Intuition? Uneven. Polygraphs? Cheats beat them all the time. Really, there's no surefire way to figure out whether someone is trustworthy or not. That's something America's spies would like to change.
Next month, the Iarpa, the intelligence community's mad science division, is holding a researchers' conference in Virginia to discuss the agency's latest program. It's called TRUST, short for "Tools for Recognizing Useful Signals of Trustworthiness." The idea is to bring a little confidence to the art of BS-detection by developing "sensors and software" that can "amplify our own useful signals in order to more accurately predict trust and trustworthiness in others."
"Both trust and trustworthiness - as concepts, much less measures - remain highly qualitative and often unproven," the agency complains. Even the term is hopelessly muddied. "Trust to an organizational psychologist rarely refers to the same thing as trust to a behavioral economist, or a cognitive neuroscientist, or others... Without at least some common understanding and measures of interpersonal trust, knowing who is trustworthy under specific conditions may remain more speculative than it might otherwise have to be."
Iarpa is looking to take a two-step approach to assemble those "combinations of sensors that will detect reliable signals of trust in operationally-relevant scenarios." Phase one entails settling on some "experimental protocols that can be validated in order to measure, quantify, and assess different kinds of interpersonal trust." Step two: use those protocols to develop liar-spotting tools. The hope is to give spooks some peace of mind. God forbid our professional deceivers should have to feel paranoid and untrusting.
