Carl Smith
speaker
508 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2018
last heard Sep 2020
Carl Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We've all experienced this scenario, probably multiple times every day.
You clock a stranger in a shop or walking down the street, and before we've even noticed we've done this, we've formed several judgements about them.
These judgements are often subconscious, but they shape our behaviour, whether we look up and smile or cross the street.
And one of the core judgements we make is whether or not to trust someone.
This is Dr. Anna Buchler-Reitig, social psychologist at the Leibniz University, Hanover.
When we see a stranger, we do dwell on facial features.
But within that same fraction of a second, Dr. Buchler-Reitig says our minds are also gleaning several other key bits of important information.
Just how accurate are these first impressions?
And do they linger?
You know, how sticky are they?
Do they stick with us?
This troubling combination is why I wanted to examine this moment of citing a stranger and deciding whether to trust them, to unpick some of those biases and to better understand these judgments.
Because it is important to understand how and why we trust.
Whether we perceive someone as worth trusting can impact things like whether they're convicted of crimes, whether they're given a loan, whether we interact with them, whether we date them, or elect them as a political leader.
In fact, Dr Claire Sutherland, senior lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, says without trust, society cannot exist.
One thing I was thinking about when I was reading through your work is that we tend to put a huge amount of trust into people we can't see all the time.
You know, when we step out onto a bridge, we're trusting that the engineer who made it built it correctly.
Dr. Sutherland studies how we judge trust based on someone's face.
So it might seem obvious, but why might this process be ingrained in us?
Why do we judge a book by its cover, as it were?
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