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现代社会正在经历信任危机。调查显示，大部分人已对政府、企业、NGO、媒体、银行失去信任。但人们却出奇地相信网上的用户评分。是什么让人们看了Uber、Airbnb等App上的用户评分，就敢大胆地坐上别人的车，进入陌生人家？这种信任机制可靠吗？
测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：
frenzied ['frenzid] adj. 疯狂的，激怒的
egalitarian [iˌɡælɪ'teəriən] adj. 平等主义的
oversight ['əʊvəsaɪt] n. 监督，照管
roam [rəʊm] vi. 漫游，闲逛，徜徉
implicit [ɪm'plɪsɪt] adj. 含蓄的；内含的
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Last week, I organised a transatlantic trip for the holiday season to visit family and friends. I clicked on Airbnb's website to book a place for a couple of nights （having learnt that it is easier to have a joyous time during the frenzied Christmas season if you have the odd night of privacy）.
Nothing unusual about that, you might think; smartphones are embedded in our lives now, and the use of websites and apps such as Amazon, Airbnb and Uber are, for many of us, habits that have become ingraineD.But reflect for a moment on the cultural patterns that have been created by these apps and you can see that something rather peculiar is happening.
These days we are constantly being told that public trust in institutions is fast eroding, if not collapsing. Since the 2008 financial crisis, for example, trust in banks has slumped, while respect for other types of business leadership has declined, along with confidence in government. A survey of 28 countries by the public relations group Edelman suggests that only 29 per cent of people trust government leaders and only 37 percent trust CEOs.
Even non-governmental institutions are suffering: globally, only 53 per cent trust NGOs, according to Edelman. And as a journalist, there's no room for Schadenfreude: a Pew survey shows that, in the US, 63 per cent of the public have a negative view of the national news media — a higher figure even than the 46 per cent that disapprove of banks.
But not all types of faith have erodeD.One area of our life where trust is high — and rising — is in relation to what sociologists describe as “distributed” trust; processes that require people to trust in their peer group or community, rather than put blind faith in a big institution or somebody of a supposedly superior status.
The numbers from the Edelman survey reflect this: globally, some 60 per cent of respondents said they trusted their peers as a source of advice — far higher percentages than those cited for government officials or corporate executives.
You can see the rise of distributed trust in the popularity of services such as Airbnb and Uber. These work on the basis of community control: people enter a stranger's car or home partly because there is group oversight, peer ratings and an exchange of personal pictures. Bitcoin is similar in some ways, since its value rests on faith in computer code that has been created not in a central bank but by peers — as have the reviews on sites such as Amazon or Expedia.
It's tempting to see this as just one more aspect of the digital economy. But another way to understand this cultural pattern is to use the intellectual framework offered by the business consultant and social analyst Rachel Botsman in her fascinating recent book, Who Can You Trust?
Botsman argues that the rise of sites such as Airbnb means there are now essentially three patterns of trust in the modern worlD.The first of these — the trust that is forged on the basis of face-to-face contact between individuals — is as old as humankinD.This （relatively） egalitarian, or “horizontal”, pattern has predominated in most communities, during most periods of history, gluing together villages, clans and families.
The second type of trust is vertical rather than horizontal, and emerges when a society has institutions such as a royal family, a government or a church that hold it together. This type of trust enables huge groups to collaborate even when they do not know each other.
For Botsman, what makes the digital distributed economy fascinating is that it presents a third category of social glue. This new type of trust relies on peer-to-peer contact, in a fairly egalitarian manner, and on group oversight, which is powerful, since a breach of trust can be punished by creating a sense of shame or exclusion. Yet there is no face-to-face contact, and membership of any community is voluntary.
A cynic might point out that cyber-distributed trust only “works” if there is also some implicit institutional back-up: if something goes wrong with Uber, Airbnb or Expedia, we tend to assume that regulators or the police will step in. We also trust that the cyber technology will work. If that is ever called into question, the pattern of distributed trust might crumble.
So far, this has not happened, despite all the recent cyber attacks, the growing political controversy around digital privacy, and the failure of social media sites such as Facebook to prevent fake news. Maybe that will change in 2018. But unless it does, our economy will be partly driven by rising levels of distributed trust or, as Botsman says, “people trusting other people through technology”. It is a powerful sign of the unpredictable cultural contradiction created by the internet. Happy digital holidays.
请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：
A.National news media.
B.NGOs.
C.Banks.
D.Tech companies.
答案 (1)
A.Processes that require people to trust somebody of a superior status.
B.Processes that require people to trust government as a source of advice.
C.Processes that require people to trust in computer code created by peers.
D.Processes that require people to trust their peers as a source of advice.
答案 (2)
A.horizontal trust pattern.
B.face-to-face contact.
C.vertical trust pattern.
D.authoritative groups.
答案 (3)
A.Incredulous.
B.Dismissive.
C.Laudatory.
D.Impartial.
答案 (4)
(1) 答案：A.National news media.解释：全世界范围内，只有53%的人信任NGO，在美国，63%的公众对国家通讯社抱有负面看法，这一数字比银行的46%更高
(2) 答案：D.Processes that require people to trust their peers as a source of advice.解释：“分布式”信任指要求人们信任他们的同等群体或社群的过程。
(3) 答案：A.horizontal trust pattern.解释：数字分布式经济最令人着迷的是它体现出了第三类社会粘合剂，这种新型信任模式是基于对等联系，是非常平等的。
(4) 答案：D.Impartial.解释：反对者指出这种基于网络的分布式信任是依靠隐含的制度支持建立的，如果失去这一前提，它将会颠覆。但至少目前为止，这种情况并未发生。