425. How change is blocked

In the preceding item in this blog, I showed how ideas can develop, in a ‘cycle of discovery’. From that one can also derive where and how obstacles for development can arise, as follows:

a.       Obstructions to movement into new contexts, in ‘generalisation’, as the source of new insights in limitations and opportunities. This can arise by arguments of property (one is not allowed to take it away), or by entry barriers (one cannot enter the new context,  obstacles to trade).

b.      A blockage of ‘differentiation’ by rigidity in the composition of elements, perhaps to preserve advantages of scale or economies of experience with present arrangements. For business, the head office may forbid such local adaptation.

c.       Obstacles to ‘reciprocation’, to incorporating new elements from the new context, for reasons of local ownership, unwillingness to upset existing roles, structures, institutions, reputations, or sheer mental myopia and prejudice.

d.      Limitations to creativity and imagination or, again, institutional obstacles, that prevent radical change of basic logic or design principles, in configuring old and new elements in a new basic logic or design, in ‘reciprocation’.

In b and c, the obstacle can arise from excess power. When one has the power to impose one’s own, existing logics and designs on the new local context, the challenge and opportunity from local pressure to adapt is lost. That happened, for example, with US business entering first Japan and later China. They offered so much in terms of technology and access to US markets that they could afford to impose their modes of conduct.  

I also want to give an illustration of how one can get locked into erroneous ideas, taken from the literature on trust (one of my subjects).  There is an accumulating store of trust research that employs available measures of ‘generalized trust’, i.e. ‘trust in people in general that one is not acquainted with’, to study effects of trust on a variety of variables, such as economic performance, human development, happiness, democracy, peace, and so on. I recently had to review another paper doing that. The problem with this is as follows.

Trust has several dimensions that one needs to take into account. One is the difference between trust in competence and the trust in intentions: commitment, no cheating. Another is the difference between trust and the wider notion of reliance, which can be based on control or on trust. Control is based on enforcement, by contract or hierarchy, or on incentives. Trust in the strong sense, or ‘real’ trust, going beyond control, is based on solidarity or loyalty based on ethics, morality, or personal bonding and empathy.

The measure of generalized trust embraces both forms, and when they are not separated they produce ambiguity of results. What are we then talking about? The wider notion of reliance, including both control and trust, or ‘real’ trust? The measure should be replaced by one of  ‘real’ trust or trust ‘in the strong sense’.

When pressed, people making and using the measurement of generalized trust admit the problem but they stick to the measure of generalized trust for the pragmatic reason that no better measure is available. In particular, one wants to study the development of trust and its effects in time, and replacement with a new measure would eliminate its continuity. So one knowingly engages in research based on an misleading metric, and obfuscates it.