三 惊人的相似

从寿司到自动驾驶汽车——在说服人们相信新想法方面有一些令人惊讶的经验

My parents, for the most part, didn’t believe in cocooning their children in cotton wool. They wanted my brother and me to learn how to navigate our world through first-hand experience, by boldness and trial and error, even if it hurt a little. If we fell from a climbing frame, off a bike, a wall or even a horse, there wasn’t a collective gasp. We were one of those families where minor calamities were greeted with a no-nonsense, ‘Straight back up.’

But there were certain things, dangerous things, my parents taught us to avoid. Don’t put your fingers in the plug socket; don’t answer the front door to people you don’t know; don’t put plastic bags over your face; don’t touch the fire or boiling kettle; don’t cross the road before looking both ways; and so on.

I vividly remember the day my mum asked me, ‘Do you know what a stranger is?’ I was four and a half and about to start kindergarten, about to be out in the world in a new way. We were on our way home from getting my first school uniform, an awful olive green dress with a chequered green and white shirt, complete with green woollen knickers. As we walked down the high street, she made a point of explaining that a stranger is not necessarily a good or bad person, just someone we don’t know. There were ‘safe strangers’ that were okay to trust. For example, police officers, lollipop ladies and firefighters.

And then there were others. Strangers in cars. My mother repeatedly explained that if someone stopped a car and told me to get in, I was to run and shout loudly. I was good at that. If someone unexpected was going to pick me up from school, even an aunty or Mum’s friend, we had a code word to share, ‘green tomato’. Compared to the rest of her somewhat rational parenting, her fear around strangers kidnapping me in their cars bordered on paranoia.

So there is a beautiful irony that, as an adult, my work focuses on ideas that require trust between strangers, and even strangers in cars. It’s a once unthinkable form of trust that has sprung up around the world. And we’re only just beginning to understand how it works.

Anshul Shuka is a twenty-nine-year-old doctor who lives and works in Gurgaon, a fast-growing city on the fringes of southwest New Delhi. He regularly takes trips to Jaipur to visit his family and friends. It’s a long journey of around 240 kilometres, and depending on the traffic it can take him close to four hours in his dark grey Hyundai. Rather than make the drive alone, Shuka offers his three empty seats to people who want to take a similar journey around the same time. He ‘sells’ the seats for 600 rupees (approx. £7.00) per passenger, advertising them on BlaBlaCar, the world’s largest long-distance ride-sharing platform.

On his profile, Shuka describes himself as ‘BlaBla’. It means he is a good match for other passengers who like some conversation but do not want to chat the entire journey. If he did want to talk non-stop, he would be a ‘BlaBlaBla’. If his preference were to drive in silence, he would just be a ‘Bla’. His profile shows that he likes listening to music, doesn’t smoke and won’t bring any dogs or other pets along for the ride. His rating is good, a 4.7/5. Manisha Vasdey, a twenty-six-year-old female passenger who has shared a ride with Shuka, gave him an ‘outstanding’ review. ‘The ride was very nice and comfortable,’ she commented. ‘Great conversation from sports to Game of Thrones (which he doesn’t watch!) to politics. Would definitely recommend travelling with him.’

The idea behind BlaBlaCar, a French start-up founded in 2006, is relatively simple: drivers ‘sell’ the empty seats in their cars on trips they are planning to take but they can only charge prices that cover petrol and road tolls. They are not allowed to make a profit (it’s against the rules). It’s a win-win; passengers get a relatively cheap ride and drivers offset the costs of their journey. BlaBlaCar sounds like a worthwhile community service. It is, in one sense, but it’s also a commercial venture. Indeed, the company was valued at £1.2 billion in 2017.1 BlaBlaCar makes a nice profit by charging a booking fee, which is about 15 per cent of the cost of the ride.

Notably, BlaBlaCar is different from Uber in its pricing model but it’s also not designed to compete with taxis. The average trip taken is long, around 320 kilometres (200 miles), which makes it more of a direct threat to coaches and trains.2 It is also a long time to spend in a car with someone we have never met before. We could get a back-seat driver telling us what to do on the road, someone with a weird sense of humour or, as Mum still likes to point out, a psycho-killer.

Forty-one-year-old co-founder Frédéric Mazzella first got the idea of creating a marketplace for empty seats back in December 2003. He was working hard in Paris at the time and had promised his family that he would join them for Christmas. They lived in the Vendée region of France, around 420 kilometres southwest of the capital. Busy with his job, Mazzella had left his travel plans to the very last minute. All the trains were fully booked and he didn’t own a car. In a fix, he convinced his sister Lucie to make a two-hour detour to pick him up.

On that wintery night, driving along the motorway, he noticed that most of the cars had only one person–a driver and no passengers. ‘I thought, that’s crazy. What a waste,’ says Mazzella. ‘Why don’t we put those empty seats in some kind of search engine, making it as easy for passengers to search and book them as it is for available seats on trains?’3

To Mazzella’s surprise, no such website existed yet. Yes, people posted random trips on Craigslist, but that was about it. He couldn’t get the idea out of his head, although for a long time he was too busy to do anything about it. Finally, three years later, in 2006, he decided the time was right to start a ride-sharing company. Online marketplaces such as Etsy and eBay that match buyers and sellers were taking off, and social networks such as YouTube and Facebook were beginning to gather momentum. If people were starting to share photos, music and daily thoughts, why not seats in cars?

Mazzella contacted Francis Nappez, a close friend and programmer. Together they created a website that they initially called CoVoiturage (French for the term ‘car-pooling’).4 The first site was very basic and ugly-looking. It didn’t have user profiles and there were no peer reviews or ratings. Drivers simply submitted their emails and phone numbers and advertised their rides in a similar way to online classified ads. People had to contact one another, agree on prices and make necessary arrangements. There was a lot of friction. It took time and effort. And, most importantly, strangers were still strangers.

On paper, ride-sharing looked like a big opportunity. In France alone, there are approximately 1 billion seats travelling empty between major cities each year, and there are more than 700 million trips taken each year that are in excess of 150 kilometres.5

Yet the idea did not initially take off as Mazzella had envisioned. Indeed, it would take more than a decade for the platform to get real traction. People were simply not ready to take the trust leap needed to adopt this new way of travelling. That early model had overlooked something vital, something very human: the company had focused on solving the coordination problem of matching drivers and passengers but it had failed to solve the problem of trust.

In 2007, Mazzella decided to enrol in the MBA programme at the INSEAD Business School. It was there he met Nicolas Brusson, now the COO of the company. They decided to enter CoVoiturage into the INSEAD’s business venture competition.6 Disappointingly, they finished fourth. The biggest question the judges had was around trust–how was this different from a marketplace for hitchhiking?

‘The iPhone did not exist. People were only just beginning to grasp the fact that we were entering the digital age. And there I am, pitching my idea of a world where anyone looking to travel could connect with drivers heading the same way,’ Mazzella says. ‘It took some time before the world was ready for this idea.’ He had to figure out a way to get round that lesson drummed into us as children: never get into a car with a stranger.

Getting people who haven’t met to trust each other to share a ride is a fiendish problem. It’s basically reinventing the hitchhiking experience into one that is paid for, planned and trusted. But the problem does not in fact start with personal trust, which is getting people to trust one another. The problem starts with building generalized trust, which is how we first gain trust in the idea itself.

And for many years BlaBlaCar, as it was renamed, took the wrong approach to getting people to adopt the idea. The company tried emphasizing the environmental savings, how good sharing a car was for the planet. But it didn’t work. It wasn’t a good enough reason to get people to use the service. The next approach was to try to sell the software to companies who could offer car-pooling services for employees. It was a logical idea; employees are not total strangers, the trust is already there. But all the companies wanted different features to suit their specific needs. ‘An enormous amount of time, resources and attention was spent on delivering multiple customized platforms. There was no scalable solution,’ says Mazzella. ‘Over time, it became clear the business-to-business version would not flourish.’

The turning point came when he recognized a now-obvious problem–users were frequently cancelling reservations without being penalized. ‘Passengers would call, like, an hour before or three hours before saying, “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t come. My grandma is sick.” We had a percentage of sick grandmothers which was way above average,’ Mazzella jokes.7 Passengers were booking seats online in multiple cars to hedge the risk of a driver cancelling last minute. And drivers compensated for unreliable passengers not showing up by overbooking the spots they had available. There was no mutual commitment and the whole experience was an inefficient mess.

So BlaBlaCar implemented a solution that in retrospect sounds ridiculously simple. In 2011, they introduced a feature so that people had to pay online and, critically, in advance. At the time of the booking, passengers were charged for the ride. Not only did this remove the social awkwardness of exchanging cash in the car, it created upfront commitment. Cancellation rates fell from 35 per cent to less than 3 per cent. And the service started really to take off. Online payments removed a trust blocker, things that can get in the way or are the deal breakers when it comes to people trusting a new idea or each other.

BlaBlaCar now transports more than 12 million people per quarter across twenty-two countries, as of April 2017.8 To put that in context, it carries more passengers each month than Eurostar (2.5 million travellers per quarter) or British Airways (10 million passengers per quarter).9 ‘Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come,’ says Mazzella, quoting the French novelist, poet and playwright Victor Hugo.

BlaBlaCar is an illustration of how technology is enabling millions of people to take a trust leap in an idea, to do something new or different from the way we have previously done it, regardless of cultural norms.

Over the past decade, I have been researching hundreds of networks, marketplaces and systems that reinvent the way something of value–a product, service or information–reaches many people. There are fascinating nuances in how trust works in these examples and we will explore those nuances throughout the book. But beneath the differences lies a common behavioural pattern people follow in forming trust. I call it ‘Climbing the Trust Stack’.

The trust stack goes like this: first, we have to trust the idea; then the company; and, finally, we have to trust the other person (or in some instances a machine or robot).

Let’s use BlaBlaCar for an overview of how it works. On the first level, we have to trust that the idea of ride-sharing is safe and worth trying. There has to be enough understanding and certainty, or reduced uncertainty, to make us willing to try the idea. The next stage is about having confidence in the platform and company. In this instance, it’s knowing that BlaBlaCar will remove bad apples before the ride and help us out if something does go wrong. The third and final stage sees us using different bits of information to decide whether the other person is trustworthy. It’s this last level where the real trust happens. But we can’t get there without going through the other two stages.

The first time we climb the trust stack it feels a bit weird, even risky. But we get to a point where these new ideas seem not only normal but necessary. We’re comfortable to make the trust leap and, once made, our future behaviours change, often quite quickly.

What coaxes us into trusting new ideas? It is trust, after all, that influences how far, how fast and how permanently a new idea will spread.

Trust in new inventions doesn’t happen by accident. There are some universal psychological and emotional hurdles to overcome first. The conditions that enable that to happen are summed up in three key notions: the California Roll principle, the WIIFM factor (‘what’s in it for me’) and trust influencers.

The first depends on making the unfamiliar more familiar. Consider sushi. The concept of sushi was introduced into the United States during the late 1960s, a period of whirlwind change in tastes–entertainment, music, fashion and food. At first, the idea of sushi did not bite. Keep in mind that the average family at the time was sitting down to a dinner of cuts of meats with sides of mashed potatoes swimming in gravy. The thought of eating raw fish was bewildering, even dangerous, in the minds of most restaurant-goers. And then a chef by the name of Ichiro Mashita, who ran Tokyo Kaikan, a small sushi bar in downtown Los Angeles, had a clever idea. He asked, ‘What would happen if the strange ingredients were combined with familiar ingredients such as cucumber, crabmeat and avocado?’10 Mashita also realized that Americans preferred seeing the rice on the outside and seaweed paper in the interior. In other words, the roll would feel more familiar if it were made ‘inside-out’.

Demand exploded. The California Roll was a gateway for many people to discover Japanese cuisine. Americans now consume $2.25-billion-worth of sushi annually.11 As Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked, writes, ‘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’. Humans, understandably, have a tendency to be more comfortable around people or things they are familiar with. There is more than one way to build on this.

Apple does it through a design feature Steve Jobs called ‘skeuomorphism’.12 It’s a catch-all term for when design cues are taken from common objects or elements in the physical world. The iPhone calendar resembles a physical calendar. The notes app looks like a yellow legal pad. The rubbish bin on the first Mac was exactly like a metal bin. The podcast app when first launched looked like an ancient reel-to-reel tape and iBooks looked like a real bookshelf with wood veneers. The familiar elements are not necessary for the new features to function but they tap into our memory bank. Their role is to enable our brains, in a split second, to grasp things they have never experienced before. Jony Ive, the legendary Apple designer, describes the goal as ‘to build things that are strangely familiar’.

When I was at Oxford doing my undergraduate degree in Fine Art, I had to take a course in modern philosophy and critical theory. We studied the likes of Descartes, Voltaire and Rousseau. The lectures would be held in a grand hall in an old Oxford building. There was lots of dark wood panelling, with enormous portrait oil paintings hung on the walls of mostly elderly men. Our professors would tell us things like, ‘Art is a form of thinking that addresses the thoughtfulness of life.’ I honestly thought these lectures were pompous and painful. In fact, I still have dreams about having to sit through them. At the time, I didn’t know how to think in abstract ways. But there was one class that I found fascinating: Immanuel Kant. ‘Human reason is by nature architectonic,’ Kant wrote in The Critique of Pure Reason–i.e. our thoughts follow a clearly organized and defined structure.13 Well before Steve Jobs came up with the idea, Kant believed that people need some kind of system or familiar schema to pave the way to understanding something new.

Perhaps you have stood looking at a piece of art and thought, ‘What on earth is this?’ I remember standing in the Tate Modern some time ago in front of a pile of 120 bricks arranged in a rectangle; bricks that would otherwise be used to make an ordinary house. The piece, by the sculptor Carl Andre, was called Equivalent VIII. Andre is renowned for making ‘idea art’ that is about ‘recognizable things’. But what was the idea in bricks? I felt lost. So what did I do? I just walked away, on to the next piece. The same thing happens with new inventions and new experiences we just don’t get. We move on.

It was only recently I realized that that is exactly how I think about trust. Specifically, for us to trust a new idea, we need bridges that are easy to find and to cross. The unknown needs to be reduced just enough that our mind goes, ‘I get this. It’s kind of like…’ We have to turn Equivalent VIII into ‘Destruction of the Berlin Wall’. We have to put the strange seaweed on the inside and rice on the outside.

Let me give you an example of a company that knows how to create bridges that allow people to step lightly from the known to the unknown. That company is Airbnb.

Judd Antin’s official title is director of research at Airbnb. His job is to get inside the heads of guests and hosts using the accommodation platform. He wants to find out what they really think and what really happens. If you wanted to know, say, all the strange and unexpected ways hosts get their homes ready for guests, Antin’s experience research team could tell you. Like the host who decided they did not want their guests to use a specific toilet in one of their bathrooms, so they placed a giant prickly cactus in a heavy concrete pot on the toilet seat.

Antin, thirty-eight, is a social psychologist with a PhD in information management and systems from the University of California, Berkeley. Much of his research has been on why people behave in certain ways in different online environments. For instance, how do people cope with managing multiple digital identities? Do women and men edit differently on Wikipedia? (Turns out they do.) Antin gives you the sense that when he gets interested in something, he gets a little obsessed. He is the type of person who would say no question is a dumb question, but perhaps you could ask the question differently. In fact, he said that to me a few times when we spoke over Skype.

He never talks about the people he studies as ‘subjects’ or ‘participants’. He doesn’t even use the word ‘users’. It is always ‘guests’ and ‘hosts’. He doesn’t talk about ‘spaces’ but ‘homes’. The word he uses to describe his research is ‘sexy’. ‘When I say sexy, I mean that the topic of our research is really meaty. The idea of letting another person into your home has lots of dimensions that you could spend years diving into,’ Antin explains. ‘It’s research that requires deeply understanding a problem and figuring out how to turn the findings into design, product and communication solutions.’14

Antin’s team must understand what makes people comfortable with trusting the idea of Airbnb. When guests go to the Airbnb site for the first time, they know they want to go on holiday or simply need a place to stay. But there are lots of ‘what ifs’ and unknowns before they get started. The first and most basic question is, ‘What is the idea of home-sharing?’

Even investors had trouble getting their heads around the idea initially. In fact, many laughed the founders out of the room and dismissed it as dangerous. Take Chris Sacca, an accomplished entrepreneur and the head of Lowercase Capital, one of the leading venture funds in the United States. Sacca spots things early. I mean, really early. He has been one of the first to back the likes of Twitter, Uber and Instagram. He was one of the first people to whom Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia, the three founders, showed the original pages of Airbnb to in 2008. But he passed on making a seed investment.

‘I pulled them aside and said, guys, this is super dangerous,’ Sacca said. ‘You’re renting out a room in somebody’s house while they’re still there? Somebody’s going to get raped or murdered, and the blood is gonna be on your hands. There’s no way this’ll succeed.’15

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?’ In the case of Airbnb, a lot can happen and has since happened.

Sacca is not the only investor who initially spurned Airbnb and missed out. I met the founders in 2009 when I was writing my first book on the so-called ‘sharing economy’. I came home and told my husband, Chris, we should make an early investment. I explained in immense detail how people were going to take pictures of their homes–bedrooms, kitchens and even their bathrooms–and then guests from all over the world would book these places. He is used to me continually sharing and sounding ideas off him. But this time, he looked at me strangely, as if I had lost the plot. I went on trying to convince him: ‘eBay is a multi-billion-dollar business where strangers trade all kinds of stuff including second-hand cars online. At the time, people thought Pierre Omidyar was also crazy and it wouldn’t work,’ I insisted. He did not budge, so I went with my overused line: ‘The future is created by optimists, not pessimists.’

Chris is a barrister and therefore a master at arguing his point. ‘Well, this is not eBay. People are not trading goods anonymously online. This is people’s homes. This is people meeting up in the real world,’ was his comeback. He was right and very, very wrong. Airbnb is now the second most valuable hospitality brand in the world, estimated to be worth $31 billion. I keep the valuation chart of Airbnb on our fridge. It has scribbled at the top, ‘Always listen to your wife!’

In retrospect, it is easy to point to the likes of Sacca and my husband and say how wrong they were. But, as I say, it’s also easy to see why they thought the way they did. Airbnb’s success rests on having been able to get people to make that staggering leap of trust and overcome our natural ‘stranger danger’ bias.

Try this quick experiment yourself. The next time you are sitting next to someone you don’t know, ask them to swap phones with you for just one minute. Explain that you will hold their phone and they can hold yours. Tell them: ‘What you decide to do with it is your choice.’

I have played this game many different times with different groups of people, from financial advisors to students to estate agents. I have tested it at dinner parties, conference events and in the classroom. The reactions are predictable. Some people outright refuse. People laugh nervously. People hesitantly take the phone but place it face down. People ask how long is left to go. A few launch straight into the experiment, looking at messages, photos and Twitter feeds. Some even tweet or post on Instagram. But for the most part, it feels very uncomfortable for participants. And that is just holding another person’s phone for less than a minute.16

Airbnb has had to create trust around an exchange that involves one of the most intimate things in our lives, the place where we rest our heads. ‘We have to enable Olympic levels of trust between people who have never met,’ Antin says.17 And that’s what makes his job so fascinating and challenging. ‘As big as we are, most people will have no idea and many more people will have a vague idea of what Airbnb is, but don’t really get it,’ Antin told me. The first thing that will run through their minds is, ‘What on earth is this anyway?’18

When some people go to the site for the first time, they even wonder if Airbnb owns all the homes they see on the website and the company simply rents them out. ‘It sounds silly but it’s not; it’s a known model of holidaying they understand,’ says Antin.

A lot of research has been done on how people ‘get’ the concept. Noticeably, there are no ‘How does Airbnb work?’ videos on the homepage. Admittedly, some people look at explicit things such as the ‘About’ or ‘Trust and Safety’ pages. But those are listed right at the bottom of the page. Front and centre, the first thing we see on Airbnb is a simple question, intentionally curious: ‘Where?’

‘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?’

For example, when a first-time guest living in London wants to stay in New York, they might not search for New York but for London instead. And then they get even closer to home and search their borough, say, Camden. ‘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.’ Critically, Airbnb has designed the site in a way to encourage this behaviour. It could have had a drop-down menu where guests select a destination from a list. But that would be overly prescriptive. It wouldn’t allow new users easily to discover something they can understand; that other nearby homes, like theirs, are available for rent.

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.

Familiarity is not the only thing that matters in convincing us to trust a new idea. Once we are over the ‘I get this’ hump–the California Roll principle–the next barrier to be crossed is the ‘What’s in it for me?’ (WIIFM) factor.

On 14 May 1796, Edward Jenner, an English doctor, carried out an experiment on eight-year-old James Phipps, the son of his gardener. After making two small scratches on the boy’s arms, Jenner rubbed in a small amount of fluid from a cowpox blister. Young Phipps got the expected reaction of a slight fever but within a few days he had fully recovered. Two months later, Jenner inoculated the boy again. This time he used matter from a smallpox lesion. As the doctor predicted, and no doubt to his relief, the boy did not contract smallpox. Further tests showed that James was immune to the disease. This is how the concept of vaccinations, named after the Latin vacca for cow, was born.19 So where did Jenner get the idea?

Jenner had received his training in the Gloucestershire countryside where most of his patients worked on farms with cattle. While still a medical student, Jenner observed that milkmaids who contracted cowpox, a relatively mild disease, did not catch smallpox, one of the deadliest infectious diseases of the period, claiming the lives of millions of people including five reigning monarchs. A cure was urgently needed.

In 1797, Jenner sent a short paper to the Royal Society describing the findings of his experiment. The paper was rejected. Scorned by his peers, Jenner published the book himself, documenting his theory that cowpox did indeed protect against smallpox. His ideas, however, were met with widespread controversy and criticism. The reasons varied from religious to scientific and political objections. The clergy claimed it was repulsive and ‘unchristian’ to inoculate someone with material originating from an infected cow, one of God’s lowlier creatures. Some physicians dismissed his research as ‘unethical’. Others selfishly did not want Jenner to succeed because they were making significant sums of money selling different kinds of drugs to treat the disease. In 1802, a satirical cartoon was published called ‘The Cow-Pock–or–the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!’, summing up the sentiment of the time. It caricatured a scene of the vaccine being administered to a group of petrified young people and cows sprouting from different parts of their bodies.20

Jenner was told that his ideas were too revolutionary and that he needed more proof. Undaunted by the ridicule, he experimented on several other children, including his own eleven-month-old son, by placing a small amount of cow pox scab into the human skin. Every child he injected showed immunity to the disease.

The young country doctor did not discover the idea of immunization–it had a long history in China and Africa–but he was the first person scientifically to attempt to control an infectious disease by the deliberate use of vaccination. Jenner later became known as the ‘Father of Immunology’. In 1853, thirty years after Jenner’s death, the British government made cowpox vaccinations compulsory in England and Wales. On 8 May 1980, the World Health Assembly declared that the world was free of smallpox.21 But for decades Jenner’s new methods did not catch on. Why? People were not ready to take a trust leap in the idea of vaccinations because they didn’t fully understand the risks and benefits–they couldn’t see what was in it for them.

And it’s a doubt that persists today. The anti-vaccination movement has existed since Jenner first discovered the cure, but it gained resurgence during the late 1990s after a series of events stoked the fear and doubt already brewing. One was an article that appeared in the UK medical journal The Lancet in 1998, written by Dr Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, implying a possible link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. Remarkably, Wakefield wrote the paper based on research he had done on a mere twelve children.22 The children in the study were carefully selected and the research was largely funded by lawyers acting for parents who were involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. The article has since been discredited and retracted but the damage was already done. Dr Sharon Kaufman, the chair of the Department of Social Medicine at the University of California, has done extensive research focused on individuals’ trust–and mistrust–in the findings of medical knowledge. ‘Most parents are not anti-vaccination per se,’ she says. ‘Rather, they live in a time, as we all do, of heightened risk awareness, mistrust of government institutions and the pharmaceutical industry and a great many opportunities for “seeing” doubt.’23 Even if people don’t believe that vaccines cause harmful side-effects such as autism, the power of anti-vaccination stories is they evoke fearful emotions that undermine our trust, no matter what we might rationally think.

James Samuel Coleman, a famous American sociologist born in 1926, was, among other things, fascinated by how we make decisions.24 Specifically, by the ways people decide whether or not to trust a new idea. He was living in a time when many great new technologies, from the first television and video recorder to the first commercial passenger jet plane, were introduced. Essentially, his research showed that we decide whether to trust based on assessment of the upsides and downsides. We make a calculation about whether trusting this idea will in some way make our lives better or not.

It sounds obvious, right? But it raises a critical point–we don’t want to use a new invention until we understand it. That doesn’t mean we all need to understand precisely how a technology functions, whether it was a combustion engine back then or a blockchain now. However, we do need to grasp what it can do and what it can give us. Until that chasm is crossed, we won’t abandon what we already have.25

Creating trust in a television is one thing. What about creating it in something that has the power to hurt or even kill us? We’re seeing this play out now with self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles are expected by some engineering groups to account for up to 75 per cent of vehicles on the road by 2040.26 But how do you get people to trust machines enough to let them take over the wheel? An expert who knows the issue first-hand is Dr Brian Lathrop.

Lathrop has worked in the Electronics Research Lab at Volkswagen (VW) since 2004. He has a PhD in cognitive psychology, specializing in human interface design, and is the person in charge of research and development of VW’s autonomous vehicles.

Prior to his current role at the automaker, he worked at NASA during the period when pilots were first adopting plane automation. He became fascinated by a rather worrying state he calls ‘mode confusion’. ‘This happens when pilots wonder if the aeroplane is doing the flying or if they are,’ Lathrop explains to me. ‘Autonomous vehicles face exactly the same challenge.’27

During our conversation, Lathrop speaks surprisingly openly about the challenges of self-driving vehicles. He has a natural exuberance but you wouldn’t describe him as an evangelist. More like an optimistic realist.

In March 2016, the American Automobile Association (AAA) conducted an extensive survey to understand how much trust its members had in self-driving cars. Three out of four drivers in the United States said they would feel ‘afraid’ to ride in self-driving cars. Only one in five said they would trust a driverless vehicle to drive itself with them inside.28 The reasons people gave included: ‘trusting their own driving skills more than the technology’ (84 per cent); ‘feeling the technology is too new and unproven’ (60 per cent); and ‘not knowing enough about the technology’ (50 per cent).

There is a YouTube video of a seventy-year-old grandmother, named Shirley, freaking out the first time she is inside a Tesla Model S on autopilot. As the car moves across lanes and navigates traffic, Shirley screams, ‘Oh no, there is a car coming! Oh dear Jesus. Ah, ah, ooh, ooh, where is it going?’ It is painful to watch. In the video, you can hear her son Bill laughing at her reaction after he turns on the autopilot. ‘Oh my, I am about to die,’ his mum cries out. She looks like she is on the verge of heart failure.29 In fact, all Shirley needs to do to take control from the machine is simply touch the steering wheel. But her mind is elsewhere.

When I ask Lathrop how hard it is to get people to trust being driven by autonomous vehicles, I assume he will go into details of how smart design can overcome the fears of people like Shirley. I expect him to cite the safety stats. In fact, he makes a quite different observation. ‘People trust the car quickly, almost too easily,’ he says.

Yes, Lathrop has seen how some people, such as Shirley, freak out the first time they are driven by an autonomous car. They are, however, the minority. Others are completely awestruck and think, ‘Wow, it’s doing the driving for me.’ But then something interesting happens. After a few miles–around twenty minutes of being driven by the car–the experience feels normal, even boring. Being driven by an intelligent machine it turns out is just not that exciting. That’s why Lathrop is worried about people nodding off.

‘What do you do when people fall asleep in a self-driving car?’ is his biggest concern. ‘How do you deal with that?’ He thinks it’s a question that is not being asked enough. ‘It’s not good for the trust equation!’ Lathrop admits half jokingly.

The idea of people trusting the car too easily is intriguing so I press Lathrop harder. Surely, the first step in getting people to use self-driving cars has to require a massive trust leap? ‘Think about it,’ he replies. ‘Most people are comfortable being a passenger. They are used to being driven by a colleague or by a friend.’ In other words, the idea of being a passenger in a self-driving car taps into something familiar. ‘The leap we are asking people to take is not a new experience, but it’s asking people to trust a machine versus a human to drive. It’s not that huge.’ It is strangely familiar.

Lathrop admits that before people get inside an autonomous vehicle, they do have questions. Quite predictable ones. ‘What if a vehicle cuts in front; will the car respond?’ ‘Can the vehicle change lanes?’ And the most common is, ‘Can it drive as well as me?’ Lathrop points out that very few of us ask about unpredictable situations. For instance, what happens if a deer or even a dog runs out in front of the car? How does the car navigate parking lots at busy sports matches? The researchers have not yet figured out the answers to all these questions. Some are hard to simulate safely or even predict. It’s those unforeseen, or as Lathrop puts it, ‘1 per cent corner cases’, that his team needs to solve for. But the point is, very quickly a first-time user runs out of questions. They just get into the vehicle and let it do the driving.

The ultimate success of self-driving cars–that it becomes normal to use one–doesn’t depend on engineering success. It doesn’t even depend on us understanding how the technology works. It depends on that second principle of getting people to trust an idea, the WIIFM factor. We want to know what we will gain. In this instance, will the benefits of the machine doing the job of a human outweigh the risks?

The typical American commuter spends on average more than fifty-two minutes per day stuck in traffic. That adds up to more than 4 billion hours of wasted time in the United States alone, time we could use in better ways.30 ‘People want to know what they will be able to do if they are freed from driving the car,’ Lathrop tells me. They imagine being able to watch movies, talk on the phone, work and eat. ‘Look around you when you’re at the traffic lights, when cars are stopped. These behaviours are not new. I want to allow people to do what they are already doing but in a much safer manner,’ he says. Indeed, the biggest benefit of self-driving cars is safety.

One hour after passing my driving test as a teenager, I crashed my car. And it wasn’t a minor ding. I was waiting at the intersection of a busy crossroads in Hampstead Garden Suburb, north London, looking for a break in the traffic. I started fiddling with the radio, switching from Capital to Virgin and other stations, trying to find a song I liked. Distracted, I decided foolishly to make a go for it. Smash. You never forget the sound of metal hitting metal. My car spun and landed in what was previously a nicely groomed privet hedge on the other side of the road. Over the course of the next five years, I had three subsequent accidents. I am truly a terrible driver. And my experience is a reminder of why self-driving cars matter.

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. It works out to be more than 300,000 lives saved each decade in the United States alone, and a saving of $190 billion each year in healthcare costs associated with accidents.32 In the UK, KPMG estimates that self-driving cars will lead to 2,500 fewer deaths between 2014 and 2030.33 But we are still highly sceptical of the benefits. ‘No one is going to want to realize autonomous driving into the world until there’s proof that it’s much safer, like a factor of 100 times safer, than having a human drive,’ Andrew Moore, the computer science dean at Carnegie Mellon University told The Atlantic.34

Humans are not ‘risk mutual’ people. In other words, they don’t place the same weight on things going well as things going badly. For example, say I lost a favourite navy blue chequered coat, I would feel more about the loss than I would about the joy of finding another coat, even if the jackets were identical. That’s the human tendency, to feel more strongly about a loss than a gain. The basic idea of ‘loss aversion’ is a concept first discovered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the Israeli psychologists who changed how people think about how people think. Sticking with the status quo feels much safer and better, even if we know we might compensate a loss.35

Undisputedly, we love new things, but those things tend to be an upgrade or improvement on ideas we are already comfortable with. For instance, the high-definition wireless flat screen is better than the clunky colour television box with wires and remote controls. It is easy to trade up. To date, the media has not done much to help foster the idea that self-driving cars are safer than humans. In fact, it has tended to fuel the opposite image: the car could kill you.

On 7 May 2016, Joshua Brown’s Tesla Model S vehicle crunched into the side of an eighteen-wheeler trailer truck. Forty-year-old Brown was killed. The car was on autopilot during the collision. When police arrived at the scene, a Harry Potter movie was reportedly playing on a portable DVD player inside the car. In a blog post published on the day the accident became public, Tesla stated, ‘Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.’ In other words, the car is not perfect. And the driver was distracted by a young wizard.

‘The media love these stories. They sensationalize them. I understand why,’ Lathrop tells me. ‘But they are extremely rare.’ Indeed, this was the first known autopilot death in roughly 130 million miles driven by Tesla customers.36 To put this in perspective, among all vehicles in the United States, it is estimated there will be a fatality every 94 million miles.37 In other words, self-driving cars are 36 million miles safer.

Lathrop thinks a lot of the messaging around self-driving cars is not useful. ‘We need to temper expectations that an autonomous vehicle can be perfect,’ he says. ‘We need people to realize that the benefits hugely outweigh the negatives.’

What’s interesting in Lathrop’s observation is that it illustrates how building trust doesn’t have to hinge on a promise of perfection. In fact, guaranteeing 100 per cent certainty of an outcome is a recipe for disaster.

Whether it’s deciding to use Airbnb rather than a well-known hotel brand such as Marriott or Hilton, or deciding to put our trust in an intelligent vehicle, the pros and cons we draw up will circle around the same dimensions–value and certainty. Whatever the idea, the questions are essentially the same: Will these experiences create value in my life? How can I be sure of that value?

You’ve no doubt heard the term ‘early adopter’. It typically refers to an individual (or business) who uses a new product or technology before others do. My brother-in-law is one. He seems to be in on the next big thing way before it’s big. ‘Found it first’ is a badge he likes to wear. He tells you about new things you should be trying: digital wallets, the Aire digestive tracker that helps you figure out which foods are most compatible with your body, the Nest Learning Thermostat and so on. Early adopters tend to seek novel things to tinker with, and then become evangelists for them. They tend to have strong and excited opinions (and I don’t mean that in a bad way). Let’s just say they know a lot without being a know-it-all. Without a doubt, early adopters are critical to innovations taking off. Interestingly, however, as a group they are not necessarily the most influential in terms of getting the late majority, or laggards, to climb the first layer of the trust stack. What is needed is that third element–made up of what I call the trust influencers.

Trust influencers are groups of people who can disproportionately influence a significant change in the way we do something; they set new social norms.

Trust influencers are out there for every idea but sometimes we have to look hard and in unexpected places to find them.

There is a wonderful example of trust influencers relating to what is not a particularly exciting concept–transferring money overseas.

Behind almost every great start-up lies a story of personal frustration. The tale of TransferWise goes like this: Taavet Hinrikus was born in Estonia when it was still part of the USSR. It was a tough environment to grow up in. ‘One really had to take charge and solve problems in creative ways to get anything done,’ Hinrikus says.38 In 2002, when he was twenty years old, he met two budding entrepreneurs called Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. They were tinkering around with an idea: what if people could digitally transfer their voices and words to one another? Like a phone but without a phone. And without the phone bill. This was exactly the description first used for what would become known as Skype. Hinrikus became one of the first employees on the team.

Skype grew fast. In 2006, the company needed Hinrikus to move from Estonia to London to help them expand. He was earning euros that were paid into his Estonian bank account. Every fortnight Hinrikus had to transfer money to a UK account, to cover his rent, food and other costs. When his money eventually arrived, it was much less than he expected. The whole experience, he thought, was unnecessarily painful.

An old friend, Kristo Käärmann, faced the same problem but in the opposite direction. He was working as a consultant at Deloitte and was being paid in pounds. He was transferring money back to Estonia to pay his mortgage. ‘I was losing five per cent of the money each time I moved it,’ Käärmann says. The money was being lost in the hidden fees and poor foreign exchange rates that earn the banks a hefty profit.

Hinrikus and Käärmann came up with a simple but clever idea. ‘We figured we could just “swap” the money. I could just transfer money from my Estonia account into his Estonia account and he transfer money from his account in London to my account in London,’ says Hinrikus. ‘Pretty quickly we saved thousands by eliminating unfair rates and banking fees.’ The friends realized they had hit on an enormous opportunity. TransferWise, the company they founded in London in 2011, is as of March 2017 valued at more than $1.1 billion and already has a 5 per cent market share of international money transfer in the United Kingdom.39

TransferWise is based on a peer-to-peer technology system that matches money flows. Say I wanted to send £1,000 from a bank in London to a bank in Paris, the system looks for someone else wanting to convert euros to pounds. The result is that the money never moves between countries. Doing things this way means the process is faster, easier and cheaper than the transfer services we get from banks. Which brings us back to the question of trust and changing behaviour.

The conventional way to transfer money from one country to another is to use a traditional bank or a post office or a known brand such as Western Union. In 2015, in excess of $601 billion was transferred in this way.40 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.’ But just who would TransferWise’s trust influencers be?

Hinrikus and his team realized their ideal trust influencers were neither fintech know-it-alls, nor the people with the latest Apple Watch. Far from it. They had to find users we wouldn’t necessarily expect to take a risk with an unknown company like TransferWise. Namely, pensioners. Retired British people living abroad in Spain, for instance, who needed to get their pension regularly transferred from pounds to euros. ‘For them, the fees they were being charged represented a big portion of their total, so they had a strong incentive to take the same leap of faith,’ Hinrikus says.

When other first-time users heard about pensioners giving TransferWise the thumbs-up, it had enormous influence on shaping their decision to trust the idea. Indeed, when enough trust influencers are seen to have made the trust leap and survived, millions will follow, often very quickly. That’s how change spreads.

James Surowiecki wrote brilliantly about the influence of group example in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. It was largely based on the science of crowd persuasion: how groups of people can influence other individuals to say ‘yes’. Some of the core ideas were grounded in Professor Robert Cialdini’s theory of ‘social proof’. ‘If a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t. Especially when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd,’ Cialdini wrote.41 Put simply, we tend to follow the lead of other people, especially when we are unsure.42

Various experiments have shown the different dimensions of social proof. One of the most visual is known as the ‘Street Corner Experiment’.43 It was designed in 1968 by social psychologists Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman and Lawrence Berkowitz. First, 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. So the next day, they put five people staring at the sky on the same street corner. Four times as many people stopped to check what they were gazing at. And when the researchers put fifteen people to stare at the empty sky, 45 per cent of all passers-by stopped and tilted their heads to see what the others were looking at. They stopped traffic by staring at an empty sky. The typical takeaway from this study, as Surowiecki puts it, is ‘the crowd becomes more influential as it becomes bigger’.44

There’s no doubt social proof builds trust around new ideas, especially when we are uncertain of the outcomes. That is why we commonly see sites boast the number of reviews or users they have. For instance, TransferWise has on its homepage, front and centre, their number of ‘happy reviews’ (35,000), and its number of customers (more than 1 million).45 Indeed, we seem to be living in a world where it is perceived that the critical way to persuade us is through large numbers, be it Facebook ‘likes’, five-star ratings or Twitter and Instagram followers.

But social proof, and the trust it fosters, does not have to come from large crowds. It can also come from a small group of individuals with a unique power to influence. They do not need to have an impressive title, be a celebrity or even a credible ‘expert’. They do not need large followings. They do not even have to be people who are similar to the majority, the crowd. They can be just like the British pensioners in Spain, people who can change other people’s perceived uncertainty because they seem the least likely to take a trust leap.

The three ideas covered in this chapter–the California Roll principle, the WIIFM factor and trust influencers–aka ‘What is it?’, ‘What do I gain?’, ‘Who else is doing it?’–offer a way to see how an idea once dismissed as preposterous can turn into something strangely familiar. They explain how trust in new ideas spreads. Anyone who has ever built trust in a venture, a new product or an idea has had to go through that process, whether they’re aware of it or not.

It’s as if there’s a daunting rock face the creators of the new idea are asking people to climb. First, they have to show the would-be climbers some familiar moves and handholds, to reduce the unknowns enough to encourage that first step. (And while they’ve reduced uncertainty, they haven’t promised perfection–there’s still risk.) They have to explain what climbing the rock face has to offer. Finally, they have to point out the other climbers above them who are loving the experience. Before long, the doubters find themselves racing up the climb, leaving the ground so far behind it’s soon just a distant memory.

And that process is powerful. It can turn an idea once dismissed as risky and even frightening–sharing a long ride with a stranger, staying in the home of someone you don’t know or getting into a self-driving car–into something normal, rewarding and disruptive. So that’s the ‘idea’ part of the bigger climb, the climb up the trust stack. The next level is building trust in the platform.