Trust in the Federal Government Makes People Less Likely to Help One Another, Study Finds

On Trust Infrastructure Trust underpins civilisation. It expands the scope and complexity of the pursuits within our collective reach by allowing us to act as a…

Tiny Publics: Small Groups and Civil Society

It has been conventional to conceptualize civic life through one of two core images: the citizen as lone individualist or the citizen as joiner. Drawing on analyses of the historical development of the public sphere, we propose an alternative analytical framework for civic engagement based on small-group interaction. By embracing this micro-level approach, we contribute to the debate on civil society in three ways. By emphasizing local interaction contexts-the microfoundations of civil society-we treat small groups as a cause, context, and consequence of civic engagement. First, through framing and motivating, groups encourage individuals to participate in public discourse and civic projects. Second, they provide the place and support for that involvement. Third, civic engagement feeds back into the creation of additional groups. A small-groups perspective suggests how civil society can thrive even if formal and institutional associations decline. Instead of indicating a decline in civil society, a proliferation of small groups represents a healthy development in democratic societies, creating cross-cutting networks of affiliation.

Rethinking Trust

Reprint: R0906H Will we ever learn? We’d barely recovered from Enron and WorldCom before we faced the subprime mortgage meltdown and more scandals that shook our trust in businesspeople. Which raises the question: Do we trust too much? In this article, Stanford professor and social psychologist Kramer explores the reasons we trust so easily—and, often, so unwisely. He explains that genetics and childhood learning make us predisposed to trust and that it’s been a good survival mechanism. That said, our willingness to trust makes us vulnerable. Our sense of trust kicks in on remarkably simple cues, such as when people look like us or are part of our social group. We also rely on third parties to verify the character of others, sometimes to our detriment (as the victims of Bernard Madoff learned). Add in our illusions of invulnerability and our tendencies to see what we want to see and to overestimate our own judgment, and the bottom line is that we’re often easily fooled. We need to develop tempered trust. For those who trust too much, that means reading cues better; for the distrustful, it means developing more receptive behaviors. Everyone should start with small acts of trust that encourage reciprocity and build up. Having a hedge against potential abuses also helps. Hollywood scriptwriters, for instance, register their treatments with the Writers Guild of America to prevent their ideas from being stolen by the executives they pitch. To attract the right relationships, people must strongly signal their own honesty, proactively allay concerns, and, if their trust is abused, retaliate. Trusting individuals in certain roles, which essentially means trusting the system that selects and trains them, also works but isn’t foolproof. And don’t count on due diligence alone for protection; constant vigilance is needed to make sure the landscape hasn’t changed.

Nature of Trust

The Nature of Trust Project is a collaboration between Biomimicry for Social Innovation (BSI) and Biomimicry 3.8 that combines biological research with real-world application to discover new models for social innovation using nature’s best strategies for building trust. Working alongside leaders in health equity and social change, the project explored how trust functions in living systems—and what those insights reveal for building stronger human relationships, organizations, and communities.

Civic Action

Commonly, researchers have looked for civic life in a distinct sector in which they assume that voluntary associations will cultivate special skills and virtues. Gathering together many challenges to this approach, and using ethnographic cases of housing advocacy and youth civic engagement projects, the authors reconceptualize “the civic” as civic action and show how patterned scene styles shape it. Doing so reveals patterns of action in complex organizations that may span institutional sectors. The authors show how researchers can locate scene styles, and with an extensive literature review, they portray several common styles and suggest that different civic styles often lead to different outcomes.

Volunteering and Civic Action: Boundaries Blurring, Boundaries Redrawn

The aim of this introduction to the special issue is to call into question the presumed conceptual divide between volunteering and civic action and suggest an analytical tool and four perspectives that bring to light the varying meanings of popular engagement. Volunteering and civic action are laden with different moral meanings, are associated with different theoretical approaches and, just as important, have been assigned different roles in society. This conceptual divide is reflected in the academic debate. Only rarely, however, has the academic debate explored and discussed how the meaning of volunteering and civic action has changed historically. Therefore, we argue for a contextual and relational interpretation of the different forms of popular engagement instead of the application of essentialist definitions of volunteering and civic action. In order to examine the variety of popular engagement without being caught up in pre-made or taken-for-granted conceptualisations of volunteering and civic action as two separate forms of popular engagement, we propose approaching variations of popular engagement with respect to two criteria: first, to what degree popular engagement is enacted in institutionalised spheres of politics or in social public spheres and, second, to what degree actions of popular engagement are controversial or operating in line with what is widely agreed upon and dominant in public opinion. Moreover, we argue that history, discourses, politics and a relational approach are four crucial perspectives in order to reveal the varying meanings of popular engagement.

CivicPulse

CivicPulse is a nonpartisan nonprofit seeking to promote more effective local and state governance through improved access to reliable data and research.

Psychological ownership interventions increase interest in claiming government benefits

Significance Most government benefits programs exhibit a sizable participation gap, with eligible individuals forgoing billions of dollars in government benefits each year. Many policymakers have focused on addressing this participation gap, as receiving government benefits has been shown to reduce poverty, childhood hunger, educational gaps, and physical and mental illness. The current work presents psychological ownership framing as a behavioral science intervention, and we show that it can help address this benefits participation gap. These interventions are subtle, simple to implement, and cheaper to execute relative to logistical interventions. Moreover, the data show that psychological ownership interventions can be more efficacious than other common psychological interventions such as social norms and urgency. , Each year, eligible individuals forgo billions of dollars in financial assistance in the form of government benefits. To address this participation gap, we identify psychological ownership of government benefits as a factor that significantly influences individuals’ interest in applying for government benefits. Psychological ownership refers to how much an individual feels that a target is their own. We propose that the more individuals feel that government benefits are their own, the less likely they are to perceive applying for them as an aversive ask for help, and thus, the more likely they are to pursue them. Three large-scale field experiments among low-income individuals demonstrate that higher psychological ownership framing of government benefits significantly increases participants’ pursuit of benefits and outperforms other common psychological interventions. An additional experiment shows that this effect occurs because greater psychological ownership reduces people’s general aversion to asking for assistance. Relative to control messages, these psychological ownership interventions increased interest in claiming government benefits by 20% to 128%. These results suggest that psychological ownership framing is an effective tool in the portfolio of potential behavioral science interventions and a simple way to stimulate interest in claiming benefits.

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PARA

Civic social infrastructure for communities, governance, and public participation.

Reply to Tannenbaum et al.: Constructive dialogue advancing research on civic honesty

Reply to Tannenbaum et al.: Constructive dialogue advancing research on civic honesty

White Paper — the FIRST PERSON NETWORK

Part Seven: The four trust network effects in a two-sided market for trust.

Who Can You Trust?

Reprint: R1403K Success in business unquestionably requires some willingness to cooperate through having faith in others. The question is how much faith and in whom? Decades of scientific research show that people’s accuracy in deciding if another can be trusted tends to be only slightly better than chance. But this isn’t because trustworthiness is completely unpredictable. It’s because the guidelines most of us use to make these predictions are flawed. We place too much emphasis on reputation and perceived confidence, ignoring the fact that human behavior is always sensitive to context and can often be better assessed by our own intuition. So when your company’s money and resources are on the line, how can you do a better job of gauging trustworthiness and thereby improve your likelihood of success? This article draws on emerging research to show how trustworthiness works and offers four points to keep in mind the next time you’re deciding whether or not to do business with a new partner: Integrity can vary, power does corrupt, confidence often masks incompetence, and it’s OK to trust your gut.

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Knight Foundation funds four interconnected programs that support thriving communities and is shaped by how information, culture, and civic life intersect.

Last-Mile Optimism

Reducing Waste. Eliminating Fraud. Promoting Civic Responsibility. At least that’s what the city bureaucrats said.