Jul 6

Written by: Myra Norton
7/6/2010 10:08 AM

I find the Edelman Trust Barometer interesting, and think the research provides some helpful insight.  This year, much was made about the decrease in trust on “others like me” – see this article from AdAge as an example.  So, I went to the report itself to read a little more, and I realized that the interpretations many are making are not exactly in agreement with what the research actually tells us.  If you look at the report here, you will indeed see that in response to the questions, “If you heard information about a company from one of these people, how credible would the information be?” the top responses are academics, experts, etc.  It did show that, indeed, the percentage of respondents who selected “someone like me” decreased from last year.  Well, here is where that new vocabulary word comes in.  You see, I may be friends with an academic, friends with an expert, friends with someone from an NGO, etc and not classify them as “someone like me.”  Similarly, the deeper question is who among those different groups would I trust and why – it might just be because they are “like me” in some ways or because I know them and have developed a sense of trust in them.  We can’t tease those distinctions out of this data – and I don’t think that is what Edelman was trying to do.  It’s important to be careful in terms of the conclusions we draw…

PS…if you want to learn more about confounding variables, I think Wikipedia does a pretty good job:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding.  

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