The Leap: The Science Of Trust And Why It Matters Part 2

Bennett's article ran a few weeks after the Rockefeller case first made the headlines, and I was curious. Was Bennett right? Is this really what Clark Rockefeller did to his marks? Did the con man have a keen sense of social signals? And it does seem that a lot of observers were struck by how Rockefeller said things. According to one of the people he conned, Rockefeller spoke like the millionaire Thurston Howell III from Gilligan's Island.24 When the Boston Globe sent reporters to interview Rockefeller in jail, he bowed to each visitor, as if they were royalty.25 Or take the story of his acquaintance with Amy Patt.26 She was standing at a bus stop when Rockefeller came striding up to her, according to Seal. "Don't you look pretty today!" Rockefeller told her. The two soon developed a friends.h.i.+p, hanging out at the local Starbucks together. "He would say silly things like, 'Oh, Amy, Amy, Amy, we should have children together,'" she once explained. "'You're so smart, and our children would be so brilliant!'" Their relations.h.i.+p never became romantic, writes Seal. But Patt always thought highly of Rockefeller, always enjoyed his company. "He was really energetic and flirty," she explained, "and just sort of fun to be around."

I wanted to learn more about social signals, so I went to Boston to meet with Ben Waber, who is the CEO of a firm that offers consulting services based on the data that comes from the sociometer. Waber studied with Pentland at MIT, and he has a bit of the look of an indie rocker-shaved head, big leather watch, checkered s.h.i.+rt. Waber and I sat in the company's meeting room, both wearing sociometers as we talked, as the a.n.a.lysis of our discussion appeared on a small screen in front of us. The results looked like a video game, with each person represented by a circle. When Waber spoke to me, a line shot from his circle to my circle, and the more he talked, the larger his circle grew.

Waber leaned back and continued to speak-his circle shooting even more lines at my circle-as he explained that social signals help bind us into small networks of friends and colleagues. These groups are intimate, and when we're angry or disappointed, we turn to the people that we know well. When Waber gave sociometers to some eighty people working in a Bank of America call center a few years ago, for instance, he found that the employees who had a close-knit group of friends were more effective-and less stressed.27 With deeper social connections, these employees could better handle calls from irate customers, and, according to Waber, a 10 percent increase in group cohesion was the equivalent of an employee having an additional thirty years' worth of experience.

Waber let me see the power of social signals for myself, and he let me borrow a set of sociometers for a weekend so that my wife and I could test them out. At first I was worried that the devices were going to reveal something I didn't want revealed, and I felt like I was going to visit a marriage counselor who would have hard numbers on my various shortcomings. Would I be shown to be a pain-in-the-a.s.s nudge? Would I be the sort of guy who always interrupts his wife? But despite a couple of fraught events-such as my seven-year-old daughter's birthday party-the data was positive. My wife and I didn't seem to interrupt each other all that much, and at least on one of the days, it seemed that my wife and I spent a good amount of time mimicking each other. As Waber told me, during those times, "it would imply that you were really in sync."

But what's interesting about social signals is that they do more than bind us to our partners. They also link us into a much larger circle of people; they give us a way to relate to people who might be outside of our network. Or think of them as a way to create a type of bridging capital. In one project, Waber and his team used sociometers to track people in a company as they ate lunch.28 Some people went to a cafe that had small tables. Others went to a cafeteria that had large, twelve-person tables. It turned out that the people who sat at the big tables were more effective employees. They were also better able to handle difficult events such as downsizing. "When you eat lunch with somebody, not surprisingly, you're much more likely to talk to that person later in the day and later in the week," Waber told me. So, for instance, if Bob in sales has an administrative issue, he's far better off if he's had lunch a few times with Jeff in human resources. It gives Bob access to more information and faster, more innovative ways of getting things done.

There's little question that social ties helped Rockefeller promote his scam. Just consider the fact that Rockefeller didn't have a Social Security card or a driver's license, according to Seal. Rockefeller also often had acquaintances pay for him and drive for him.29 His large group of connections was particularly helpful when he went on the run, and before he kidnapped his daughter, Rockefeller had told some people that he was going to Alaska for a while.30 Others believed that he was heading to South Africa. Still others thought that he was going sailing.31 It made the first few days of the investigation a mess of false leads and bad tips.

As part of my reporting, I reached out to one of Rockefeller's friends, architect Patrick Hickox. In his book, Seal describes a fascinating interview with Hickox. The two men talked over wine and oysters, and in his remarks to Seal, Hickox argued that Rockefeller was a "genuine fraud." I was intrigued by Hickox's comment, and so I met up with the architect at a Mexican place just off Harvard Square.

Hickox arrived a minute or two late, bursting through the front door of the restaurant with the flair of an aging matinee idol. He wore a Burberry overcoat and a thin, silken scarf. His white hair fell around his face in a thick pageboy.

You look exactly like yourself, Hickox said as he stretched out his hand.

I hope so, I replied.

Well, given the conversation, this is important, he said and grinned.

Before Hickox met Rockefeller, he had seen the con man around Beacon Hill, usually talking with a group of people a.s.sociated with the school that Rockefeller's daughter attended. "I had spotted him around the neighborhood. He's somewhat of a striking person with his unusual hue of orange hair and somewhat projecting eyes," Hickox told me. The memory seemed to have stayed with Hickox in part because of the people that Rockefeller was talking to. "There he'd be every day with a handful of Beacon Hill types who were familiar and prominent," Hickox told me. "I mean, really major figures."

A friend introduced the two men at a fundraiser at the Four Seasons, and they soon became friends. Over the years, Hickox would occasionally have doubts about Rockefeller's ident.i.ty. But, all in all, Hickox didn't really question Rockefeller's story too much. After all, everyone else believed that Rockefeller was a Rockefeller. Plus, the con man was plainly charming. "There's a certain amount of mercurial skill with people that Rockefeller had," Hickox told me.

Hickox explained that when most people found out about Rockefeller's scam, they felt betrayed. They felt scared. But Hickox saw it all as an act, a sort of show.

"I was just thinking of that phrase from Tennyson's 'Ulysses,'" Hickox said. "Do you know that poem?"

I shook my head, mumbling something about maybe having read it in high school. Hickox explained that Tennyson's poem features the Greek king Ulysses, who wistfully remembers his early days as a warrior and wonders if he should set out on one last adventure. Hickox then quoted a few lines: "All experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world."

For Hickox, the relevance to our conversation was plain. Much like Alex Pentland, Tennyson argued that we are "a part of all that we have met," and by creating the fake Clark Rockefeller, Clark Rockefeller had become the real Clark Rockefeller, Hickox suggested. "In his mind, he is still Clark Rockefeller, even though he has been exposed. So much has been involved in this long evolution tested by experience," Hickox told me.

So Rockefeller was a Rockefeller because others believed that he was a Rockefeller. "So he created this network and just became a part of it?" I asked.

"That's right," Hickox replied. "And certainly he would have loved that way of looking at it."

When we talk about a con man like Clark Rockefeller, there's one final thing to think about: There's a little bit of a con man in all of us. Sometimes we do cheat and steal.32 We are dishonest. In fact, you've probably already spun a few fibs today. "I'll see you at the party," you told a friend, even though you had no plans of attending the event. Or maybe you told your coworker, "I love your jacket," when in fact you believed the coat was painfully ugly. People will often tell as many as three lies during a coffee breaklength conversation. This sort of deceit isn't limited to spinning fibs either. It turns out that there are even some people who lie for a living.

So how do we reconcile this fact-that most people are both trustworthy and untrustworthy? The question is important to understanding how we can improve our faith in others. There's a conflict here, to be sure. In his book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, psychologist Dan Ariely argues that part of our nature is selfish.33 Cash, fame, fancy houses-people desire it all. But at the same time, there's the issue of self-respect: Am I a good person? Am I kind and trustworthy? So when people do something that's wrong, they rationalize. Ariely puts it well: "Essentially, we cheat up to the level that allows us to retain our self-image as reasonably honest individuals."

This explains why it's often easy for people to lie and cheat: They don't see lying and cheating as lying and cheating. No doubt, people get nervous if they're spinning a clear and obvious falsehood. When people tell an unabashed lie, they become jittery. Their skin becomes clammy. They start breathing heavily.

But when we tell white, or social, lies, we often don't feel any anxiety at all. In fact, small embellishments can even have a positive psychological effect. College students who exaggerated their GPA in interviews later showed improvement in their grades. Their fiction, in other words, became self-fulfilling. "Exaggerators tend to be more confident and have higher goals for achievement," Richard Gramzow, a psychologist at the University of Southampton in England who ran the study, told me. "Positive biases about the self can be beneficial."

There's not much that separates a slight exaggeration from a ma.s.sive whopper, though. When you're not telling the truth, you're telling a lie. These are all transgressions, big or small, and ultimately what we're doing is lying to ourselves. Dan Ariely once conducted a study that gives another way to understand this idea. For the experiment, he slipped into a college dorm and tucked a six-pack of c.o.ke in half of the building's fridges. In the other fridges, Ariely placed a paper plate with a half dozen one-dollar bills.

As Ariely points out, if the students didn't care about what they were stealing-the c.o.kes or the money-both items would have disappeared from the fridge at the same rate. After all, if a student was really parched, he could have used one of the bills to buy a c.o.ke. When Ariely returned a day and a half later, all the sodas had vanished. But the bills? No one had even fingered them. For Ariely, the point was that we don't like stealing things that have clear monetary value, like crisp dollar bills. But when we take a c.o.ke from the fridge, we don't see that as, well, stealing.

There are many ways to s.h.i.+ft this equation, as Ariely notes. We can make promises. We can clarify expectations. Studies also suggest that people are less trustworthy if they are anxious or stressed or just plain tired. Our connections to others matter, too, and we're more trustworthy if we know someone is watching. But perhaps most important, the research on lying makes clear that people rarely spin large yarns. In Ariely's experiments, for instance, very few people turned out to be dedicated wrongdoers. Almost no one in his studies fully took advantage of other people.

So why do we believe otherwise? Why do we think that others are so untrustworthy? Part of the issue is that negative events are often more salient in our minds, and so if something bad happens, we're more likely to remember it than something good. Another issue is the media. As a species, we didn't evolve to get a constant Twitter feed of negative news, and because of headlines that scream the news of one crisis after another, people believe that the world is far more cruel-hearted than it really is. So while violent gun crime has been dropping steadily, most Americans believe that it's on the rise.34 As for Rockefeller, he and his daughter eventually made it down to Baltimore. Rockefeller had purchased a house not far from downtown, and he was in the process of building yet another persona for himself as Chip Smith. But a Baltimore realtor tipped off law enforcement, and the FBI soon arrested the con man. Later that day, two agents placed Rockefeller in a white-walled room to talk about his case.35 The video of the interview is grainy and washed-out. It's hard to see facial expressions. The social cues are blurry and hard to read. But you can still see glimpses of the Rockefeller who convinced so many.

A few minutes into the video, one of the agents asks Rockefeller if he wants to tell his side of the story. Rockefeller looks the agent in the eye and then raps the table with his knuckles for emphasis. "My sincere apologies for the problems that I caused to you."

"Accepted," the agent mumbles with a wave of his hand. "We're all adults."

"My sincere apologies," Rockefeller says again.

Both of the agents nod their heads now.

"Thank you," one says. And for a short moment, Rockefeller's shoulders sink. He looks toward the table. A rapport had been established.

The agents, of course, didn't believe Rockefeller-he was the con man who proves the rule. Most people are worthy of our trust, and Rockefeller was eventually convicted of kidnapping and murder. And that bring us to our next chapter, which looks at how we can repair our faith once it's been broken.

Chapter 4.

Can We Trust Again?

Learning from Rwanda IN THE East African country of Rwanda, about twenty miles north of the capital of Kigali, Empimaque Semugabo went to go check on a pig. The animal lived in a small, mud-filled pen, and Semugabo pulled up some yam leaves to feed to the animal.1 Pigs eat a lot, Semugabo told me as he pushed the large green leaves into the pen. Semugabo will eventually sell the pig at a local market, and the resulting profit will go to Semugabo-and some of the men who helped kill his family.

Two decades ago, a brutal genocide swept across Rwanda, and many of Semugabo's relatives died in the violence. Semugabo managed to escape, and today he often sees some of the men who partic.i.p.ated in the murdering of his family. He will greet them with a warm handshake or a loose hug. They'll talk about their children or their crops or the latest development in soccer's Premier League, and for his part, Semugabo does his best not to think about how a group of men cast his family into a latrine to die.

Rwanda's genocide exploded in April 1994. After a gunman missiled down President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane, Hutu extremists rolled out an extermination campaign against the minority Tutsis.2 The violence was fast and brutal and often executed by hand. Members of the Hutu militia hacked adults to death with machetes. They killed children by smas.h.i.+ng their heads against a wall. The death toll eventually reached 800,000. "I cut down some alive and on their feet," recalled one killer who led a ma.s.sacre in a church.3 "I began to strike without seeing who it was, taking potluck with the crowd, so to speak. Our legs were much hampered by the crush, and our elbows kept b.u.mping."

In hindsight, there aren't nearly enough reasons for all the murderous violence. Religion, language, and culture are all shared by both Hutus and Tutsis, and in many areas, the two groups lived together without incident for decades. Many intermarried and had families together. There were divisions along the lines of wealth and power, however, and for a long time Tutsis were the nation's elite. The group had more wealth, more education, more prestige. The Hutus had everything else, which wasn't very much. But in the early 1990s, a group of radical Hutus gained power, and they cultivated a sense of loathing. The Hutu leaders referred to Tutsis as "c.o.c.kroaches." They blamed Tutsis for political instability. Anyone who worked with a Tutsi was a traitor.

About two weeks after the attack on Habyarimana's plane, some Tutsis ran into Empimaque Semugabo's village north of Kigali. They recounted how the Hutu militia had a.s.saulted their village, burning houses, killing Tutsis, throwing grenades at anyone who tried to fight them. When Semugabo saw the victims, he was working in the fields. The morning was rainy and wet, and he knew there was no time to go home.

So he swam across a lake at the edge of the village and soon stumbled out of the water on the other side, tired and gasping for air. Looking back toward the village, he could see a group of men with machetes and sticks. He could hear their shouts echo over the water. Semugabo couldn't make out everything, but he watched as the men killed a small boy near the sh.o.r.e.

It was only later that Semugabo learned that the Hutu militia also attacked two of his sisters, three of his nieces, and his aunt on that morning. The men battered the women and children until they were dead or half-dead, and then they looted their houses. Another group of men hauled the corpses and barely breathing bodies to one of the village's outdoor latrines, a deep pit of feces and urine. The Hutus pushed the half-living tangle of arms and legs inside.

"There was no possibility of them escaping," one of the Hutus who partic.i.p.ated in the murders recalled. "There was no human thinking."

On that morning, Semugabo fled north and joined the RPF, a Tutsi rebel group led by General Paul Kagame. Semugabo fought with the RPF for a while before moving to a village not far from where his family had been killed. Over the following years, Semugabo often saw some of the men who partic.i.p.ated in the murder of his family. Some had gone to jail; others had done some form of community service. Many still lived in the area.

Eventually, after various efforts and initiatives and workshops, Semugabo began to reconcile with the killers, and today some of them work together in a small farming cooperative, sharing the profits from the animals that they raise. One of the men who partic.i.p.ated in the killings is now the G.o.dfather to one of Semugabo's sons. "I trust them," Semugabo told me. "They also trust me."

How is this possible? You might believe that once trust is broken, it can never be repaired. This is the oft-repeated message of afternoon television talk shows, or as Dr. Phil says, "The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior."4 But our faith in others can be restored. We are so deeply wired to work together that even after a terrible betrayal, we will place our faith in others again. In this chapter, I'll touch on why social trust goes wrong as well as examine some of the ways that we can rebuild our faith in others.

What's important to keep in mind is that while there's no question that Semugabo's act of forgiveness is remarkable, it's not as remarkable as people might believe. Many others have forgiven heinous crimes. In 1995, for instance, the daughter of Bud Welch died in the Oklahoma City blast.5 At first, Welch wanted revenge, and he says that he would have murdered Timothy McVeigh himself if he had had the opportunity. But eventually Welch reconciled with McVeigh's family and even began advocating against his execution. Or take the case of Conor McBride.6 In 2010, McBride shot and killed Ann Grosmaire. But Grosmaire's parents, Kate and Andy, ultimately forgave McBride, and during the judicial proceedings, the family argued for him to receive a lighter sentence. Even after the sentencing, the couple would visit him in prison once a month.

Not everyone is as forgiving as Semugabo or Welch or the Grosmaires. But most of us forgive all the time. We pardon friends who are late. We overlook colleagues who make rude remarks. We forgive for the simple reason that it rebuilds the bonds of the group.7 Plus, sometimes we don't have much of a choice. To succeed at work, to succeed at home, to succeed at school, we have to work with others, and without some form of trust, cooperation is nearly impossible.

This sort of groupish pressure exists in Rwanda, largely due to its recent history. After most modern large-scale conflicts, the warring sides don't typically live together again in close proximity.8 But the Rwandan experience is different, and many of the Tutsi families that fled to Uganda and the Congo during the genocide have since returned home to their old towns and villages. At the same time, many of the Hutus who partic.i.p.ated in the genocide have finished their prison sentences and gone back to their old towns and villages. Today, Hutus and Tutsis, victims and killers, go to the same marketplaces. They work adjoining fields. They see each other at church and school and the local bar. They try to forgive for the reason that it makes it easier to work together again in a group.

Empimaque Semugabo and Seleman Jyamubandi had known each other for years before the genocide. Their cattle used to graze in the same valley, and for a long time the families of the two men lived on the same hill. Yet, in April 1994, Jyamubandi joined in on the attacks on the Tutsis. Area functionaries asked him to partic.i.p.ate in the killings, and Jyamubandi got dressed in pants and a s.h.i.+rt and armed himself with a stick before meeting up with the Hutu militia.

"The genocide was planned by the local government officials," Jyamubandi said. "The government encouraged me." The officials a.s.signed Jyamubandi to bring the bodies of the Tutsis to the latrine and push them into it-some were still conscious as they fell to the bottom. "If the people had been taken to a hospital, they could have survived," Jyamubandi said.

In the years immediately after the genocide, Semugabo avoided speaking with Jyamubandi. He thought that silence might be one of the best ways to make Jyamubandi regret what he did. But the two men eventually began a process of forgiveness. Semugabo wanted to move on, to give up his anger, so the two men partic.i.p.ated in a workshop devoted to reconciliation, which "made the truth come out and the human side show up," Semugabo says.

The two men also held a small ceremony at Semugabo's house, where they drank beer and invited relatives to celebrate their coming together. During the ceremony, Jyamubandi promised that he would never let anyone hurt Semugabo's family again. Today, their wives belong to the same church. Their children attend the same school. Jyamubandi is one of Semugabo's closest friends. "I have dropped the anger and developed a human heart," Semugabo told me.

Bagwire Illuminee lives in Kigali. Her home is at the end of an alley, off a dirt road, not far from the city's downtown. When I drove up on a recent evening with my translator, a heavy mist hung in the air. City lights sparkled and s.h.i.+mmered in the distance. A few men sat around an outdoor bar watching a game of soccer on television. We hiked up a narrow street to Illuminee's house, past cement walls topped with barbed wire, past a woman cooking dinner on her stoop, past all the other houses packed into the hillside like so many office cubicles. By 8:45, we were in Illuminee's home, listening to the radio.

Every week, Illuminee follows the radio broadcast of the soap opera Musekeweya, which translates as "new dawn."9 For a long time, some 90 percent of Rwandans followed the radio soap opera, with more than 60 percent saying that they listened to the show every week. Over the past few years, the program's numbers have slipped to around 85 percent, but even with the slightly lower listeners.h.i.+p, the soap opera may still be one of the most followed radio programs in the world. It certainly is one of the most effective at promoting faith in others, and people who regularly listen to the show have a more positive view of trust.

On that spring evening, Illuminee had a half dozen people in her living room. A woman with a bright purple head scarf sat on a wooden sofa. A thin man with a baseball cap and watery eyes perched himself on a step. All were steadfast fans of the show, which revolves around two invented villages. The fictional towns are called b.u.manzi and Muhumuro, and they each have their own hill and share a river that lies between them. Every season, the characters in the two villages fight and argue and feud but over time, they also forgive and placate and reunite. The show never explicitly mentions Hutus and Tutsis, and yet everyone who listens to the show knows what it's about, that the radio program is a metaphor for Rwandan society.

The narrative of the show is jumpy, with unexpected love affairs and cliff-hanger kidnappings. When I listened with Illuminee, the show first developed a plotline about a man who heard people throwing stones at his house in the middle of the night. Then there was a tender moment between a young woman and her male friend. In the final scene, a man visits his mother in prison. He tells her that a factory has been built. People's lives are improving. The villagers are coming together, he tells her. But his mother wants to hear none of it. "Remember we are always your family, so don't forget that," she tells her son.

The soap opera strives to be realistic. The program deals with some of the cla.s.sic problems of Rwandan village life, like bad potato harvests, and to create believable dialogue, one of the show's writers hangs out in bars and listens to prost.i.tutes talk up clients. But more than anything, the show gives people a way to start to make sense of the genocide. In many ways, this accounts for the soap opera's remarkable success, because to regain social trust, we first have to gain a sense of how our trust went wrong.

This is harder than it seems, and part of the issue is that too often confessions are non-confessions. Politicians, toddlers, steroid-juiced sports stars-all often admit fault without really admitting fault. When Pete Rose was the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, he often bet on baseball games, and the league eventually banned him from the sport because of his gambling. In his autobiography, Rose seems to want to come clean.10 But he also brushes off his misconduct. He doesn't seem sincere. "I'm supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I've accepted that I've done something wrong," Rose writes. "But you see, I'm just not built that way."

What's important about confessions is that they give context, and in Rwanda, people want to know what happened. They want to understand why the attacks occurred. A confession-or something more formal, like a truth and reconciliation commission-also typically addresses two related points. It underscores a sense of regret as well as offers some sort of commitment that things will not go wrong again. The Rwandan soap opera tries to address these issues, and the program relies on the work of psychologist Ervin Staub, who argues that genocide often requires "pa.s.sive bystanders."11 For Staub, people who remain quiet in the face of ma.s.s violence play a crucial role, and pa.s.sive or inactive bystanders can give perpetrators a sort of tacit permission.

At the same time, the soap opera tries to show that people can adjust, that individuals can adapt, and over the course of the program, the biggest star of the drama goes from being the chief villain to the main hero. All of this works to promote a feeling of empowerment, a sense of understanding. Some years ago, psychologist Elizabeth Paluck conducted a study of the soap opera, showing that people who listened to the radio program were significantly more likely to believe that trust was a positive trait.12 The listeners also reported having more empathy for others as well as being more open to dissent.

Before I left Illuminee's house that evening, I talked with the other dedicated soap opera listeners for a while. One man told me that the show inspired him to forgive the men who killed his parents. Another said that the soap opera helped her better grasp why people did what they did. No one argued that the show would fix all of their problems; there are some crimes that cannot be explained-or forgiven. Or as one man said, the soap opera might provide only 9 percent of the solution.

Instead, the soap opera seemed to give people a framework to begin to understand something that seems beyond understanding. "When a person is alone, it's very hard to imagine something different to make him happy and to mend his broken heart. That's why the program is an encouragement," Chantal Uwimbabazi told me. "It helps him or her gain that imagination."

One of the questions that haunts the soap opera-and Rwanda itself-is an enduring one: How could people have trusted so much? Why didn't Tutsis and other Hutu moderates see the signs that a ma.s.s killing would occur? After all, there were all sorts of cues that genocide was imminent-in villages, in marketplaces, there was constant gossip about a coming attack. There had also been ma.s.s killings in 1959, 1963, and 1973, and in the weeks before the genocide, street gangs often strutted around Kigali, hailing the power of the Hutus. It all led one Belgian to observe that the Rwandan government "is planning the extermination of the Tutsi of Rwanda to resolve once and for all, in their own way, the ethnic problem."13 Let's first take a step back, though, because it turns out that our approach to risk-or our judgment of whom to trust-isn't totally logical. When you look at the data, it's actually pretty embarra.s.sing. This goes well beyond the issue of ma.s.s killings, and we fear snakes more than cigarettes, even though snakes usually kill about a half dozen people a year.14 Lung cancer, in contrast, kills more than 100,000 people annually. Or just look at sharks. If you watch a lot of TV, or even just follow Shark Week, you might believe that shark attacks have become an epidemic. But sharks kill only about four people a year, which is essentially nothing given the fact that about 200 million people visit beaches in the United States every year.15 The bottom line is that our approach to risk isn't always rational. If we were perfectly logical-if we could predict when a genocide was about to happen-our mental formula for risk should look something like this, according to writer Amanda Ripley, who smartly describes the psychology of risk in her book The Unthinkable:16 Risk = Probability Consequence But within our brains, our mental risk formula actually looks a lot more like this: Risk = Probability Consequence Dread The dread factor changes everything, and generally we dread things that have certain attributes. Gruesomeness, issues of control, uncertainty, graphicness-these all change the dread factor, as Ripley and other experts argue.17 In her book, Ripley gives the example of airplanes. I'm often more afraid of snakes, honestly, so let's consider the reptiles again, because dread is what makes snakes appear more dangerous than lung cancer. Snakes seem like something that we can't control, as opposed to other risks such as smoking. Also, a snake attack appears uncertain. A Western rattler seems like something that could attack us at any time. And finally, a snakebite seems like a particularly graphic way to die.

The dread factor works against us in all sorts of ways. It makes us afraid of lots of things, people and situations that simply aren't that dangerous, such as sharks. Because of the dread factor, we're also scared of certain types of diseases-flesh-eating bacteria, for example-when all in all, they're actually pretty rare. But most relevant is the fact that dread makes us trust too much, and it was dread-or a lack of dread-that made hundreds of thousands of Tutsis stay when they really should have left.

Take the survivor of another genocide as an example. Elie Wiesel should be one of the least trusting people in the world. When he was fifteen, the n.a.z.is sent him to Auschwitz.18 At the Polish death camp, Wiesel watched babies being thrown into bonfires. He hungered constantly for something to eat. A dentist at the n.a.z.i-run camp once pried a gold tooth from Wiesel's mouth with a spoon. "Here, there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone," a n.a.z.i guard told Wiesel. But Wiesel managed to survive, and he later described his story in the book Night, which helped him earn the n.o.bel Peace Prize.

Years later, a friend came to Wiesel and said, "Look, you work so hard. What are you doing with your money?"19 "Shares here and there," Wiesel replied.

The writer's interests lay in ethics, Wiesel explained; he didn't know that much about finance. So the friend introduced Wiesel to an investment manager named Bernie Madoff. To Wiesel, Madoff seemed impressive. The friend told Wiesel that the n.o.bel Prize winner was "not rich enough" to join Madoff's fund, but that Madoff would make an exception for Wiesel. "It was a myth that [Madoff] created around [himself]. That everything was so special, so unique, that it had to be secret," Wiesel once explained.

When Wiesel and Madoff got together for dinner, they didn't talk about finance. Instead, they talked ethics and education and whether or not Wiesel might resign from Boston University and teach instead at Queens College in New York City. The notion that Madoff was a fraud never seemed to have crossed Wiesel's mind. The writer eventually gave more than $15 million to the investor's fund, and once Madoff's Ponzi scheme was revealed, Wiesel lost it all.

"How did it happen? It's almost simplistic," Wiesel explained. "I have seen in my lifetime that the problem is when the imagination of the criminal precedes that of the innocent. And Madoff had imagination."

When it came to Madoff, Wiesel did not have a feeling of dread. He didn't see danger. It's not that the Holocaust survivor didn't know that people could be evil. Instead, it seems that Madoff's fund didn't engage Wiesel's sense of worry. The fund didn't seem uncertain or gruesome or something he couldn't control, and so Wiesel handed over his money. "We gave him everything, we thought he was G.o.d," Wiesel recalled. "We trusted everything in his hands."

If Wiesel didn't have dread, if he didn't mistrust, it's easy to see why so many of the Tutsis did not flee the country. At the time that the violence first broke out in 1994, many Tutsis simply didn't believe that their neighbors and friends and colleagues would all turn against them. The Hutus had the advantage of what Wiesel calls the "imagination of the criminal." But there's another set of questions that are just as important: Why did the killers do what they did? Why did the Hutus murder with such ease? How can people commit genocide?

In Rwanda, what's striking is just how personal the killings were, and many of the Hutu killers knew their victims well. One man told me that he killed a half dozen people who had lived in his village. Other victims explained how their friends and neighbors attacked them. Or recall Seleman Jyamubandi-he had been friendly with Empimaque Semugabo since Semugabo was a child.

How is this possible? The radio soap opera provided some glimpses of an answer, but there's more going on here, and when we think about trusting too much, we have to consider the incredible power of peer pressure. We typically a.s.sociate peer pressure-and its cognitive kin, conformity-with teenagers. When it comes to smoking or teen s.e.x or driving drunk, high schoolers seem particularly vulnerable to the opinions of others. But for most adults, our willingness to go along with the group is far stronger than we'd like to admit, and in a way, we're all constantly broadcasting our inclusion in a certain social group.

Consider, for instance, the clothes you're wearing today. Your decisions about your shoes (sneakers or loafers?) and rings (silver or gold?) and pants (khakis or jeans?) all underscore your desire to fit in.20 They indicate what sort of group you belong to, what culture you want to conform to.

This pressure to conform, to go with the beliefs of the tribe, goes far beyond the issue of genocide. Almost every board of directors, almost every team of salespeople, suffers from this kind of social pressure in one form or another, and versions of the phenomenon have been behind the Enron scandal, the dot-com bubble, and the recent real estate bust.21 In many ways, the issue is that people comfort themselves with the beliefs of others. As we saw with the research on the sociometers, people use their networks to support themselves.

When it comes to genocide, a lot of other factors are at play. When I spoke to psychologist Erwin Staub, who helped create the radio soap opera, he gave me a long list of factors that can build conditions for a ma.s.s killing: economic threats, uncertain futures, the dehumanization of others. In Rwanda, there was also significant violence leading up to the genocide, and that sort of brutal confusion can push people further into conformity. As Philip Zimbardo argues in his thoughtful book The Lucifer Effect: "Ordinary people, even good ones, can be seduced, recruited, initiated into behaving in evil ways under the sway of powerful systematic and situational forces."22 But perhaps what's most disconcerting is that groups do more than silence people's doubts. They might actually make people see things differently. Seleman Jyamubandi, then, may not have suppressed doubts when he threw the bodies into the pit toilet during the genocide. As Jyamubandi stood in the rain and mud, as he tossed the corpses into the latrine, as he watched the looting, he just may not have had any doubts at all.

A few years ago, Emory University psychologist Gregory Berns scanned people's brains while they were exposed to a type of peer pressure.23 Not surprisingly, a large percentage of the subjects gave the wrong answer if they were told that everyone else gave the wrong answer. Berns, simply put, showed that peer pressure is a strong social force.

What was surprising were the brain scans. Because when Berns examined the data from the fMRI, he found that when people decided to follow the decision of the group, there was almost no neural activity, indicating that they were overruling their visual observations. Instead, the brain areas a.s.sociated with emotional processing lit up, as if people were attempting to understand the social implications of going along with the group. While the study is far from conclusive, Berns argues that the pressure for conformity actually changed what people saw. "We like to think that seeing is believing," Berns told a New York Times reporter.24 But the study's findings suggest that "seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe."

There are a lot of reasons to worry about the power of groups. But when it comes to social trust, perhaps the most disturbing thing is just how quickly these groups form. For the slightest, most irrelevant of reasons, we will discriminate against people outside of our clan. In Rwanda, radio programs were key in hardening the social lines between Hutus and Tutsis, and in the months before the killings, one radio station called RTLM made incessant calls for genocide: "Cut the tall trees. Clean your neighborhood," the announcer would say.25 The radio program mixed its genocidal messages with popular music and easy banter. It made it seem like being a proud Hutu was the thing to do. What's more, RTLM played its message over and over again; it reminded Hutus again and again that they should take action, later even giving very specific directions about whom to attack. To create the conditions necessary for genocide, this sort of propaganda is crucial. It builds up a type of social pressure for killing. It makes it seem like the killings are inevitable, and today many of the Hutu killers blame the radio station for the murders. Seleman Jyamubandi, for instance, told me that it was the RTLM radio program that inspired him to take part in the ma.s.sacre. "It called for the Tutsi killing," he told me.

This might seem like a cop-out answer but it's not. Because even without the pressure of propaganda, we all have a deep propensity toward stereotyping. In many ways, this idea first took shape with another genocide survivor, psychologist Henri Tajfel. When World War II broke out in 1939, Tajfel was studying chemistry in Paris.26 He had grown up in Poland in a Jewish family, and he managed to spend the war in a POW camp. But when Tajfel returned to Paris in 1945, his family was gone. Almost everyone he knew before the war was dead. Tajfel soon began studying social psychology, and in a way, his research questions were obvious. Why do people discriminate? How does genocide happen?

In one of his earliest experiments, Tajfel told a group of young men that he was administering a quiz that would test their visual skills.27 Tajfel had the men estimate the number of dots on a page, then sorted the group into two teams based on their results. The distinction between the two teams was "flimsy and unimportant" according to Tajfel. But still, when he told the young men to divvy up some money among themselves, they gave more cash to the men on their own team.

The issue is that people outside of our clan appear less trustworthy, so we're less likely to put our faith in them. We view them as outsiders, as interlopers, and even something as arbitrary as the shape of someone's nose or the arch of his eyebrow or the number of dots that he estimates on a page can make it seem as if someone is not part of our group and thus less reliable and honest.28 But the second and perhaps more important lesson is that it's easy to get caught up in our trusting ways. We can have too much faith. Or as physicist Richard Feynman once said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."29 There are some solutions to trusting too much. One thing that's particularly powerful is dissent, as we saw in the radio soap opera. Active bystanders can play an important role in making sure that people don't trust too much. The good news is that a small amount of dissent goes a long way, as James Surowiecki argues in his marvelous book The Wisdom of Crowds, and often just one individual is enough to upend the power of conformity.

For example, in Philip Zimbardo's infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, an outsider-psychologist Christina Maslach-saw the guards abusing the prisoners, and she told Zimbardo that the experiment needed to end. In Solomon Asch's well-known conformity experiment, the presence of a single objector pulled down the effect of peer pressure by a third, as Surowiecki notes. The ability to empathize makes a difference, too, and in Stanley Milgram's conformity experiments, subjects were less likely to obey if they were sitting closer to the person getting the electrical shocks.30 Or take Paul Rusesabagina, who saved the lives of more than 1,000 people during the Rwandan genocide. His story was chronicled in a Hollywood blockbuster, Hotel Rwanda. Rusesabagina argues that he was just a regular guy who took action because he had no choice. But dig into his autobiography, An Ordinary Man, and it's clear that Rusesabagina had an outsider's sense of perspective. He didn't, for instance, have a strong allegiance to either Hutus or Tutsis, and it turns out that his father was a Hutu, his mother a Tutsi. Rusesabagina was also the manager of a large hotel in downtown Kigali, and it seems that he had constant interactions with foreigners.

But perhaps just as significant, Rusesabagina had a sense of empathy. He was someone who understood the power of connection. Take, for instance, how Rusesabagina describes making a business deal. "The very act of negotiation makes it difficult, if not impossible, to dehumanize the person across the table from you," he writes in his autobiography. "You are forced to make a compromise, and by doing this you are forced to understand, and even sympathize with, the other person's position." The takeaway, then, isn't that we need to deny all of our faith in others, or that we need to ignore our social nature. It is, after all, part of who we are. Instead, we need to make sure that we engage outsiders, that we promote dissent, that we don't become too wrapped up in our trusting ways.

Even with all this context, it remains difficult to comprehend the brutal depths of the Rwandan genocide. At one memorial site a few miles outside of the capital, I saw the skeleton of a woman who had had a wooden spike inserted into her v.a.g.i.n.a and driven through her body. At other sites, men hacked off the feet of small children. One group of killers pulled the hearts out of victims' bodies and ate them. Put simply, there was little dissent in Rwanda. Few were able to push back against the Hutu government, and through a dedicated and targeted approach, a small faction of government officials managed to turn a group of Hutus into monsters.

But people did survive the genocide. A nation still exists today. Every day in Rwanda, people are trying to live their lives. They send their kids to school. They ride the bus to work. Empimaque Semugabo now works as a security guard. Another victim that I spoke to runs a small milk company. Another survivor earns his income in home construction. And like people everywhere, they dream of a better society, of better opportunities. But for that to happen, there needs to be some sense that a ma.s.sive break in trustworthiness has deep consequences.

When it comes to a small break in trust, punishment isn't all that important. When the transgression is small, a confession can seem like a form of atonement. But when the crime is large-a vicious rape, a brutal murder, a case of genocide-people need more. We want reparation and atonement, retribution and punishment. What's more, justice can work to create a sense of trust, a feeling of togetherness.

Rwanda struggled with this idea after the genocide. How does a nation provide redress to victims after a ma.s.s murder? What's the proper punishment for someone who hacks off the feet of a child? How could the nation create justice without leading to more killings? The nation's leaders also wanted the judicial process to empower the victims, and the government eventually decided to prosecute all of the perpetrators using a gra.s.sroots, mediation-style judicial approach. The system was called gacaca, which translates roughly as "on the gra.s.s," and it incorporated many of the nation's precolonial legal traditions, where a town elder would typically moderate a dispute between two villagers.