Trust

1. Trust • As a key element in the social order • Driving down the street • As a key element in the cognitive order

2. Trust dependency of the social order • Relying on one another • Goffman our dealings with one another have a “promissory character” • Giddens – modernity as shift from familiarity as basis for trust to impersonal systems, reliable systems of expertise (e.g., airplane, medicine) • Credentialing • Sanctions, enforcement mechanisms • Mixed • Access points to expert systems: do you trust the institution of medicine or your doctor?

3. Kinds of Trust • Common distinction: • Cognitive approaches • risk assessment, judgments of a person’s or institution’s competence and reliability; • reliance, on one’s disposition to act based on trust in another. • Emotional approached focus on trust as a feeling rather than a cognitive assessment. • Another way to distinguish among notions of trust is to look at types of interpersonal exchanges or cooperation. • division of labor, contracts, and exchanges. • sociability: the role of trust in the social order, civic engagement, and the relationship of trust to citizenship, cooperation, reciprocity, and morality • epistemological trust

4. Shapin, “A Social History of Truth”: Trust dependency of the cognitive order • “This book draws attention to some moral aspects of the collective nature of knowledge.” Different members of community hold knowledge one may need to draw upon > moral bonds between them.“The word I propose to use to express this moral bond is trust.’” p. 7 • His task: to demonstrate • The ineradicable role of what others tell us • how reliance upon testimony achieves invisibility

5. Epistemological trust • Expertise: experts are knowledgeable • Cognitive authority: those whom we would ask for advice. • Astrology: we might grant that a person is an expert astrologer, but not follow her advice. • Accepting others’ testimony is, among other things, a strategy of cognitive efficiency. • Trust avoids the costs of developing or verifying knowledge claims on our own. • P. Wilson points only that only a few knowledge claims are of sufficient importance for us to engage in detailed examination. We generally don’t actually evaluate many claims; we wait until we need to decide whom or what to believe, and then weigh the costs of evaluating claims against the penalties of believing wrongly.

6. How do we decide? • How we decide on criteria for trustability? • How we decide whom to trust?

7. Epistemic communities • Shared beliefs: What “everyone knows” • Practices: “How things should be done” • Indicators • E.g., education, institutional affiliation… • Assessment by trusted others • Infinite regression?

8. CONSUMER WEBWATCH GUIDELINES http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/bestpractices/index.html

9. 1 Identity • Web sites should clearly disclose the physical location where they are produced, including an address, a telephone number or email address. • Sites should clearly disclose their ownership, private or public, naming their parent company. • Sites should clearly disclose their purpose and mission.

10. 2 Advertising and Sponsorships: • Sites should clearly distinguish advertising from news and information, using labels or other visual means. This includes "inhouse" advertising or crosscorporate ad sponsorships. Search engines, shopping tools and portals should clearly disclose paid resultplacement advertising, so consumers may distinguish between objective search results and paid ads. • Sites should clearly disclose relevant business relationships, including sponsored links to other sites. For example: A site that directs a reader to another site to buy a book should clearly disclose any financial relationship between the two sites. • Sites should identify sponsors. The site's sponsorship policies should be clearly noted in accompanying text or on an "About Us" or "Site Center" page.

11. 3 Customer Service: • Sites engaged in consumer transactions should clearly disclose relevant financial relationships with other sites, particularly when these relationships affect the cost to a consumer. • Sites should clearly disclose all fees charged, including service, transaction and handling fees, and shipping costs. This information should be disclosed before the ordering process begins. • Sites should clearly state and enforce policies for returning unwanted items or canceling transactions or reservations.

12. 4 Corrections: • Sites should diligently seek to correct false, misleading or incorrect information. • Sites should prominently display a page or section of the site where incorrect information is corrected or clarified. • Sites should strive to mark content with its published date when failing to do so could mislead consumers. • Sites should clearly state their policy on a consumer's rights if a purchase is made based on incorrect information on the site.

13. 5 Privacy: • Site privacy policies should be easy to find and clearly, simply stated. • Sites should clearly disclose how personal data from site visitors and customers will be used. Personal data includes name, address, phone number and credit card number. • Sites should disclose whether they use browsertracking mechanisms such as "cookies," and other technologies such as Web beacons, bugs and robots. • Sites should explain how data collected from them will be used. • Sites should notify customers of changes to privacy policies, and provide an easy optout alternative.

14. Reasons why one site more credible than another http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/news/report3_credibilityresearch/stanfordPTL_abstract.htm Design Look 46.1% Information Design/Structure 28.5 Information Focus 25.1 Company Motive 15.5 Information Usefulness 14.8 Information Accuracy 14.3 Name Recognition and Reputation 14.1 Advertising 13.8 Information Bias 11.6 Writing Tone 9.0 Identity of Site Operator 8.8 Site Functionality 8.6 Customer Service 6.4 Past Experience with Site 4.6 Information Clarity 3.7 Performance on Test by User 3.6 Readability 3.6 Affiliations 3.4

15. Key findings • when people assessed a real Web site's credibility they did not use rigorous criteria • people claimed that certain elements were vital to a Web site's credibility (e.g., having a privacy policy). But people rarely used these rigorous criteria (e.g., they almost never referred to a site's privacy policy.)

16. Key Findings II • the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. • 46.1% assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes. • This occurred more often with some categories of sites then others. • finance (54.6%), search engines (52.6%), travel (50.5%), and ecommerce sites (46.2%), health (41.8%), news (39.6%), and nonprofit (39.4%) sites. • In comparison, a parallel study revealed that health and finance experts were far less concerned about the surface aspects of these industryspecific types of sites and more concerned about the breadth, depth, and quality of a site's information.

17. Topics Not Found • Small numbers of consumers registered credibility assessment comments that related to Consumer WebWatch's five general guidelines for improving credibility on the Web: • 8.8% referred to the identity of the site or its operator. • 6.4% made comments about a site's customer service or related policies • 2.3% referred to a site's sponsorships • people mentioned privacy policies in less than 1% of their comments. • We found no comments about correcting false or misleading information of Web sites in this study.

18. Summary Participants seemed to make their credibilitybased decisions about the people or organization behind the site based upon the site's overall visual appeal. Argh!