Liars and Outliers Bruce Schneier: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive

Chapter 4

A Social History of Trust

Trust is rare on this planet. Here's primatologist Robert Sapolsky:

When baboons hunt together they'd love to get as much meat as possible, but they're not very good at it. The baboon is a much more successful hunter when he hunts by himself than when he hunts in a group because they screw up every time they're in a group. Say three of them are running as fast as possible after a gazelle, and they're gaining on it, and they're deadly. But something goes on in one of their minds—I'm anthropomorphizing here—and he says to himself, “What am I doing here? I have no idea whatsoever, but I'm running as fast as possible, and this guy is running as fast as possible right behind me, and we had one hell of a fight about three months ago. I don't quite know why we're running so fast right now, but I'd better just stop and slash him in the face before he gets me.” The baboon suddenly stops and turns around, and they go rolling over each other like Keystone cops and the gazelle is long gone because the baboons just became disinhibited. They get crazed around each other at every juncture.

We're not like that. Not only do we cooperate with people we know, we cooperate with people we've never even met. We treat strangers fairly, altruistically sometimes. We put group interest ahead of our own selfishness. More importantly, we control other people's selfish behaviors.

We do this through a combination of our own prosocial impulses and the societal pressures that ...