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Author: Bruce Schneier
ISBN No: 978-1-1181-433
Review date: 16/07/2026
No of pages: 384
Publisher: Wiley
Publisher URL:
http://www.wiley.com
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Society runs on trust. We have no choice but to trust that the random people, institutions, and systems we interact with will co-operate and be trustworthy. We don’t need to trust completely or blindly, but we need to be reasonably sure our trust is well-founded. But within this web of trust, the untrustworthy can thrive. Much of the work of society centres around this tension between co-operators and defectors in society.
Briefly, ‘defectors’ are defined by the author Bruce Schneier as the liars and outliers of the book’s title—’the people within a group who don’t go along with the norms of that group’. But not all defectors are bad – such as those that rallied against slavery. Defectors change as society changes; defection can be in the eye of the beholder.
In his new book, Liars and Outliers: Enabling The Trust That Society Needs To Thrive, Bruce Schneier identifies how security can protect us from defectors; and what enables us to trust strangers at the local, national, and global scale.
Schneier says: “Trust and co-operation are the first problems we had to solve before we could become a social species – but in the 21st century, they have become the most important problems we need to solve again.” He is author of 11 books, including Secrets and Lies; and Beyond Fear.
Here he introduces ideas from across the social and biological sciences to explain how society induces trust. He suggests how trust works and fails in social settings, communities, organisations, and countries. A speaker on technology and security, Schneier covers why we need to understand our evolved security systems and their role in facilitating and stabilising human society. Most importantly, he explains how “co-operation” is defined by social convention, and that there are two kinds of “uncooperative” people: those who are selfish, and those who are differently moral than the rest of society.
In the book he goes into:
• The history and evolution of people and trust – and how to think of this relationship between society as a whole and its defectors as a parasitic relationship: As societies became more social, they needed to learn how to get along with each other: both cooperating and ensuring everyone else cooperated, too. That’s never been truer than it is today; yet we’re still getting it wrong, he argues.
• The problem isn’t trusting people; the problem is with the dilemma: People are more complicated than societal dilemmas, that is, choices between group interests and competing individual interests. Our competing interests are more nuanced and varied, and they’re subjective and situational. It’s more important we understand which societal pressures reduce the scope of defection, and how each should be scaled to keep society’s parasites down to a tolerable level.
• The need to not only trust strangers, but trust systems and institutions: It’s important to trust that defectors won’t take advantage of a group, but it’s also important to trust that institutions and systems won’t take advantage as well. Although sometimes laws aren’t enough, institutional rules allow reputation to scale, by giving people a system to trust so they don’t necessarily have to trust individuals. Systems are the last layers of defence – and the most scalable – against defection.
• Real-world applications for understanding and scaling societal pressures: There are a variety of competing interests that can cause someone to defect and not act in the group norm. Today, this largely includes how certain societal dilemmas affect corporations; how major corporations can play one societal dilemma off another; and how increasing the power and scale of corporations can prompt them to do whatever illegal activity is under consideration.
Schneier’s message isn’t that defectors will ruin everything for everyone, but that we need to manage societal pressures to ensure they don’t. Our global society has grown so large and complex that our traditional trust mechanisms no longer work.
Today’s problems require new thinking, and as World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab says: “Without trust nothing can be achieved. Liars and Outliers is a brilliant analysis of the role of trust in society and business.”
