Humans are not Frogs!

With every sign of intelligence we bestow upon the human race, to continue to adhere to a personal culture or lifestyle that denies inspiration, aspiration, motivation and the desire to understand the building blocks of human nature is conducive to the metaphor of the 'boiling frog'.  " If a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death", a metaphor for the inability of people to react to significant changes that occur gradually. All be it the frog might like being in the pot, but surely humans don't. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog


The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) research program 2010 report gives an insight to the current and future business activity across Scotland.
http://www.strath.ac.uk/huntercentre/research/gem/
http://www.strath.ac.uk/media/departments/huntercentre/research/gem/GEM_Scotland_2010_Combined.pdf

Well if necessity is the mother of all inventions, then theres hope in education and the 'Glow Futures' online project.

http://glowfutur.es/2011/04/

Planning your future? - Emergency Budget Update

Read:

 Outlook for Scottish Government Expenditure 

June 2010 Emergency Budget Update 

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/918/0101175.pdf

Trust Your Staff Online?

“Staff will not be competent in all aspects of security” 
(Forrester Research, Inc, 2008 - Identity Managed Markets Online)


Read:  Staff Fraudscape: Depicting the UK's staff fraud landscape
http://www.cifas.org.uk/research_and_reports

The Basis of Cultural Identity

Creating emotional trust and managing existing levels of trust and perceptions online, has effectively demonstrated that the cultural engagement trends existing within the online environment is a key contributor to the global economy.

The following equation theoretically demonstrate:

·   1. Creating interpersonal cultural identity stems from both emotional trust across multiple engagers and the benefits gained from online identity solution.

·   2. How managing emotional trust thresholds online has value in the formation of individual identity and interpersonal perceptions.

If: Cultural Emotion = Identity

Then: Emotional Trust + Online Identity Solution = Interpersonal Cultural Identity

The Identity of a culture: 

1. Depends on the focus and direction of a countries objectives, for example: Renewable Energy.

2. How individuals feel about conducting their day to day lives, which is increasingly through online engagement.

Trust as a Creative Concept

Tan and Thoen (2001) discuss trust as a tool of control, having the ability to ‘create’, they refer to it in its literal sense as “being the birth of something new, to cause to come into existence” (Thoen, 2001). What is recognised is the creative ability of trust as a means of facilitating change, devising a new scenario or assembling what exists and fashioning it differently to produce a new outcome. The exploration of trust as a creative concept in literature has further been defined as: “The starting point of creativity is the generation of new ideas” (Gurteen, 1998).  In effect to recognise something that is requiring being new, needs the acknowledgment of what was, is no longer required, good or could be done differently. Brenning (1992) defined that creativity in humans use the same procedure as evolution by natural selection “The memory produces the best solution to date, the random function generator adds something to it and the filter tests the new solution takes the place of the old one in the memory, and the cycle starts again” (Brenning 1992).

What I am substantiating is that emotional trust can generate a change in mind-sets, as it facilitates the willing ability to endorse whole-heartedly something different. This is the foundation and basis of what produces change and ultimately evolution in areas such as cultural identity, trends, lifestyle, practices and outlook. 

Cultural and Trust Dynamics Online

“Culture is probably the most important factor that determines whether a relationship is going to succeed” (Forrester, 2010, p. 16). In my view culture can be a pseudonym for emotion interchange, as it conveys, represents the embodiment of a cohort. Across the Internet this would be recognised as facilitating emotional interplay across multiple engagers. 

The following equations demonstrates the importance of emotion in managing culture:  

Emotion = Culture = Cohort = Identity 

What is being described is the qualification of what constitutes an identity, is that of an emotion. 

Creating emotional trust and managing existing levels of trust and perceptions, is identifying that the cultural engagement trends existing within the online environment as a key contributor to the global economy.

The following equation theoretically demonstrate:

·      Creating interpersonal cultural identity stems from both emotional trust across multiple engagers and the benefits gained from online identity solution.

·      How managing emotional trust thresholds online has value in the formation of individual identity and interpersonal perceptions.

If: Emotion = Identity

Then: Emotional Trust + Online Identity Solution = Interpersonal Cultural Identity

What is debatable at this point is whether in practice, the Internet through an Identity security solutions, can effectively create emotional trust and cultural identity.

Risk and its Association with Trust

An assumption has been introduced into business culture which is one where the action to trust has been described as “an engagement to take risk to accept a level of doubt and have confidence, leaving oneself vulnerable to the actions of those one trusts” (Hosmer L. T., 1995, p. 379). 

It has been further been defined as:

“Trust = Expectancy + Belief in expectancy +Willingness to be vulnerable for that belief” (Fox, 2006).  

Risk in this context has been described to be an acceptable entity in the equation to trust. However the continuous engagement to take risk and to trust would vary in relations to the experience and subsequent outcomes. There fore the means in militating against further risks is a means to sustain the engagement to trust.

What Creates Trust - Diagram

Confidence is generated through the assurance that the level of expectation is met. The ‘action’ to trust the subsequent reaction to the level of confidence generated through the context of the circumstance. Confidence has been described “as an emotion of assured expectation. (…) And self-projection. (…) Confidence is a positive encouragement to action” (Barbalet, 1996). Relating to previous theory, it is interesting to note that although “Confidence brings the future into the present by providing a sense of certainty to what is essentially unknowable so that assured action with regard to it may be engaged” (Barbalet, 1996), within a business context, setting expectation is the starting point in the equation as seen in the above diagram, in creating confidence, the action to trust, managing service experience, satisfaction levels in people and ultimately it leads to customer loyalty. 

The Confidence Cycle

It remains my view that emotional trust has the ability of facilitating the collective belief in something and be shared across multiple engagers. Which also supports the research of Barbaet defining the human collective belief as the “human agency, the ability to make a difference in the world (…). The function of confidence, then, is to promote social action” (Barbalet, 1996). What is described is that people have the ability to self-project and create a social experience which feedback and affirms their confidence levels in each other.

What Constitutes Trust within an Individual

According to Thoen (2001) what influences the threshold of trust is a combination of  “subjective trust and objective trust” components. Subjective trust is the formation in the mind of what composes the elements of trust within the trustee that might be influenced and defined by the threshold, generated through experience, emotion, or mental ability. Objective trust on the other hand is trust in the context of the environment and existing physical mechanisms to evoke the trust and influence the threshold. What is significant about trust in its objective form is that it can be regarded as a tool that facilitates a transaction.  But often it is the subjective elements of trust, best described as ‘emotional trust’, which enables the transaction to come into effect. 

The Emotional Trust Dynamics in a Person - Diagram

Trust the Internet?

Read: Digital Thieves: a special report on online fraud

http://www.cifas.org.uk/research_and_reports

The basis of Emotional Trust

The human brain has evolved and our “neuron-biological legacy means that emotions enjoy pre-emptive, first mover advantage in every decision process” (Hill, 2010).
The process to create emotional trust relies on the ability to provoke an emotion and although humans have the ability to rationalize, the dilemma according to LeDoux, is that “it's difficult for a thought to influence an emotion, and the parts of the brain that mediate each aren't well-connected; the pathways from the emotion systems to the cognition systems are wider and faster than the pathways from the cognition systems to the emotion systems. Emotion systems were in place early in evolution” (LeDoux, 2003).

Therefore understanding the basis ‘to trust’ is the only means in possibly creating trust. Trust is first a social emotion and according to Joseph LeDoux (2003), “to provoke trust, a salesperson has to put himself in the mind of another. And the customer has to have a theory of the salesperson and company, an idea of what they will do” (LeDoux, 2003). Trust has been described within the individual as “the emotional basis of cooperation” (Barbalet, 1996), and the “confident expectation of the benign intentions” (Dunn 1990). Trust therefore ascribes in the individual the sense of feeling of reassurance, logically interpreted that it is safe and secure to trust. 

- To engage that emotion to trust, the trustee has recognised what they want and engaged with the means to fulfil their expectation. 

- To evoke the emotion to trust and the genuine feeling between people stems from the level of accuracy and truthfulness between the exchange given through subliminal signals and chemical hormones forming intuition. 

Real-world trust mechanisms

Emotional trust emerges from three mechanisms:

-The ‘trust portion’ of Hormones: arginine vasopressin and oxytocin associated to love, social bonding and suppression of fear making people more trusting. (NIM, 2005)

·      - Facial Expression: which is inherited and transmitted through internal emotional feeling from the subconscious mind to the conscious expression. Hill (2010)

·      - Transitive environment: The external environment facilitating the  ‘experience factor’, which over time forms part of the trust perception between people. Huang (2006)

All three-trust mechanisms form the basis of evoking and conveying authentic trust between people. The online environment can only project two of the three mechanisms, however it can stimulate the hormonal levels through the two other trust mechanisms before human augmentation comes to market.

Human Augmentation - Online

2011 Gartner, Inc - Human Augmentation

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2025, cumulative sales from human augmentation products will surpass $1 billion.

In April 2010, the first Augmented Human International Conference convened. The literature sent out to solicit participation identified one of the goals of the conference as follows, "The AH International Conference focuses on scientific contributions towards augmenting human capabilities through technology for increased well-being and enjoyable human experience." Conference organizers selected "World's First Wearable Humanoid Robot That Augments Our Emotions" by Dzmitry Tsetserukou of Toyohashi University of Technology as the best paper of the conference. The paper's opening comments clearly indicate its content is vastly different from content most familiar to traditional IT professionals:

"In the paper, we are proposing a conceptually novel approach to reinforcing (intensifying) own feelings and reproducing (simulating) the emotions felt by the partner during online communication through wearable humanoid robot. The core component, Affect Analysis Model, automatically recognizes nine emotions from text. The detected emotion is stimulated by innovative haptic devices integrated into the robot. The implemented system can considerably enhance the emotionally immersive experience of real-time messaging. Users can not only exchange messages but also emotionally and physically feel the presence of the communication partner (e.g., family member, friend or beloved person)." 

Emotions are created through facial expression, hormonal activity and experience... the online has capitalised on two out of three...but now Human Augmentation will change the emotional connection online. No longer will relationships be formed through rational words, experience over time, or the photo of a nice person....but we will begin to feel them too!

How we understand our emotions and inform them and interpret those of others might change cultural trends. If the online environment informs our relationship experience more then the real-world...I call this the 'white t-shirt theory'. - An evolutionary phase of the Internet: It's how the online environment might continue to influence our lives and subsequent generations to come.