and being shy. Just because two things seem like they’re related doesn’t necessarily mean they are.
Some people call it “gut feeling”. I call it instincts. And instincts are honed. We all have natural instincts (eg. fight or flight). But even those need to be honed. Fine tuned to work properly. If our instincts are never trained, we go back to our natural base, which is fight or flight. No thought. No assessment. No logic. Just fight or flight. Most people end up choosing flight.
Now, if our instincts are trained to pick up on queues, we learn over time, how to spot danger almost instantly. It become second nature. And just as much, we learn to spot non-dangers, and so don’t react like we are in trouble all the time. Just like anything we want to be good at, we need to practice, practice, practice. The earlier the better. And children starting learning from the day they are born. They start comprehending as young as 1 year old.
What they learn, is what they will be as they get older. And the older they get, the harder and longer it takes to change them. What will you teach your kid(s)?
If you want to become skilled at something then you have to practice. If you want to remain unskilled then avoid practice.
Being able to identify BS requires that you trust people. Some of them are full of shit. Therefore you become skilled at identifying people that are full of it.
Personal experience and hours spent researching the history about scientific advances made in our town tells me this is true.
But I trust studies until peer-reviewing shows the original work had big flaws such as it was too limited in size or showed outright fraud as with Andrew Wakefield claiming vaccines cause autism using “science by press conference”.