Deontology Or Trustworthiness? A Conversation Between Molly Crockett, Daniel Kahneman

“What the work suggests is that we infer how trustworthy someone is going to be by observing the kinds of judgments and decisions that they make. If I’m interacting with you, I can’t get inside your head. I don’t know what your utility function looks like. But I can infer what that utility function is by the things that you say and do.

This is one of the most important things that we do as humans. I’ve become increasingly interested in how we build mental models of other people's preferences and beliefs and how we make inferences about what those are, based on observables. We infer how trustworthy someone is going to be based on their condemnation of wrongdoing and their advocating a hard-and-fast morality over one that’s more flexible.”