These cues were not predictive by themselves; they predicted untrustworthiness only in combination

From Who’s Trustworthy? A Robot Can Help Teach Us by Tara Parker-Pope. With all these psychology/sociology experiments, you have to take the results with a major dose of salt. Small sample size, unrepresentative sample, etc. Setting aside the caveats though (because it is fun to speculate based on only a hint of evidence), this is interesting.

One of the stronger correlations in economic development is that between national productivity and the cultural degree of trust. Countries where the culture encourages higher levels of trust when dealing with strangers have higher overall productivity. Even in countries, such as the US, which have unusually high predispositions to trust strangers, the distribution of trust is constrained.

Then the students were asked to play a game in which all the players got four tokens and the chance to win money. A token was worth $1 if a player kept it for himself or $2 when he gave it to his partner. Players could win $4 each if both partners kept their tokens, but if they worked together and traded all four tokens, then each partner could win $8. But the biggest gain — $12 — came from cheating a partner out of his tokens and not giving any in return.

Over all, only about 1 in 5 people (22 percent) were completely trustworthy and cooperative, giving away all their tokens so that each partner could win $8. Thirteen percent were untrustworthy, keeping all or most of their tokens. The remaining 65 percent were somewhat cooperative, giving away two or three tokens but also holding one or two back for security.

What the experimenters found was that there were visual cues that people picked up on.

To find out what cues the players were responding to, the researchers filmed the students’ five-minute conversations before the game started. They discovered that four specific gestures predicted when a person was less trustworthy: leaning away from someone; crossing arms in a blocking fashion; touching, rubbing or grasping hands together; and touching oneself on the face, abdomen or elsewhere. These cues were not predictive by themselves; they predicted untrustworthiness only in combination.

And individuals intuitively picked up on the cues. “The more you saw someone do this, the more intuition you had that they would be less trustworthy,” Dr. DeSteno said.

My emphasis added. I think much is lost in our national dialogues as well as in our experiments by failing to recognize that with complex systems, it is often the case that there is a high degree of contingency and additiveness. Individual variables on their own may have low predictability of an outcome but when combined together they do have predictive capability as indicated here. And sometimes there is, I suspect, an even greater level of complexity because of sequence, timing and frequency. So in this example, you have to have all four variables for mistrust to emerge but might it not also be affected by how early in the conversation these elements become apparent, in what order and with what frequency? I'll bet the answer is that yes, it does make a difference.

The reason this grabbed my attention is that it parallels my thinking regarding individual productivity. Productivity is, I believe, primarily a function of the interaction of seven different variables - Basic capacity (physical and cognitive), Store of Knowledge, Values/Behaviors, Experience, Decision-Making Skills, Effort, and Imagination. Each of these has some marginal predictive capability but combined together they are very predictive.

My interest is from the perspective of reading. How can you use books and storytelling to accelerate development of these seven variables, does it matter in which order, and is the timing important (for example focusing on the development of values and behaviors in the early years and then developing a portfolio of knowledge when the child is older or vice-versa?)

I also wonder, given that this is an intra-cultural study, whether the results are different between cultures. This is especially pertinent in mixed-culture teams, environments of minority/majority, etc. If people are unconsciously signalling mistrust because of different cultural cues, you are inherently going to have reduced productivity. Given the strong impact of trust on productivity, miscuing because of cultural misinterpretation might go a long way towards explaining disparate impacts that are so often seen.