I think there is a huge difference between the question “How much should I trust this person who is in my life already?” and “How can I find people likely to be trustworthy?” Big five seems like it would be useful for filtering people to add to your life, like if you were dating or running a job interview, whereas I think local (potentially mutable) details start to screen that abstraction out once the person is given and you’re trying to make much more particular decisions about the circumstances and nature of the relationship and mutual reliance within it.
I was thinking about which people you trust in important matters—spouses or the equivalent, employees, employers, doctors, investments, that sort of thing. If you’d like a LessWrongian flavor, who would you trust to take care of your affairs while you’re frozen, and why?
If someone is looking for a spouse (who in my mind would be your number one trusted human being on the planet in the long run) the big result I’m aware of is to avoid romantic entanglement with neurotic people. Marrying a neurotic person is one of a handful of things that defies happiness set point theory and causes a significant persistent decrease in a person’s happiness, and it also predicts divorce. Easily googleable pop science summary here.
Neurotics can be hard to rely on. They might be particularly depressed or may be angry at you during a week you really need them. They tend to have higher variance in performance tests, so sparkling performance at one time is less likely to translate to similarly high performance later. If those are factors you think of as related to “trust” then they are probably significant here.
I think there is a huge difference between the question “How much should I trust this person who is in my life already?” and “How can I find people likely to be trustworthy?” Big five seems like it would be useful for filtering people to add to your life, like if you were dating or running a job interview, whereas I think local (potentially mutable) details start to screen that abstraction out once the person is given and you’re trying to make much more particular decisions about the circumstances and nature of the relationship and mutual reliance within it.
Nancy clarified in another comment:
If someone is looking for a spouse (who in my mind would be your number one trusted human being on the planet in the long run) the big result I’m aware of is to avoid romantic entanglement with neurotic people. Marrying a neurotic person is one of a handful of things that defies happiness set point theory and causes a significant persistent decrease in a person’s happiness, and it also predicts divorce. Easily googleable pop science summary here.
Neurotics can be hard to rely on. They might be particularly depressed or may be angry at you during a week you really need them. They tend to have higher variance in performance tests, so sparkling performance at one time is less likely to translate to similarly high performance later. If those are factors you think of as related to “trust” then they are probably significant here.