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Intervening Trust and the Residual Anti-social effects of Otherness through Technological
Means

Moises Ramirez
Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research
GPSY5120- Social Psychology
Dr. Jeremy Ginges
May 05, 2021
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Abstract: A psychological intervention is proposed to combat the forced isolation of subjects

during the COVID-19 pandemic, which had many states and nations instituting restrictions and
limits on the physical co-presence of non-household members to avoid the rampant spread of the
deadly virus. Perceived trust may be measured in the willingness to obey instructions from a
stranger, an Other or outsider from the in-group. Does technology mediated or algorithmically
aided governance and leadership stand more of a chance? To test such a broad question, one
must first look at interpersonal power relations when one becomes vulnerable to the Other. This
intervention aims to explore this by manipulating sensory perception of vision by using a
blindfold, and asking the participant to be guided by a stranger serving as a techno-tour-guide
using GPS-technology through open-air public monuments.

Key words: perceived trust, public spaces, perception, artificial intelligence, cognition.
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Otherness is not a new phenomenon but has been a topic of concern in social psychology

and philosophical treatises. For Emmanuel Levinas, it is this “Other” who the subjects sutures

itself onto the world as bearing meaning through this Other. Metaphysical desire thereof of an

Other as an alterity, is how a being-as-subject attends to the World and gains its meaning as a

subject. Levinas states, “their alterity is thereby reabsorbed into my own identity as a thinker or a

possessor. The metaphysical desire tends towards something else entirely, towards the absolutely

other” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 33). Even artificial intelligence programmers need to

learn to code algorithms that apprehend the world of strange objects in real-time, constructing

dynamical models of encountered objects and things to adapt processing to environmental factors

that may suddenly change. In such a setting, trust may be difficult to establish - or even re-establish

if it is lost in such a changing ecology of defined objects - with others after periods of isolation

and interactivity with insular populations. The following intervention hopes to understand the ways

subjects can open up to trust strangers mediated by technical means by relying on the aptitude of

one group, while setting up the participating subject to take on a vulnerable blindness to a

perceptual faculty. This proposed intervention will use a site-specific model which is by no means

limited to the geographic marker that is later suggested. New ways of constructing social contracts

must be established, while relying of the primitive source of faith – perceived trust in the Other.

Social distancing regulations created by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions have made

socializing and encountering and communicating strangers in public more difficult for most.

Delivery services that offer “contact-less” delivery promote anti-social behaviors that are

simultaneously positioned as being pro-social in preventing un-necessary exposure to people who

may be asymptomatically carrying the virus. Certain populations have found it even dangerous to
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take ordinary brief walks, or perform essential grocery shopping, near their homes without

becoming sudden targets – for negative attention by an unknown Other. New waves of violence

against at-risk populations – such as the elderly members of Asian communities across the Unites

States- is noteworthy to take into consideration as restrictions lessen and people begin to take on

the ordinary rituals of daily life in public spaces. This intervention will combine the use of

technology in order test whether trust can be established in a technology-mediated leadership of

an Other and whether the potential for algorithmic co-presence as virtual company can one day

ensure a type of confidence and comfort while navigating unknown territories. Since robotics may

not be appropriate to use at this stage of a proposed project, the intervention will use a human-

being Other that uses GPS technology to guide a blind-folded participant through an open-air

public monument.

This particular intervention hopes to recreate the feelings of sudden vulnerability by asking

participants to allow a technically-mediated guide them down a moderately through an open-air

and public monument labyrinth that dislocated and disorients those who in their full-sensorial

faculties interact with the space. In this intervention the participating subjects will remain

blindfolded. Most people walking around a city, maneuvering through the fast-paced circulation

of bodies, rarely take into consideration the experiences of others who may not be as mechanically

and physiologically adept to the surrounding flow. My hypothesis in constructing such a relatively

benign intervention questions two elements that city-dwellers and planners should take into

consideration as lockdown restrictions begin to lessen, and the city re-opens. This type of

interventions should also be encouraged to be performed with members of secondary school and

university aged populations to promote vulnerable perspectives amongst populations who may be
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at-risk of joining violent gangs where a sense of identity in participating in group-molding

initiation may seem alluring.

Two cognitive elements of the intervention are as follows:

1) Trust in the mechanical algorithms that organize spatial presences and flow (i.e. traffic lights,

crossing-signs, bike lane traffic lights, lamp-posts, real-time dynamic GPS systems, analogue and

digital road signs). A new semiotics of flow should take into account those who may not be able

to interpret or even see the signs. Non-verbal communication of pattern-recognition of the

mechanics of bodies is a perceptual system that is often unconscious or even pre-conscious.

Learning how the AI-driven robots see the surrounding world in real time, may be able help shape

the way real human beings phenomenologically encounter the spatial world that they are embedded

in.

2) Technology can also aid in producing positive interactivity between vulnerable populations and

the greater external World at large. Sharing the co-presence of a robotic object can offer an external

layer of defense from the immediacy of judgment and scrutiny from a public gaze, offsetting the

potential for internalized negative judgments from surfacing in other people prior to an actual

encounter with populations residing in the out-group dimension of any give viewer’s identification

makeup.

Perceptual and Affective Experience of the Out-group

When people experience the type of vulnerability that others experience everyday on a

consistent basis, my hypothesis is that this exposure to blindfolded, yet aided by a robotic entity,

would affect the way they take their perceptual faculties for granted. Not only would they be

stepping foot into the shoes of the other, the sudden diminished perceptual experience of the World
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when an essential sense-faculty is removed, an interview on their reflections should reveal

discomfort and relief in the process, aligning themselves with some of the insecurities that others

less privileged experience on a consistent basis. This shared experience should promote empathy

for the out-group, and create new allegiances with the those who may be experiencing different

forms of anxiety just for belonging to an out-group that is currently being targeted by any given

other group.

Much of perception relies on feedback between the visual cortex and the external real

world. When maneuvering novel environments different levels of attention are required, than when

navigating through spaces that have become imprinted into one’s daily habits. Most often taking

steps in one direction or the other do not stir moral and ethical issues, unless there are pre-existing

rules, signs, and designated areas of necessary mobility (i.e. No Standing Zones for automobiles,

crosswalks for pedestrians). In collective action such as protests, blocking highways and traffic on

bridges – walking on the street becomes the embodied form of some type of moral outrage against

an event, norm violation, or a political action that conflict with a people’s sense of moral-core, or

as Haidt et al. suggest that actions not producing harm yet still produce disgust or discomfort.1 The

action emerges in response to some sort of moral attack against one’s core identity parameter,

which leads to the direct activity of spontaneous collective action. Without knowing whether

violations were being committed a subject would not even become aware of moral transgressions

unless they were informed or educated by the in-group member who was already trained to behave

in an acceptable way regarding the moral value or social protocol at play.

Collective will does not arise spontaneously and masses do not just appear out of thin air.

The assemblage of bodies participating together in collected efforts, often requires the sensitivity

1 Haidt et al., 1993.

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to dynamically adapt to what is the shared and perceived moral value. Another important

perceptual mechanism is the ability to define and respond to antagonistic forces that attempt to

disarm and disassemble the collective spirit that was produced while participating in forms of

collective action. Shared experiences, particularly phenomenological and experiential ones can

provide elements to compose the framing of community membership.

Altruism and Individualistic Moral Behavior and Artificial Intelligence

Treading unknown terrains such as a global pandemic may be impossible to re-construct

in a laboratory setting. However, recreating the anxieties and learning how people behave in

individualistic or cooperative ways to novel situations is what this proposed intervention is

attempting to bring to light. In a dynamic state of fluid motion and time where events may be

difficult to predict and highly uncertain, individuals must constantly define and re-define their

moralistic stance, counterposed to their instincts towards survival, to lead to beneficial. Questions

of utility and altruism are raised when one must decide to act in accordance to a collective or to as

a singular entity in times of crisis and novel situations.

The studies found in Shariff et al., 2014, highlighted the role that the exposure to

neuroscientific information promoting a mechanistic worldview had upon participants in

attributing moral responsibility to transgressors. The effect of such information made the

possibility for free will and intentionality on the transgressor be diminished in the eyes of those

exposed to the reading material that promoted a mechanistic view on the universe and on

psychological behaviors. What resulted was that attribution of punishment was reduced when

participants had exposure to informative material that suggested that human moral behavior is

modeled after machines in the sense that intentional free-will, in the sense of conscious intentions,

do not entirely guide a person to act. Considering

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Site-Specific Intervention

Cooperation between strangers, let alone cooperation between humans and artificial

intelligence, may often be met with resistance from individuals, depending on their ability to trust

those who may not be members of their specific in-group. The modeled intervention is site-specific

but not chosen because its location and purpose have a strong historical value and social depth, but

rather because - apart from being an outdoor and open-field experience - it offers a type of visceral

engagement that produces helpless feelings of being lost, time-space distortion, as an individual

walks around the 2, 711 stone slabs. Memorial To The Murdered Jews of Europe by Peter

Eisenmann (2017) offers an “undulating field” to create a sense of insecurity for the explorer. 2

One intervention of having a technologically mediated guide, a techno-guide, may not be feasible

without major funding.

In lieu of not having access to artificial intelligent robot to guide a participant through the

labyrinth, “techno-guides” will have access to a GPS-informed map and guide the blind-folded

participant through safety in efficient time. The participant will be tethered to guide by holding

onto a rope that is attached to the guide – at any point the participant can let go and at that time the

intervention will end. The participant will have an option choosing a 5-minute or 10-minute guided

interval.

Developing Trust

One important cognitive process that occurs while attributing sacred meaning to an entity

or an organization is the processes that occur during rituals of initiation. In a research article by

Atran & Ginges (2012) the process of attributing sacred values as being a component of developing

2 https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-holocaust-memorial-takes-shape/a-949359
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“ingroup trust.” In order for ingroup trust to be established by subjective individuals, an external

process of validation must be performed. Such liminal experience produces the bonds that promote

trust and faith in the authority of the Other. Without the ability to see, one hypothesis is that the

subject will attempt to procure trust while blindfolded by making some sort of small talk

communication with the guide. Even though the guide will be speaking the directions aloud, there

might be some resistance to the walking velocity of the guide. A semiotics of command does not

gain its authority by the mere cognition that the person that functions as the tour-guide is endowed

with the technical means to direct the blind-folded participant. There must also be a raising to

power, such that the participant not only trusts the guide, but also believes. In the study conducted

by Asch (1955) the idea that one’s subjective sense of perception and intuition could be challenged

and subsumed by an antagonistic majority. In that foundational experiment, the findings found that

a single subject model modulated their own responses to perceptual tasks when a majority of others

responded differently. The idea that a collective mind could overtake the autonomous sense of

truth could be raised again when the optical perceptual faculty is absent from the participant during

the intervention. Although, the pressure to conform to the command of the guide is only questioned

without any external perception, but may be stirred from an internal doubt, that is framed upon the

impressions generated by the relational encounter between the subject and the guide.

Conclusions

Although such an intervention may not yield immediate benefits. As shown in other

interventions such as Birnbaum et al. (2020), interventions may have explicitly long-term effects

in populations that are observable years from the intervention experience. This intervention hopes

to bring about long-standing impressions upon the participants in gaining the experience of

vulnerable disposition that may have not otherwise been possible to experience.
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References

Asch, S. (1955). Opinions and Social Pressure. Scientific American, vol. 193, no. 5, pp. 31-35.

Atran, S. & Ginges, J. (2012). Religious and Sacred Imperatives In Human Conflict. Science 336,

pp. 855-857.

Birnbaum et al. (2020). A Diversity Ideology Intervention: Multiculturalism Reduces the Racial

Achievement Gap. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1-9.

Haidt, Koller, & Dias (1993). Affect, Culture, and Morality, or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog?

Levinas, E. (1961). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Duquense University Press.

Shariff et al. (2014). Free Will and Punishment: A Mechanistic View on Human Nature Reduces

Retribution. Psychological Science, 10, pp. 1-8.