Trust Factor

Introduction

Arriving in Malke, a remote village of 1,000 people in Papua New Guinea, I had only three days to run the first-ever organizational culture experiment in a rain forest, so I had to get my equipment working. While experiments I ran in my laboratory and in companies in the United States had shown that a culture of trust generates high performance, testing members of an isolated tribe would help me determine if trust improves performance everywhere. Adding to the pressure of doing neuroscience in the rain forest, NHK TV from Japan would be filming the experiment.

Naturally, the experiment gods had other ideas.

Malke has no electricity ...