The Origin of Trust and Its Impact on Technology

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by Steve Abrams


The essential feature underlying all psyops and perception management
operations is trust. Gaining a victim's confidence, establishing
credibility with the victim, or even creating an environment conducive
to the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the victim are all
forms of developing a trust relationship between the victim (defensive
actor) and perpetrator (offensive actor). Developing a trust
relationship is also the first step in various techniques of hacking,
phreaking, and social engineering in which the defensive actors are
computers, telephone switches, and people, respectively.

Why do we trust so readily? For that matter, what is trust? What are
its biological or evolutionary origins? How does it impact our
technology?

At first glance, trust seems to be a social construction in that it
involves two or more self-aware individuals. Solitary individuals have
no need of trust, though they may need the same pattern recognition
skills necessary to develop a sense of trust. For example, they may
learn to trust certain aspects of Nature, such as the Sun rising in the
east, because the pattern repeats itself consistently, but the trust is
in one direction only, without reciprocity.

"Trust is earned" is a familiar theme in our culture that suggests a
certain experiential aspect to the nature of trust. Trust seems
conceptually conflated with cooperation, another social construct of two
or more individuals. After all, where is the incentive for cooperation
between parties when there is no trust (that both parties will benefit
from the cooperation) between parties?

Trust in a human context, then, might be considered to be a faith in the
consistency of a pattern of observed beneficial results from
cooperation. But how could such cooperation develop in the first place,
given that natural selection is a rather selfish process (i.e...