data jungle adventures

We all have an intuitive understanding of trust and also exercise this more or less consciously in everyday life. But how does this work in a metaverse, or in a social media context? Do we establish trust in the same way? Is it also as fragile as the real-world equivalent? Does it differ at all?

In interpersonal relationships, trust refers to the confidence that a person or group of people has in the reliability of another person or group; specifically, it is the degree to which each party feels that they can depend on the other party to do what they say they will do.

American Psychological Association

Trust is defined as the willingness of someone (trustor) to become vulnerable to another party on the presumption that the trustee will act in ways that benefit the trustor. In addition, the trustor does not have control over the actions of the trustee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_(social_science)

Trust in the tangible and virtual worlds

In the real tangible world, trust is the belief and confidence we place in another person or entity based on a certain sense of reliability and predictability. Personal relationships, professional credibility, and social systems are all affected by how much trust is traded between people in the real world.

As for the metaverse, being the “virtual reality space in which users can interact with an environment generated by computer and with other users“, trust there refers to spaces where people communicate and interact in interconnected virtual spaces where they engage in digital financial, social, or other types of experiences.

Characteristics of trust

Trust has an impact on all relationship types, reciprocal, hierarchical, or communality as nicely described by Steven Pinker. In the real world, the key characteristics of trust are honesty and integrity, vulnerability, consistency and mutual respect, communication and accountability, empathy, and understanding. Here, probable the most important of all are time and experience. You invest time of your life to build an experience either full of trustworthiness or not.

On the other side, the characteristics of trust in the metaverse are community governance, virtual social norms, accessibility and inclusion, technical reliability, cross-cultural engagement, data ownership and monetization. Most important of all, the digital identity and avatars of the metaverse need to represent real individuals. Else, we would lose a main component of trust in the metaverse.

How to trust?

Much guidance exists on how to trust in a real world romantic and even in a virtual-centered professional relationship. Common advice includes honoring your commitments, effective communications, being consistent, honest, vulnerable and expressing your feelings, and owning your failure.

In a virtual setting you need to do all this in a lot less time, missing or reduced non-verbal cues, personal affinities (or the opposite). In such a setting, you need to intentionally replace the informal interactions that help build trusting relationships.

Value and trust in the metaverse

An interesting article was published on PwC Australia’s website under the title “Trust in metaverse: 6 considerations“. While emphasising that the digital world will bring risks and challenges, the writers open the eye on the fact that some issues will need to be reimagined. These issues are mainly trust, governance, security, privacy, and identity.

What comes first? A need of value to build trust or a required trust to get value? A recent article in the World Economic Forum, talks about “creating value in the metaverse and how this is an opportunity that must be built on trust”. The article tells us about the global crisis that has risen around trust in virtual spaces upon the arrival of the metaverse. Viewed by most firms “as a new channel for their existing operations” while the opportunities to create value grow rapidly. Making the user’s trust in the technology and data behind the metaverse vital while the virtual and the physical worlds merge more with time.

So technically trust is the baseline. We need it in order to create value in the metaverse. Similarly, this also applies in the real world. We need trust to create valuable relationships.