

Hiding Negative Information May Seem More Untrustworthy Than Revealing It - eastbayjake
http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/08/the-company-we-keep

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alialkhatib
The title seems a little misleading. The study seems to explore the social
impact of explicitly _declining to answer_ questions, which is very different
from _not volunteering_ something. If I'm telling someone about my work
history, the social implications of leaving out that summer I swept freight
docks is different from telling them I'd rather not talk about the summer in
question given that they've asked.

In the former case, there's no attention placed on that summer, and people
(probably rightly) assume that nothing interesting happened (it may come up in
an interview why there's a gap there, but I'll get to what I think the
parallel for that is). In the latter case, I'm being relatively uncooperative
in the information-gathering process.

The connection to companies seems weak to me. When I go into a restaurant that
neglects to post its food hygiene scores, I assume roughly the same as when I
walk into a store and the cashier neglects to tell me if he has a criminal
history. If I ask, and the restaurant tells me that it declines to answer,
_that_ seems more parallel to the question of declining to answer negative
personal information. Similarly with the "decline to answer" case among
people, I bet people would infer the worst of companies that "actively"
declined to answer questions (versus those that neglected to bring it up).

These are interesting questions the researcher is asking, and it's
particularly interesting to think about how we craft our identities online,
but I think they need to reflect more on the parallels they draw before
concluding that dynamics are different.

edit: I'm looking up the paper itself, because it occurs to me that a
mainstream news outlet is pretty likely to misreport the study's design,
results, discussion, etc... and it'd be unfair not to assume that the article
writer (or I the reader) misunderstood something.

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Natsu
> I'm looking up the paper itself, because it occurs to me that a mainstream
> news outlet is pretty likely to misreport the study's design, results,
> discussion, etc... and it'd be unfair not to assume that the article writer
> (or I the reader) misunderstood something.

I really wish we could convince science journalists that giving a proper
citation of any new study they cite is an absolute requirement for meaningful
coverage. And for web journalists, there should absolutely always be a link to
it if it is in any way available online, no excuses permitted.

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mattlutze
Well, it is cited by title and authors, and a googling of the title and lead
author returns a full copy PDF as the first two results:

[https://www.google.de/search?q=What+Hiding+Reveals+leslie+jo...](https://www.google.de/search?q=What+Hiding+Reveals+leslie+john&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=fbfNVYinJ5Ky7Qbw56igBg)

Agreed that a link should have been there, but it was effectively cited, if
not MLA/APA.

~~~
Natsu
Fair enough, but I do think we have to convince them that there just aren't
any excuses for linking not it if that's possible.

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emmab
Therefore, you should only continue to withhold the information if you think
they've underestimated how bad it is.

Therefore, if you continue to withhold the information they should increase
their estimate of how bad it is.

