Re: Learning to doubt

Lance wrote: 
Peter H.M. Brooks wrote:

Lance wrote:

Peter Ashby wrote:

Essentially the idea is that the social world works on the basis of trust. If you work for a company, for example, you trust that your hard work will be recognized and you will get promotion, and the like. The cynic has come to doubt that this trust is well placed, and is thus inclined to look for short cuts. The cynic begins to believe that it is not what you do or how hard you work but who you know, etc. So when corruption of some kind is offered, often the cynic will sucumb to temptation, but the trusting person will resist. Indeed in one experimental test, people who scored highly on a trustingness scale almost never bought a fake watch from a stooge on the street, but a significant proportion of those who scored as low on trust were caught by the scam. So there are advantages to trust...

You've lost me now. I didn't realise that fake watches were a scam - I thought that they existed to upset people who wasted their money on real Rolexes.


Cynicism taken to a new level?

I'm really not meaning to be cynical - I suppose that they might have been thirty years ago when they first turned up and people weren't aware of them.



--
Those who know anything about the matter are aware that every writer, from Epicurus to Bentham, who maintained the theory of utility, meant by it, not something to be contradistinguished from pleasure, but pleasure itself, together with exemption from pain; and instead of opposing the useful to the agreeable or the ornamental, have always declared that the useful means these, among other things. -- J.S.Mill Chapter II, Utilitarianism
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Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Learning to doubt
    ... Essentially the idea is that the social world works on the basis of trust. ... If you work for a company, for example, you trust that your hard work will be recognized and you will get promotion, and the like. ... Indeed in one experimental test, people who scored highly on a trustingness scale almost never bought a fake watch from a stooge on the street, but a significant proportion of those who scored as low on trust were caught by the scam. ...
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