8 Scientific Reason Why People Are The Worst
1. You're An Untrusting Cynic
If you're smart, you'll trust people as far as you could spit them, that's the received wisdom, right? Turns out that us humans are a pretty cynical lot and we tend to massively underestimate the trustworthiness of others.
In a study published in Psychological Science participants were asked to rate the trustworthiness of strangers. 120 participants were given 7.50 and asked if theyd like to hand it to another person. If the other person made the same decision the pot would increase to 30 - so they would each get 15 in total, but so would a person who didn't hand over their winnings, you would have to just trust that they did. They found that people only trusted the strangers 52% of the time, whereas 80% of them were actually trustworthy. This is due to an asymmetry in the feedback we usually get about the trustworthiness of others.
In the real world, we generally only find out whether we can trust someone after we choose to do so and we never really find out if were were wrong not to trust someone. If, for the sake of demonstration, we trust 50% of people, but are let down by 50% of those people, that brings the total amount of untrustworthy people up to 75% in our minds because the 50% we chose not to trust were implicitly untrustworthy, even if that was not really the case.
This constant confirmation bias that basically everyone is a bunch of bastards only serves to make matters worse. In the study, it was found that this cynicism fell away when the participants found out whether they were right or wrong when they didn't trust someone as well as when they did, and their trust rates went up to about 71%.
Basically, people aren't as bad as you think they are, except for in all the ways outlined in this article.
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