A recent study by the Washington D.C. based Pew Research Center has shown that the level of online social activity is linked with the tendency to trust. Their data shows that the more time someone spends actively participating in an online social network, the more easily they trust people.
One of the key points in this study is the largest online social network, Facebook. The study pointed out that people who visited the site more than once daily are nearly twice as likely to trust other people on the network and perhaps the internet. Further it reported that these Facebook members are three times more trusting than non-internet users. The level of confidence in strangers may not only reflect the growth of social networks, but also reflect other online businesses.
This is also a source of danger, as in real life, the online virtual communities have criminals. With increased level of trust in strangers who people have never met, it exposes them to financial losses and identity theft. Besides individuals, it also has the risk to expose businesses if the employees become too trusting of people they meet online.
The other flip side of these data sets may also be true which suggest that the people who were found to be most trusting of strangers may already be pre-disposed to lower levels of xenophobia, of fear of the other. In which case, these people in real life may be equally susceptible to manipulations by people with malicious intent and criminal thinking.
The activity on the internet allows an individual to take on an anonymous online persona, which may appear to be quite different from whom they are in real life. And through this persona, they become more trusting of people they meet and information they come across online. However, the extent of how this is reflected on their real personal and social life still needs to be examined in detail. There is a possibility that because this online persona is still the same person underneath, the effects of reducing the distrust in others may filter down to their real personalities.
Another aspect to investigate is if this increasing tendency of spending time on maintaining and growing online connections and relations is because we are inherently a social being and cannot exist as isolated individuals. Perhaps people turning to online relationships are looking for a society that is not tainted with the real fears we carry during are time spend in real life.
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Source: http://www.gev.com/2011/07/social-networks-make-trusting-easy/
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