West versus East – A Question of Trust

  • Abstract:

    The relationship between Eastern and Western Europe has always been complicated. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, gave new opportunities.

    Reinventing Eastern Europe, the question of trust between East and West must once again be defined – especially in the context of businesses. The importance of trust in business was underlined by the Nobel Laureate in economics, D. Akerlof, who introduced the term: Confidence multiplier. This idea was based on the concept of the “Keynesian multiplier”, which relies on the complex nature of human beings, where irrational “animal spirits” – emotions, affect people’s decisions in the sphere of economics. Trust is often measured in sociological surveys. However, according to Akerlof, current tests have failed to provide insight into the irrational side of this question.

    The paper presents the latest patented method, UllaDa, based on a trilemmatic paradigm which allows us to understand the ontology of inter-personal space in the contours of a Möbeus topology. The paper explains the concept of the multiplier of sub-personal trust and the Möbeus personality profile. This provides an opportunity to measure and understand intuitive, emotional and rational aspects of the attitude towards a particular question.

    During 2011 and 2012 a pilot research was conducted based on the Ullada method. In this study, 20 representatives from Western Europe who came to East in search for business opportunities, completed an internet-based colographic test based on the trilemmatic approach. One of the goals of this research was to discover the attitudes towards doing business in their own countries versus Russia, and thus, to what degree did they trust their Russian partners compared to doing business in their own countries – and how does the complexity of sub-personal confidence reveal itself through the research?