Why I could trust YOU more than my neighbour

No offence to my neighbours. They are very nice people. But do I trust them enough to get into their car and drive 300km, or to sleep in their flat? Not necessarily. I see them often but I know very little about them. Thanks to trust built online by collaborative economy platforms, I can potentially trust you, whom I never met, more than someone whom I see every day. And that’s revolutionary. It’s unlocking immense untapped potential for collaboration, and bringing people closer together than ever before.

Trust enables you to have a life.  Literally.  It all starts when you’re a child, with your family, your first circle of innate trust. At school, trust enables you to interact with other children, play games, develop a team spirit in sports, and make friends. As you grow-up, trust becomes the omnipresent yet invisible bond underscoring most of your daily interactions with society.

Looking back in history, human collaboration was initially based on interpersonal trust; the kind of trust built between two people, which you have for your family, friends, or perhaps even your neighbours. But, as British anthropologist Robin Dunbar found, humans can only comfortably maintain 150 relationships. This kind of trust can therefore hardly extend beyond your village. It is not scalable. As a result, humankind created intermediated trust. Governments and a variety of legal and financial institutions act as trust proxies centralising some of the systems needed to organise society. This allowed people to trade beyond their immediate circle of trust, fostering economic growth. Shops became companies and companies became multinationals promising reliability through brands which became a new form of trust proxies. But interpersonal trust, which empowers individuals to collaborate directly with one another, had not scaled. It was limited in reach (it only applied to the people involved in a relationship), and by the time necessary to build it. Until today.  

Internet connectivity and new digital trust tools are disrupting interpersonal trust in both reach and time, scaling it to a previously unimaginable level, and thereby unlocking immense untapped potential for collaboration.

Digital trust is to interpersonal trust what the invention of the phone was to communication. A historical breakthrough introducing unlimited reach and immediacy.

Digital trust tools provided by online platforms are allowing people who do not know each other to become trusted peers. Individuals can instantly download their respective trust capital based on declared and verified information, and on accumulated feedbacks from one-shot interactions with a multitude of different people.

BlaBlaCar created the framework D.R.E.A.M.S. which states that online trust in peer-to-peer platforms is created through a combination of six pillars: Declared information, Ratings, Engagement, Activity, Moderation, and Social networks. Trust can now be shared and scaled, and individuals’ trust circles can grow from limited, to infinite. We become interconnected to millions of trusted peers, and part of population-size trust grids.  

In a recent research titled Entering the Trust Age, conducted in collaboration with Arun Sundararajan, NYU Stern Professor and author of The Sharing Economy, we looked into how much trust was created in peer to peer communities. Over 18,000 BlaBlaCar members across 11 countries in Europe were asked to rank on a scale from 0 to 5 the level of trust they had in different types of people, such as family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, and social network contacts. We wanted to understand how a BlaBlaCar member with a full online profile would fare compared to these different types. We looked specifically at the percentage of respondents who gave 4 or 5 out of 5 to these profiles, or in other words, a high level of trust.

Respondents gave the highest level of trust to family and friends, followed by colleagues, neighbours and social network contacts. When introducing a BlaBlaCar member into the set of options, the results were striking. 88% of respondents gave a high level of trust to a BlaBlaCar member with a full profile. That is significantly above the percentage of people who highly trust neighbours or colleagues whom they meet everyday, and close to that who highly trust friends.

This result gives a sense of the magnitude of the social transformation currently under way. When provided with the right set of tools, users of online platforms are able to recreate a sense of trust robust enough to supersede the need to meet in person before engaging in high-stakes exchanges such as sharing a long-distance car ride, or staying in someone’s home.

The behavioural shift underway is allowing human beings to overcome the last barrier to human collaboration - namely trust.
That’s great news for society, and the world we live in.

Research also revealed that trust created on one platform generates positive spillovers to the entire collaborative economy, and beyond. Close to half of BlaBlaCar members declare that ridesharing has made them more open to others, and results show they are up to three times more likely to engage in other sharing economy activities since ridesharing. As users of online platforms familiarise themselves with digital trust tools on one peer-to-peer marketplace, they actually become more prone to trusting their peers on other platforms too. Essentially they are becoming more trusting in all aspects.

These results offer a sharp and encouraging contrast to recent studies such as the American General Social Survey, which have found a lowering level of trust across society in general. A phenomena that is even exacerbated amongst Millennials. So how come we see an increasing number of people trusting their peers online? Could this point to a cultural shift whereby digital tools are taking precedence over cues from the physical world and introducing new social codes? According to the American Lifestyles 2015 Report from Mintel, nearly 70% of online consumers (81% of Millenials) make their online purchasing decisions based on reviews posted by strangers. Are strangers’ reviews becoming more trusted than brands?

We went a step further in our research to understand the role of the brand in creating trust online. We asked respondents to rank their trust in a peer, providing the exact same level of information as in a full BlaBlaCar profile, but on a generic platform. 67% of respondents still gave a high level of trust to a person with a full profile on a generic platform. That remains above the high trust in a colleague, showing the strength of the trust tools on a standalone basis, when stripped from the brand. The BlaBlaCar brand though still plays a strong role as a proxy for trust, the 21% difference between 67% and 88% (high trust for a BlaBlaCar member with a full profile) being attributable to it.

We’re at the beginning of a new era where old and new trust cues are still intertwined, and new social codes are emerging. As individuals are able to connect and trust each other, they are disintermediating former trust proxies to find solutions that are better suited to their specific needs, and often more affordable, efficient and friendly. Trust is effectively powering the collaborative economy.

Trust is core to any human collaboration, and ultimately to any social construct.
Without trust, there is no collaboration, and no economy. And thus, no collaborative economy.  

Trust is the invisible bond inherent to any human collaboration. It is the lifeblood of any social construction. Today, it’s being freed from its historical constraints, and turned from a scarce resource into an abundant one, from time-consuming to instantaneous, and from a limited reach to an infinite one. This is empowering people, and opening up a bright future for a more trusting collaborative society. As Woody Allen put it, we care about the future, since that’s where we intend to spend the rest of our lives. Together, let’s build this new era, let’s enter the Trust Age.  

Explore how BlaBlaCar creates trust and read the full report here: Entering the Trust Age.