Today’s Listen is one of the most interesting podcasts we’ve tuned in to recently—and we’re not just saying that because it isn’t about social media strategy for once. It also helps that the guest on this episode of the Harvard Business Review is a brilliant Brit.
Rachel Botsman, author of Who Can You Trust, talks about how trust works in relation to robots, companies, or other people, and how technology speeds up the formation of trust.
“But when it comes to making those decisions, we shouldn’t leave our devices to their own devices.” (Harvard Business Review’s got jokes.)
There are so many good points in here, starting around 01:45:
- (02:35) The lopsided trade-off that occurs when we give our trust to devices
- (03:12) Rachel’s pseudo-experiment between Amazon’s Alexa and her 3 year-old daughter
- (4:20) Why so many of these assistants are given female voices
- (5:05) MIT study about driverless cars and gender roles, and what happened when a driverless car was given a male voice
- (05:15) Why technology is accelerating the formation of trust
- (06:10) Efficiency as the “enemy of trust”
- (06:55) The 4 traits that make someone trustworthy (Competence, reliability, integrity, and benevolence)
- (08:08) How technology helps or hinders this kind of trust development
- (08:10) “Is technology making smarter decisions about who to trust, or is it encouraging us to place our trust in the wrong people in the wrong places?” (Rachel thinks it’s a bit of both)
- (09:48) Trust signals and why it’s so easy to tune into the wrong ones
- (11:05) Rachel’s wild story about her childhood nanny… Wild, we say!
- (11:15) Why it’s so vital for babysitting platforms like UrbanSitter to use machine learning for trust development
- (12:25) Why “How do we rebuild trust?” and “How do we gain more trust?” are terrible questions to ask
- (14:18) How companies trying to become more trustworthy also put themselves at greater risk
- (14:25) The “trust hierarchy of needs”
- (15:00) Why transparency and trust are not synonymous
- (15:35) Why transparency should not be the goal of your organization
