Critique of Sharif’s and Pitt’s Models of Technology

abstract

In this article Pitt’s and Sharif’s models of technology are discussed. These models are based on two different conceptions of technology, which are technology as “instrument” and as “making use of instrument.” Sharif considers technology as a collection of empowering tools, including technoware, humanware, infoware and orgaware. On the other hand, Pitt sees technology as “humanity at work.” Based on his definition, Pitt proposes a model of technology with three components; first-order transformation, second-order transformation, and the assessment of feedback mechanism. In this article this model will be explained and criticized. After that, Sharif’s model is criticized in the light of Pitt’s theory and it will be shown that Pitt’s model provides a better understanding of different aspects of technology. For example, it will be argued how Pitt’s model is efficient in explaining dynamicity, transfer and control of technology along with its soft dimensions, while Sharif’s model is incapable of doing so. In the next part, Pitt’s model is criticized and it is shown that the mechanism of knowledge progress suggested by this model is controversial and Pitt’s framework cannot support the idea of indigenous technology. Furthermore, the ability of Pitt’s model in describing different technological phenomena is called into question, since this model provides a superficial view of the complexity of an assessment of technology’s consequences. Finally, a list is proposed that contains minimal requirements that every model of technology is expected to explain. It is incumbent on technology theoreticians to consider this list.     

Trust,Belief, and the Second-Personal

Cognitivism about trust says that it requires belief that the trusted is trustworthy; non-cognitivism denies this. At stake is how to make sense of the strong but competing intuitions that trust is an attitude that is evaluable both morally and rationally. In proposing that one's respect for another's agency may ground one's trusting beliefs, second-personal accounts provide a way to endorse both intuitions. They focus attention on the way that, in normal situations, it is the person whom I trust. My task is to develop an account of the latter insight without the controversial theoretical commitments of the former. I propose a functional account for why the second and third-personal ‘systems’ operate not just in parallel, but in tandem, in support of a cognitivist account of trust.     

The practical rationality of trust

Most action can be explained in Humean or teleological terms; that is, in most cases, one can explain why someone acted by reference to that person’s beliefs and desires. However, trusting and being trustworthy are actions that do not permit such explanation. The action of trusting someone to do something is a matter of expecting someone to act for certain reasons, and acting trustworthily is one of acting for these reasons. It is better to say that people act out of trust, rather than for some end. Thus, teleological considerations do not suffice to trust. This is the negative claim of the paper. Its positive proposal is an account of the practical rationality of trust. The key idea is that in trusting one takes on commitments, not merely to act in certain way, but also to premise one’s practical reasoning on a trust-based view of the interaction situation.     

Trust and trustworthiness in a sequential bargaining game

We use a two‐person extensive form bargaining game to explore individuals' trusting and reciprocal behavior and how those relate to their scores on a trust survey. In keeping with prior research, we find that the ‘self‐interested’ outcome is rejected by a majority of individuals. People who score high on the trust survey are both trusting and are also trustworthy, in that they reciprocate others' trust. But people with low‐trust scores often exhibit trust but are not trustworthy. These ‘inconsistent trusters’ seem to be interested in exploiting the trust and trustworthiness of others in increasing their own payoff. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Trust within Limits

Abstract

There have two recent challenges to the orthodoxy that ‘X trusts Y to ø’ is the fundamental notion of trust. Domenicucci and Holton maintain that trust, like love and friendship, is fundamentally two-place. Paul Faulkner argues to the more radical conclusion that the one-place ‘X is trusting’ is explanatorily basic. I argue that ‘X trusts Y in domain D’ is the explanatorily basic notion. I make the case that only by thinking of trust as domain-specific can we make sense of the relationships between trust and belief in goodwill, trust and distrust, and trust and trustworthiness. In addition, by modeling trust as essentially domain-specific we can account for the way in which wise trust in others is finely discriminating.     

The role of epistemic and social characteristics in children’s selective trust: Three meta‐analyses

Over the last 15 years, researchers have been increasingly interested in understanding the nature and development of children’s selective trust. Three meta‐analyses were conducted on a total of 51 unique studies (88 experiments) to provide a quantitative overview of 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children’s selective trust in an informant based on the informant’s epistemic or social characteristics, and to examine the relation between age and children’s selective trust decisions. The first and second meta‐analyses found that children displayed medium‐to‐large pooled effects in favor of trusting the informant who was knowledgeable or the informant with positive social characteristics. Moderator analyses revealed that 4‐year‐olds were more likely to endorse knowledgeable informants than 3‐year‐olds. The third meta‐analysis examined cases where two informants simultaneously differed in their epistemic and social characteristics. The results revealed that 3‐year‐old children did not selectively endorse informants who were more knowledgeable but had negative social characteristics over informants who were less knowledgeable but had positive social characteristics. However, 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds consistently prioritized epistemic cues over social characteristics when deciding who to trust. Together, these meta‐analyses suggest that epistemic and social characteristics are both valuable to children when they evaluate the reliability of informants. Moreover, with age, children place greater value on epistemic characteristics when deciding whether to endorse an informant’s testimony. Implications for the development of epistemic trust and the design of studies of children’s selective trust are discussed.     

Supplication and the Muslim personality: Psychological nature and functions of prayer as interpreted by Said Nursi

Efforts to describe an Islamic psychology of religion must include the relationship that Muslims maintain with God through supplication. The Turkish theologian and scholar Said Nursi (1877–1960) offered useful theoretical guidance for understanding this issue. His perspective rested on the assumption that supplication finds its motivation in humanity’s innate shortcomings. Such imperfections encourage a person to communicate with God through supplication, and supplication then provides a source of felt closeness to God that defines how the Muslim personality should function. In broad terms, Nursi subdivided supplication into verbal (petitionary) and doing (behavioural) types. Verbal supplication helps persons respond to innate weaknesses by trusting in their own strengths, and this trust then manifests itself in the behavioural supplications that the individual uses to meet the demands of life. Nursi’s views suggest opportunities for empirically understanding supplication within an Islamic psychology of religion.     

Trust in Nanotechnology? On Trust as Analytical Tool in Social Research on Emerging Technologies

Trust has become an important aspect of evaluating the relationship between lay public and technology implementation. Experiences have shown that a focus on trust provides a richer understanding of reasons for backlashes of technology in society than a mere focus of public understanding of risks and science communication. Therefore, trust is also widely used as a key concept for understanding and predicting trust or distrust in emerging technologies. But whereas trust broadens the scope for understanding established technologies with well-defined questions and controversies, it easily fails to do so with emerging technologies, where there are no shared questions, a lack of public familiarity with the technology in question, and a restricted understanding amongst social researchers as to where distrust is likely to arise and how and under which form the technology will actually be implemented. Rather contrary, ‘trust’ might sometimes even direct social research into fixed structures that makes it even more difficult for social research to provide socially robust knowledge. This article therefore suggests that if trust is to maintain its important role in evaluating emerging technologies, the approach has to be widened and initially focus not on people’s motivations for trust, but rather the object of trust it self, as to predicting how and where distrust might appear, how the object is established as an object of trust, and how it is established in relation with the public.     

重复信任博弈的决策过程与结果评价

“信任他人或者不信任他人?”是社会互动中经常面临一种行为决择, 直接影响着个体的社会生活。作为一种重要的社会信号机制, 信任是建立良好社会关系的基石, 它能够降低社会交易成本, 易化合作行为。为了探究个体在信任互动情境下大脑活动变化的时间动态特征, 采用事件相关电位技术记录了20名健康被试(充当信任者)完成重复性信任博弈任务(repeated Trust Game, rTG)时的脑电成分。行为结果发现个体选择信任的比例显著高于几率水平。电生理学结果表明, 决策阶段中不信任选择比信任选择诱发了更正的P2成分(150~250 ms), 差异波溯源分析定位于额中回(middle frontal gyrus, BA 46)和额下回(inferior frontal gyrus, BA 46)。反馈阶段中损失反馈比获益反馈诱发了更负的FRN成分(200~300 ms), 而获益反馈比损失反馈诱发了更短的P300潜伏期。本研究为理解人类信任博弈过程的动态加工时程提供了初步的神经电生理学证据。     

Vulnerability,Resilience, and Surviving Destruction: Discussion of “The Analyst’s Experience of Trust and Mistrust”

In this response to Danielle Novack’s intellectually astute and clinically rich paper on the “analyst’s trust,” I reflect on the valuable ways in which Novack elucidates this undertheorized aspect of the analyst’s experience and reconfigures trust/mistrust as a meaningful intersubjective dimension of the therapeutic relationship. Novack shows how attending to shifts in trust/mistrust can provide valuable clues for deciphering the transference/countertransference. While I strongly agree with her construction of trust as a psychoanalytic achievement, I question the notion that the analyst’s trust is a necessary condition for her participation. Novack’s work on the analyst’s trust joins a broader contemporary conversation about potential overreaches in the relational paradigm, which I discuss. Finally, I consider the implications of Novack’s work for specifying the factors that underly resilience and engaging a conversation about surviving destruction in contemporary relational psychoanalysis.     

Trust in the workplace: factors affecting trust formation between team members

The authors used survey data from 127 professional-level employees working in 8 industries to assess the effects of respondent's trusting stance and (a) the trustee's organization membership (internal or external), (b) the hierarchical relationship (supervisor or peer), and (c) the gender of the trustee, on initial trust level for a new project team member. The authors found that trusting stance was positively related to initial trust level. The authors also found an interaction effect between respondent gender and trustee gender on initial trust. Specifically, male initial trust level was higher for a new male team member and lower for a new female team member. The present study provided additional understanding of the formation of initial trust levels and its importance for team functioning.     

Impact of Jin‐Shang teachings on Chinese people's trust

Three studies are reported that explore the impact of Jin‐Shang teachings (a specialized Confucius teaching of trust on business practices) on mainland Chinese people's trust. In Study 1 , we primed Confucius and Jin‐Shang teachings on trust, and compared their effects on trusting tendency to a control prime. We found that these teachings made mainland Chinese participants score higher on three different trusting scales. In Study 2 , we found that the Jin‐Shang prime made mainland Chinese participants invest more money in a trust game than those in the control prime. In Study 3 , we compared the Jin‐Shang prime to Protestant teachings and contemporary writings on reciprocity, and found that only the Jin‐Shang prime induced a significantly higher trusting tendency from Chinese participants than the control condition.     

Trust and belief: a preemptive reasons account

According to doxastic accounts of trust, trusting a person to \(\varPhi \) involves, among other things, holding a belief about the trusted person: either the belief that the trusted person is trustworthy or the belief that she actually will \(\varPhi \) . In recent years, several philosophers have argued against doxastic accounts of trust. They have claimed that the phenomenology of trust suggests that rather than such a belief, trust involves some kind of non-doxastic mental attitude towards the trusted person, or a non-doxastic disposition to rely upon her. This paper offers a new account of reasons for trust and employs the account to defend a doxastic account of trust. The paper argues that reasons for trust are preemptive reasons for action or belief. Thus the Razian concept of preemptive reasons, which arguably plays a key role in our understanding of relations of authority, is also central to our understanding of relations of trust. Furthermore, the paper argues that acceptance of a preemptive account of reasons for trust supports the adoption of a doxastic account of trust, for acceptance of such an account both neutralizes central objections to doxastic accounts of trust and provides independent reasons supporting a doxastic account.     

Trust,Endangerment, and Divine Vulnerability: An Interdisciplinary Conversation with Niklas Luhmann and K.E. Løgstrup

Faith is trusting God in the midst of endangerment. Yet, human experience of excessive suffering has challenged any spontaneous trust in God. In this article, I reconsider the idea of faith as trust in God, adding an emphasis on the divine vulnerability in the incarnation. I develop a more complex view of trust inspired by the Danish philosopher of religion K.E. Løgstrup and the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. I use this view of trust to reconsider the relationship between trust and faith in the God of incarnation.     

TRIANGLE EFFECT AND THE CONNOTATIVE MEANING OF TRUST IN PRISONER'S DILEMMA: A CROSS CULTURAL STUDY

Two hundred and forty-nine male postgraduate students of management played the Prisoner's Dilemma Game (Deutsch 1960) and filled out a postgame questionnaire measuring attitude toward the ‘other player’. Striking differences resulted between trusting and trustworthy subjects on the one hand and suspicious and untrustworthy subjects on the other with respect to different meanings given to the dimension of trust (cooperation) in the interaction. As predicted, trusting behavior of the other player was given a positive evaluative meaning - good versus bad - by the trusting and trustworthy subjects and negative dynamism meaning - weak versus strong - by the suspicious and untrustworthy subjects. The trusting players expected the typical other to make either trusting or suspicious moves, whereas the suspicious subjects expected the typical other to be uniformly suspicious, yielding a high Triangularity Index (Kelley and Stahelski 1970). Most provocatively, while 51% of trusting subjects thought that the other player was a female, 81% from among the suspicious subjects thought so. Some implications of the results in interpersonal and organizational situations are discussed.     

Cooperative,pure, and selfish trusting: Their distinctive effects on the reaction of trust recipients

Three types of trusting have been distinguished conceptually and empirically. In cooperative trusting the trust giver explicitly expects a reaction from the trust recipient that fits with the equality norm. In pure trusting, no explicit expectation is expressed by the giver. In selfish trusting the giver explicitly expects a reaction that benefits himself or herself at the expense of the recipient. We asked whether the three types of trust elicit distinctive reactions from trust recipients. Each participant was paired with a fictitious player who ostensibly enabled him or her to divide money between them. As hypothesized, both cooperative and pure trusting elicited more equal allocations than did selfish trusting. A second hypothesis, that cooperative trust would yield more equal allocations than pure trust, was not supported. Results are discussed in terms of equality norm, self‐interest norm, reciprocity norm, reactance theory, social sanctioning, and the need to comply with others' expectations. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Relation Between Early Adolescents’ Trust Beliefs in Peers and Reactions to Peer Provocation: Attributions of Intention and Retaliation

The authors examined the relation between early adolescents’ trust beliefs in peers and both their attributions for, and retaliatory aggression to, peer provocation. One hundred and eight-five early adolescents (102 male) from the United Kingdom (M age = 12 years, 2 months, SD = 3 months) completed the Children's Generalized Trust Beliefs in peer subscale (K. J. Rotenberg, C. Fox, et al., 2005) and reported the intentions of, and their retaliatory aggression to, hypothetical peer provocation. A curvilinear relation was found between trust beliefs in peers and retaliatory aggression but not for attributions of intention. Early adolescents with low and those with very high trust beliefs in peers reported greater retaliatory aggression than did early adolescents with the middle range of trust beliefs. The findings supported the conclusion that early adolescents who are high trusting, as well as those are very low trusting, are at risk for psychosocial maladjustment. Support was not obtained for a hostility attribution bias interpretation of those patterns.     

What Is Wrong with Lying?

One thing wrong with lying is that it can be manipulative. Understanding why lying can be a form of manipulation involves understanding how our telling someone something can give them a reason to believe it, and understanding this requires seeing both how our telling things can invite trust and how trust can be a reason to believe someone. This paper aims to outline the mechanism by means of which lies can be manipulative and through doing so identify a unique reason for accepting testimony; a reason based on trusting a speaker's telling.     

Trust,Distrust, and Feminist Theory

I explore Baier, Held, Okin, Code, Noddings, and Eisler on trust and distrust. This reveals a need for reflection on the analysis, ethics, and dynamics of trust and distrust—especially the distinction between trusting and taking for granted, the feasibility of choosing greater trust, and the possibility of moving from situations of warranted distrust to trust. It is impossible to overcome the need for trust through surveillance, recourse to contracts, or legal institutions.     

Getting off on the right foot: The role of openness to experience in fostering initial trust between culturally dissimilar partners

Cross-cultural partnerships can provide a competitive edge for organizations, but also hinder trust between individuals, and thus the flow of diverse knowledge that facilitates positive organizational outcomes. We investigate whether openness to experience (openness, in short) protects against lower trust in cross-cultural partnerships by weakening the effect of cultural diversity on trust formation processes (defined by perceived similarity and trustworthiness, serially). We randomly assigned White, American participants to partners from either the same or different (i.e., Chinese) cultural background. After introductions, participants rated their partner’s similarity and trustworthiness, and played a game assessing behavioral trust. Openness was measured 3–7 days prior. People high (versus low) on openness were more trusting towards culturally dissimilar partners because they perceived them as more similar, and thus more trustworthy.