Manufacturing Authentic Credibility at Scale

For cen­turies the con­cept of CREDIBILITY has been assumed, cod­i­fied, insti­tu­tion­al­ized — and every­one was so sure they knew how CREDIBILITY was cre­ated that no one ques­tioned the assump­tions, ever.

Only every­one was wrong. They were so focused on “how long” (chronol­ogy), that they over­looked the spe­cific “mech­a­nisms” that occurred dur­ing that time frame.

The insti­tu­tion­al­ized ver­sion goes some­thing like this (from Google search): CREDIBILITY is earned by con­sis­tent per­for­mance and authen­tic behav­ior over some period of time. It’s rep­u­ta­tion, knowl­edge, exper­tise, expe­ri­ence, and qual­i­fi­ca­tions. It’s hon­esty, integrity, trans­parency, fair­ness and being eth­i­cal. It’s being respect­ful, empa­thetic, con­sis­tent and reli­able.

It sounds almost impos­si­ble — and it should, because with those stan­dards — CREDIBILITY is hard to attain. And we haven’t even con­sid­ered how long all this takes. 

Although not entirely wrong — you can cre­ate CREDIBILITY this way — if you have lots of time and don’t make a sin­gle mis­take. Because the process is “brit­tle” — screw up any­where along the line and you’re back to square one.

But no one both­ered to care­fully observe the process or they would have imme­di­ately seen the two dis­tinct “mech­a­nisms” at work — the “expec­ta­tions” and “ful­fill­ment” — instead of a long, con­tin­u­ous, chrono­log­i­cal sequence of “good behav­iors” that mag­i­cally pro­duced CREDIBILITY. 

Here’s how the process actu­ally oper­ates: First, you have a sin­gle “good behav­ior” (it’s not credibility). Then you have two “good behav­iors” (still not credibility — and if they’re far apart in time — even less). And then you have a third “good behav­ior” (maybe we’re get­ting close, depend­ing on how much time has elapsed) — and the fourth, the fifth, etc.,  And some­where along that chronol­ogy — the observer (required to per­ceive the CREDIBILITY) says to her­self, “gee, I won­der if he’s going to do that “good behav­ior again like last time — and voila, if you do the “good behav­ior” — CREDIBILITY is cre­ated. If you don’t — well, back to square one.

The impor­tant point is that until there is a per­ceived “expec­ta­tion” of a behav­ior (by an observer) CREDIBILITY does NOT exist. And that’s the process in a nut­shell — “expec­ta­tion and ful­fill­ment = CREDIBILITY” and there’s no men­tion of time here, just “expec­ta­tion and ful­fill­ment.” CREDIBILITY is instantly cre­ated at the moment of “ful­fill­ment” of the pre­ced­ing “expec­ta­tion” — the closer in time the more powerful.

And you’ll notice, after the “expec­ta­tion thresh­old” is reached — all sub­se­quent “good behav­iors” are ful­fill­ment of the “expec­ta­tions” and gen­er­ate CREDIBILITY instantly.

The “two-stage” mech­a­nism, and it’s obvi­ous sim­i­lar­ity to “brand­ing” could not be ignored — cre­at­ing spe­cific expec­ta­tions — the more spe­cific the bet­ter and eas­ier it is to ful­fill those expec­ta­tions. So the chal­lenge becomes, how do you cre­ate the most pow­er­ful spe­cific expec­ta­tions and ful­fill­ment for infor­ma­tion in the “infor­ma­tion age?”

The Pedia brand tow­ers above all oth­ers in cre­at­ing the spe­cific expec­ta­tions (based on pow­er­ful Sys­tem 1 behav­ioral heuris­tics) of the high­est CREDIBILITY pos­si­ble — “inde­pen­dent third-party higher author­ity” CREDIBILITY — and the eas­i­est ful­fill­ment — as “ency­clo­pe­dias” have sim­ple, sort of “dull and bor­ing” lay­outs, far from “state of the art” (SOTA).

The great­est proof of con­cept of this “expec­ta­tion-ful­fil­ment” process in man­u­fac­tur­ing “authen­tic credibility at scale” is Wikipedia, which pro­duced mil­lions of arti­cles, to cre­ate the largest ency­clo­pe­dia in his­tory, with bil­lions of monthly vis­its. Tech­ni­cally, those arti­cles rep­re­sent “mul­ti­ple simul­ta­ne­ous instances of authen­tic credibility at scale.” And while Wikipedia is the largest exam­ple of the “Pedia Effect” there are many, many more “Pedias” uti­liz­ing exactly the same frame­work and process (Auto­pe­dia, Investo­pe­dia, Techo­pe­dia, Soft­pe­dia, Bal­lot­pe­dia, Law­in­fo­pe­dia, etc.). Not to men­tion the thou­sands of spe­cial­ized printed “Pedias” before the Inter­net even existed.

All of these “Pedias” are “man­u­fac­tur­ing authen­tic credibility at scale” every sin­gle day. And an impor­tant note, the “Pedia Effect” two-stage process of  “expec­ta­tion-ful­fill­ment” was described in a Decem­ber, 200o patent appli­ca­tion BEFORE the exis­tence of Wikipedia.

In the after­math of the “atten­tion econ­omy” the impor­tance of being able to “man­u­fac­ture authen­tic CREDIBILITY at scale” can not be over­stated. It is the most valu­able asset of every com­pany, and it can enhance or destroy every other asset of the com­pany, up to and includ­ing the entire com­pany itself. 

And every com­pany being able to man­u­fac­ture as much as they want or need — changes every­thing. CREDIBILITY makes every­thing the com­pany does — WORK BETTER. And it could even be the ori­gin of the “CREDIBILITY Econ­omy”. There cer­tainly isn’t any­thing else on the hori­zon that can solve the “CREDIBILITY cri­sis”.