The Tragedy of the Trust Commons

BY GLEB TSIPURSKY

Officials and policy makers have to grapple with historically low levels of citizen trust in the U.S. government. Pew Research Center polling suggests that Americans’ trust in the government has fallen by nearly two-thirds in the last two decades, down to 20 percent in 2020.1 It is not only elected and appointed officials who suffer from the trust gap. Analysts, commentators, and other media figures suffer from decreasing levels of trust, with a drop from 55 percent in 1996 to 40 percent in 2020.2 Given the extensive scholarship on the key role of trust in the public sphere, especially in the political arena, these numbers should alarm officials, policy experts and analysts, and academics concerned with public policy.3

While politicians have made use of disinformation to push their political agendas in the past, this problem has intensified in recent years. The 2016 presidential campaign in the United States and the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom have led the venerable Oxford Dictionary to choose as its 2016 word of the year “post-truth,” defined as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”4 The 2020 campaign proved to be even worse, including the post-election denial and attacks on a clear election result, culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

On the one hand, post-truth political methods have to do with the quantity of lies. On the other, post-truth politics involves a new model of behavior when caught lying. Unlike previous politicians who backed away when caught lying, post-truth politicians do not back away from their falsehoods. Instead, they attack those who point out their deceptions, undermining public trust in credible experts and reliable news sources.

This is not only a problem with public figures: fake news, more recently termed “viral deception” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, is sweeping social media, shared by ordinary citizens.5 Sharing such misinformation—at least by private citizens—is not necessarily intended to harm others or even deliberately deceive. Our emotions and intuitions focus more on protecting our worldview and personal identity, and less on finding out the most accurate information.6

Fortunately, behavioral science research findings provide some insights on an intervention that may address this lack of trust—the Pro-Truth Pledge (PTP). Our aspiration is for the PTP to help rebuild trust in and decrease deception in the political sphere, and we encourage all officials, policy experts, and academics to take the PTP. I wrote about this in a recent issue of Skeptic.7

Truth and the Tragedy of the Commons

The trust gap in the U.S. is difficult to bridge because, although our society as a whole loses when deception is rampant in the public sphere, individuals who practice deceptive behaviors often gain. This type of situation is known as a “tragedy of the commons,” following a famous article in Science by Garret Hardin.8 Hardin demonstrated that in areas where a group of people share a common resource without any rules about the use of this resource, each individual may well have a strong interest in taking more of the common resource than is their fair share, leading to individual gain at cost to the community. A wellknown tragedy of the commons is environmental pollution.9 We all gain from clean air and water, yet individual polluters, from a game-theoretical perspective, may well gain more—at least in the short and medium term—from polluting our environment.10 Pollution of truth is similarly eroding of the atmosphere of trust in our political environment.