With the web comes an onslaught of data. No one believes everything they read on the web, but how do you figure out who to trust? It wasn’t that hard to figure out who or what to trust when information flowed a lot slower in the off-line world. You could trust your textbooks, you could trust your mother, and you could trust the local newspaper. It just seemed natural on who or what you could trust or not trust before the internet. Now with all this real-time data, we need to be more deliberate in figuring out who and what we can trust online.
Kieron O’Hara in his book, Trust: ..From Socrates to Spin, offers a simple model that defines different types of information sources in terms of trust. This trust quadrant is a great guideline for identifying types of information sources, what type of information you can trust with your “trusted sources”, and affirm why you should trust some information sources and not others. This model is relevant for real world and the online world.
Characteristics of Trust
Trust can be characterized in a quadrant using two axes, global and local, and horizontal and vertical. Any “trusted” information source can be found in one of the four areas of the quadrant. With the web becoming more and more real-time, it becomes critical to know who to trust and even why you trust them. This “trust quadrant” can help.
Trust on the Local and Global Axis. This trust characteristic is defined as the closeness of the relationship that you have with the information source. A local trust is defined as trust that is based on personal acquaintance. At the other end of the spectrum is global trust. This is a trust by association or “proxy”. In this case, you may not know the source of the information, but someone or some institution has vouched for the person or organization. This is a global trust.
Trust on the Vertical and Horizontal Axis. An horizontal trust is a trust between equals. On the other end of the spectrum is a vertical trust. A vertical trust is granted within an established hierarchy. A horizontal trust is not really enforceable if the trust is broken or strained. A vertical trust is enforceable and accountable as the source of the information is within an established hierarchy or organization.
Examples of Types of Trusts Within the Trust Quadrant
A Local-Vertical Trusted Source. An example of a local-vertical trusted source would be a family friend that works as a bank manager. This person would be easy to trust as a source of information on financial matters and trends.
A Global-Vertical Trusted Source. An example of a global-vertical trusted source would be a published professor associated with an university. An university professor would be easy to trust and reference as a source of information in his or her field of study. A good thing about referencing a global-vertical trusted source is that if the information is later found incorrect, your “bad” reference does not necessarily reflect back on you and your reputation. With the backing of an authoritative source (the university), a professor is identified by the university as a trustworthy source of information.
A Local-Horizontal Trusted Source. An example of a local-horizontal trusted source would be a friend on Facebook, a follower on Twitter, or a family friend that works at the local grocery store. This person should be easy to trust as a source of information on certain topics. At the same time they can, on occasion, pass on bad information or set an erroneous expectation. A local-horizontal source is not necessarily reliable or right all the time. Just because you know someone at the grocery store does not mean you will get the best service at the grocery store everytime. If a local-horizontal trusted source continue to give you bad information or erroneous expectations, you can easily stop trusting them and break your link with them.
A Global-Horizontal Trusted Source. An example of a global-horizontal trusted source could be a business that an audit firm has audited. As long as the audit firm maintains a good reputation, then the audited business can be trusted to a degree. If you loose your trust in the auditing firm, then you would probably also lose your trust in the audited business.
In the real world we all use this quadrant of trust to identify who we trust as an information source. This is common sense and we are almost unaware of why we trust a source of information. On the internet we need to be more deliberate with who we trust. There is an information glut online and it is flowing increasingly and increasingly at a real-time pace. We must deliberately identify who we trust as a source of information in order to make good decisions, avoid disappointment, and avoid from being scanned. See article by Geoffrey W. Bilder, In Google We Trust?, for more on who and why to trust online.
