Book review: The Truth About Trust, by David DeSteno

by David DeSteno
Hudson Street Press
3.5 stars
David Wilson

If you claim to be totally trustworthy you are probably bending the truth. Just ask American psychologist David DeSteno.

According to DeSteno, ethics are often "situationally determined" - he cites an experiment in which he gave participants a coin to flip, which would dictate whether they did a fun task or a tough one. Secretly screening the participants, DeSteno made a surprising discovery: 90 per cent cheated, leaving the coin on its favourable face or repeatedly flipping it until they got the answer they wanted and could unfairly assign themselves the preferable task.

Blame evolution, DeSteno writes. "Evolution didn't sculpt the mechanisms of our minds to make us saints; it did so to make us 'winners' in the sense of successful adaptation. That means our minds come equipped with a calculus to make our trustworthiness malleable to the conditions at hand."

His Machiavellian argument smacking of Darwin is anchored in research from fields including psychology, economics, biology, and robotics. Through his research, he builds a striking picture of the dynamics that have shaped the human mind's inclination to trust. Plus, he shows us how the trait affects us in areas ranging from business partnerships to romantic relationships and virtual interaction. Meantime, he takes some titillating glances at the antics of gamblers and swingers, who treat sex as a game.

The Truth About Trust is intriguing if slow to cut to the chase. But it fails to fulfil the blurb's claim that DeSteno "unlocks, for the first time, the cues that allow us to read the trustworthiness of others accurately".