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more than 80 per cent of all goods bought and sold online in China are through Alibaba’s various online marketplaces.
‘Trust is confidence in one’s expectations.’
Trust is the remarkable force that pulls you over that gap between certainty and uncertainty; as the Nike tagline says, ‘Just do it’. It is literally the bridge between the known and the unknown. And that’s why my definition of it is simple: Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown.
the bigger the trust problem, the greater the business opportunity.
there were enormous advantages to developing the solution to an obstacle that stood in the way of a market, rather than waiting for others to solve the problem.
‘It is so important for China and the world to be able to trust the system,’ says Ma.
Today, more than 400 million people use Alipay to pay for goods.22 It is estimated to be worth more than $50 billion as a standalone business.23 In 2015, approximately 70 per cent of all online payments in China – whether it was for goods, rent, utilities, phone charges or tuition fees – went through Alipay.
On average, certified TrustPass sellers were receiving up to six times more genuine enquiries than non-registered sellers.
If people believe they are being observed and judged, it makes them behave better, even if they are not actually being watched all the time.
one trust-busting incident can create a generational scar against an institution or system that takes decades to heal.
we’re talking 2.6 terabytes, and it included 4.8 million emails, 2.1 million PDFs, 3 million database files, 1 million images, as well as other confidential contracts, letters, bank records and property titles.
‘A journalist’s biggest weakness, whether they like it or not, is their ego.
29 of the billionaires featured in Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s 500 richest people, 12 serving or former world leaders and 140 politicians were named in the Panama Papers.
When the survey first started, 75 per cent of Americans said they had ‘a great deal or a fair amount of’ trust and confidence in the federal government in Washington in handling international problems, and 70 per cent had confidence in the government for handling domestic problems. Those figures are now at 49 per cent and 44 respectively.21
So why is trust in so many elite institutions collapsing at the same time? There are three key, somewhat overlapping, reasons: inequality of accountability (certain people are being punished for wrongdoing while others get a leave pass); twilight of elites and authority (the digital age is flattening hierarchies and eroding faith in experts and the rich and powerful); and segregated echo chambers (living in our cultural ghettoes and being deaf to other voices).
independent survey to find out how financial insiders view other professionals within their industry. More than half of respondents believed that their competitors engaged in illegal or unethical behaviour.
2015 that over 11 million Volkswagen vehicles were knowingly programmed with software, so-called ‘defeat devices’,
On 29 June 2016, Facebook made an announcement about changes it was making to its personal news-feed algorithm. ‘We are updating News Feed over the coming weeks so that the things posted by the friends you care about are higher up in your News Feed,’
The algorithm tweak means we are limiting our exposure to opposing perspectives, whether it’s on a presidential race, climate change, safety of vaccinations or ISIS.
For the most part, we see ideas and news we are likely to agree with.
‘And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we accept only information, whether true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that’s out there.’
His claim to ‘tell it like it is’ represented an intoxicating form of transparency for many people.
Trump embodies ‘truthiness’: ideas which ‘feel right’ to many people.
‘Since people cannot bring themselves to disbelieve in the central premise of the American dream, they focus their ire and scepticism instead on the broken institutions it has formed.’45 Trump’s rise was a product of suffering.
Senator Clinton’s vote for the Iraq War; her handling of the Benghazi attack; a murky web of connections to the Foundation; her use of a private email server (and its mysterious destruction); and the revelation that on several occasions she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to give speeches to the same Wall Street bankers she promised to regulate
‘post-truth’ world, a term named as the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016. ‘Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’
November 2016, he used his skills and editing privileges to tamper secretly with Reddit users’ comments in the pro-Trump subreddit
Secretly editing another user’s threads was, by Reddit standards, a gross ethical violation of power,
The turning point came when he recognized a now-obvious problem – users were frequently cancelling reservations without being penalized.
‘Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come,’
‘The lesson of the California Roll is simple – people don’t want something truly new, they want the familiar done differently.’
The California Roll principle is based on the underlying rule of combining something new with something familiar to make it ‘strangely familiar’. It’s a phenomenon that psychologists like Robert B. Zajonc have labelled the ‘mere-exposure effect’ or the ‘Law of Familiarity’.
The same thing happens with new inventions and new experiences we just don’t get. We move on.
for us to trust a new idea, we need bridges that are easy to find and to cross.
Investors will run through ‘what if’ scenarios when assessing a deal. Specifically, ‘What’s the worst that can happen when using this product or service?’
‘One of the ways people get the concept is by relating to something they understand,’ Antin told me. ‘What we observe when new guests come to the site is that they don’t typically go to the educational materials. Either they don’t see them or they simply don’t resonate. Instead, they go straight to the search box and they search for places in their hometown because it’s a place they know, right?’
‘They look at the map of results and the guest’s reaction is, “Oh, oh, I see. This is somebody whose house is just near mine, over there by the river, and you could stay there if you wanted to. Now I get it,” ’ explains Antin. ‘That’s the “ah-huh” moment.’
In other words, we trust what we know but we can also trust what we think we know: ideas that are in fact quite new but appear strangely familiar.
Human error and inconsistent driving cause more than 90 per cent of crashes, which kill more than 1.2 million people annually, according to the World Health Organization.31 It is estimated that driverless cars could, by mid-century, reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 per cent.
this was the first known autopilot death in roughly 130 million miles driven by Tesla customers.
So what would persuade ordinary people to trust an unknown digital start-up to transfer their money? The answer: seeing unexpected users putting their faith in this new way of doing things. People who make us think, ‘Hey, maybe this idea isn’t so risky after all.’
the researchers put a single person on a street corner and had him look at the empty sky for sixty seconds. Only a fraction of passers-by stopped to see what the person was looking at.
‘When I buy or use this brand, I am …’ Coca-Cola wasn’t manufacturing sugary drinks; its product was about making you feel ‘refreshed’. Disney wasn’t making movies; it was celebrating dreams. Nike, named after the winged goddess of victory, didn’t sell trainers; it made you feel inspired.
Platforms create systems that act as social facilitators.
With Airbnb, you need to have confidence in the platform itself and in the connections between hosts and guests. In other words, trust must exist in the platform and between people in the community.
In 1865, the British government passed a law called the ‘Locomotive Act’, which was a safety precaution to warn pedestrians and horse-drawn traffic of the terrifying approach of a motor vehicle. It stated that any locomotive or automobile must have a crew of three people: the driver, a stoker and a man whose job it was to walk at least fifty-five metres ahead of the vehicle, waving a red flag.
59 per cent of links shared on Twitter have never actually been clicked.
For one week in 2012, the researchers tweaked the algorithm to manipulate the emotional content appearing in the news feeds of 689,003 randomly selected, unwitting users.
‘At any given time, any given Facebook user will be part of ten experiments the company happens to be conducting,’
62 per cent of the people were unaware the company tinkered with the news feed.51 So of the 1.72 billion people on Facebook, 1 billion think the system instantly shares whatever they or their friends post.
