“Who To Trust?” That’s the title of chapter 6 of
Not Born Yesterday, and this has a very Robert Triver’s vibe (e.g., his book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life). With the subtitle “The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe,” I kind of wonder why this chapter exists, since much of the material is implicit across the earlier chapters.
Basically, we trust those who have an incentive to be truthful. We trust people with expertise. We trust people who are confident…but once someone is wrong, we trust those who were more provisional and less confident. Humans have a host of heuristics and cues to figure out who is less likely to lie.
Not surprisingly, the chapter throws cold water on the idea that scientists have a good analytic understanding of cues so that liars and cheats can be easily detected. None of the metrics and expressions seem to have passed peer review. Rather, the problem with lying is that it takes effort and deception is hard to maintain in terms of coherency and consistency. Liars trip up because it’s hard work, they don’t exhibit subtle physical clues (well, they might, but not well enough to turn it into a consistently applied system of detection).
A key concept in the book is vigilence. The gullible dodos are exceptions, not the rule. I do wonder about social differences due to cultural conditions, implied and hinted at in this chapter. People in WEIRD and high-trust societies are presumably less vigilant. A friend told me years ago Mormons made bad politicians in Congress because their peers always lied to their faces, and they simply never expected it. Mormon culture is high-trust, and lying in a brazen manner is not socially acceptable, so these individuals were not vigilant for it.