I’m more interested in how people determine who they trust, and the parameters by which humans decide to trust someone.
I would wager that people are shit at determining trustworthiness based on limited information (like social media representations). In the old days before social media, you got to know people in person, and decades ago, most of the people you knew were likely people you grew up around. You knew that person’s background, how they treated people, what their family was like, and what likely influences them as a person.
So much of how we process trustworthiness is how we perceive the motives of the speaker. With shallower friendships and parasocial relationships, we want to feel connected but really lack any good context that you need to actually know who you’re listening to.
A person's trustworthiness has always been based more on perception though, even if you were familiar with more of their history - that's how you end up with members of a community who are perfectly kind people but are ostracized because they're perceived as strange and untrustworthy in some way; it's also how you end up with members of a community who have demonstrated a lack of trustworthiness continuing to be trusted, because they can appear trustworthy and persuade others to trust them despite the prior evidence.
Parasocial relationships are more analogous to the old priestly/shamanic to tribesman relationships. A person more or less removed from the direct social experience that has their own hidden motives and meanings, as well as strong incentive to maintain their position in the group dynamic as someone to look up towards.
Funny how humans evolved such to have such a predilection for finding these few charismatic people to uplift and throw their whole lot behind damned any other logic. While also having a small subset of people preferring to take the reins themselves and be the charismatic leader either for good or ill intent. And it has been that way in our species since long before recorded history.
Almost like queen bee to worker bee dynamics in terms of population structure but perhaps less rigid. The mutation rate of charismatic leaders vs followers happens to be “just right” by some mechanism. Too many of either case and group dynamics fall apart.
If we think of the whole population as a meta organism up a few levels of abstraction from the genetic level, but still bound by its laws generally, some mechanism must have evolved to carefully regulate dosage of these varying neurotypes in the population much like how genes evolved downstream, upstream, or midstream dosage control mechanisms to modulate protein levels in the cell for biological function. Perhaps social structure is self reinforcing through incentives and entropy.
I would wager that people are shit at determining trustworthiness based on limited information (like social media representations). In the old days before social media, you got to know people in person, and decades ago, most of the people you knew were likely people you grew up around. You knew that person’s background, how they treated people, what their family was like, and what likely influences them as a person.
So much of how we process trustworthiness is how we perceive the motives of the speaker. With shallower friendships and parasocial relationships, we want to feel connected but really lack any good context that you need to actually know who you’re listening to.