Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Laura Brandimarte. "Discounting the Past: Bad Weighs Heavier than Good". Talk or presentation, 11, November, 2010.

Abstract
This paper studies how individuals’ trust and appreciation of other parties is affected by the valence and maturity of information about actions or traits of those parties. Specifically, it introduces and tests the hypothesis that the effect of information about individuals or organizations with negative valence tends to fade away more slowly than the effects of information with positive valence, not only because its immediate impact may be stronger, but also because negative and positive information is discounted differently. To empirically test this hypothesis, we designed three survey-based randomized experiments, in which we manipulated the valence of the information that subjects are exposed to and the time to which such information refers. We measured how our subjects reacted to such information using judgment metrics of trust and liking derived from the literature or created ad-hoc for our experiments. We used a difference-in-difference model to disentangle the effects of valence, time and their interaction. Our findings provide some empirical support for our hypothesis. We suggest the theoretical grounds that could motivate differential discounting, and the privacy implications of such phenomenon in a society where negative and positive information about people, useful for judging the trustworthiness of technological environments, is so easily retrievable.

Electronic downloads

• 21%20-%20Brandimarte%20%28CMU%29.pptx · application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.pre · 614 kbytes

• HTML

  Laura Brandimarte. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/775.html"
  ><i>Discounting the Past: Bad Weighs Heavier than
  Good</i></a>, Talk or presentation,  11,
  November, 2010.

• Plain text

  Laura Brandimarte. "Discounting the Past: Bad Weighs
  Heavier than Good". Talk or presentation,  11,
  November, 2010.

• BibTeX

  @presentation{Brandimarte10_DiscountingPastBadWeighsHeavierThanGood,
      author = {Laura Brandimarte},
      title = {Discounting the Past: Bad Weighs Heavier than Good},
      day = {11},
      month = {November},
      year = {2010},
      abstract = {This paper studies how individuals’ trust and
                appreciation of other parties is affected by the
                valence and maturity of information about actions
                or traits of those parties. Specifically, it
                introduces and tests the hypothesis that the
                effect of information about individuals or
                organizations with negative valence tends to fade
                away more slowly than the effects of information
                with positive valence, not only because its
                immediate impact may be stronger, but also because
                negative and positive information is discounted
                differently. To empirically test this hypothesis,
                we designed three survey-based randomized
                experiments, in which we manipulated the valence
                of the information that subjects are exposed to
                and the time to which such information refers. We
                measured how our subjects reacted to such
                information using judgment metrics of trust and
                liking derived from the literature or created
                ad-hoc for our experiments. We used a
                difference-in-difference model to disentangle the
                effects of valence, time and their interaction.
                Our findings provide some empirical support for
                our hypothesis. We suggest the theoretical grounds
                that could motivate differential discounting, and
                the privacy implications of such phenomenon in a
                society where negative and positive information
                about people, useful for judging the
                trustworthiness of technological environments, is
                so easily retrievable.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/775.html}
  }
  

Posted by Larry Rohrbough on 7 Dec 2010.
Groups: trust
For additional information, see the Publications FAQ or contact webmaster at www truststc org.