Can you guess which application is the best at providing the most relevant suggestions?
Could it be Amazon? Facebook maybe? Netflix?
How about none of the above.
In fact, you probably didn’t even need to download it. It’s so important it came pre-installed on your phone.
We’re talking about your contacts list.
But we should.
Now, this isn’t to say the recommendation engines of Amazon, Facebook, and others aren’t very good. The suggestion features these companies build are extremely sophisticated and effective. The data they collect on you can help them get to know you better than some of your best friends. Unfortunately, knowledge is only half the battle. While this technology may know you like a good friend, you don’t trust it like one.
We’ve already spoken about how important trust is for suggestions and how technology falls short, but it’s an important point to reiterate. If you don’t trust the source of your recommendations you are less likely to follow up on them. How often have you watched the first new recommendation you received from Netflix without hesitation? Do you feel comfortable buying books suggested by Amazon without first reading about them or going through their reviews? Yet if a friend tells you about a new movie you should see, you’re more inclined to be thinking next about where it’s showing and not what its reviews are.
In a world of recommendations, trust trumps technology.
It’s not only friends and family that we trust most for our suggestions, it’s our extended community too.
What’s our extended community?
Our extended community consists of our online and offline relationships. Offline could include our neighbors, friends of friends, colleagues, and even strangers we come into contact with. Meanwhile, our online community may be made up of Facebook friends, Twitter followers, forum posters, and bloggers.
But we don’t trust all bloggers or forum posters, just like we don’t trust all strangers or friends of friends. How is a stranger or unknown blogger any better than a recommendation engine? The difference is in how we validate the source.
But trust is earned somewhat differently depending on the type of community you’re dealing with. At its core, trust is about getting to know someone. Offline this is easy to do, you talk to people. The reason you can trust a stranger is because you can get a sense of who they are through interaction. You can ask them questions, watch how they act and observe their facial cues and mannerisms to understand where they’re coming from and how they match with you. Trust is gained or lost from there.
Online can be a bit more complicated. No physical interactions can make it difficult to trust. You wonder who this person is and what is it that they want. Because of that barrier we turn to other signals for verification. This can be as simple as the person being on a friend’s list of yours or the list of someone you already know. It can also be as intense as going through the person’s forum posting history and comments to see if the two of you are similar enough. You may even chat with them through a messaging application. But without being able to speak with them face to face, more time is needed to build trust.
Offline or online, if someone wants to enter our extended community to provide a useful suggestion it isn’t hard. If their intentions are pure they will gain our trust, and we will gain some useful insight.
So why is it so much harder for the artificial intelligence of million (or even billion) dollar recommendation engines to earn our trust?
The answer is interactivity.
In both our offline and online communities there is a constant give and take. Usually, this occurs through conversation. I tell you something and then you respond with something else. That exchange is helpful because we build trust on that trade. It’s why people don’t like being lied to. If you give someone information you don’t want counterfeit information in exchange.
But if we ever feel like the information exchange has become unfavorable to us we lose trust. And this is why our contacts list beats out even the best recommendation engines. When was the last time you willingly (or consciously) exchanged information with Facebook. Usually, that information from you is being quietly collected, only to surprise you later with a friend or business suggestion. That’s why it’s creepy. It’s why you’re uneasy when a stranger knows your favorite band but not when it’s your friend.
That uneasy feeling isn’t fun to engage with. And in an effort to avoid that engagement we have a hard time working with even the best recommendation engines.
Allowing for relationships to be built with these engines is a step in the right direction. Apple’s Siri is a great example. The ability to have a conversation with the same program that can provide suggestions helps address the issues with uneven information trading. Unfortunately, we’re still far from something like Iron Man’s J.A.R.V.I.S. that can compete with human beings.
So until that day comes, it’s probably best not to uninstall your contacts list.
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