Trust

Lane Kenworthy, The Good Society
March 2025

Public opinion surveys often ask respondents whether “most people can be trusted” or “you can’t be too careful in life.” The share who choose the first option is treated by social scientists as an indicator of the degree of generalized interpersonal trust in the society.

How trusting are Americans? Is trust important? What are the causes of trust?

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HOW TRUSTING ARE WE?

Only a third of Americans believe most people can be trusted, as figure 1 shows. The share was much higher in the middle of the twentieth century. It fell sharply from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s and has decreased slowly but steadily since then.

Figure 1. Most people can be trusted
Share of US adults. NORC-GSS: 1948-64 question: “Do you think most people can be trusted? Yes or no.” Data source: National Opinion Research Corp, cited in Robert E. Lane, “The Politics of Consensus in an Age of Affluence,” American Political Science Review, 1965, p. 879. 1972ff question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in life?” Response options: can trust, cannot trust, depends. The line shows the share responding can trust, with depends responses omitted. Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series trust. WVS question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” Response options: can trust, cannot trust. Data source: World Values Survey.

Figure 2 shows the trend for interpersonal trust along with responses to a similar question that asks “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” Trust according to this measure is higher, which suggests grounds for a bit of caution in our interpretation of how untrusting Americans are.

Figure 2. Two measures of trust
Share of US adults. Fair question: “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” Response options: take advantage, fair, depends. The line shows the share responding fair, with depends responses omitted. Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series fair. Trust question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in life?” Response options: can trust, cannot trust, depends. The lines show the share responding can trust, with depends responses omitted. Data sources: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series trust.

Figure 3 shows that trust is lower in the United States than in many, though not all, other rich democratic nations.

Figure 3. Most people can be trusted
Share of adults. Question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” Data source: World Values Survey. “Asl” is Australia; “Aus” is Austria.

HOW IMPORTANT IS TRUST?

For individuals, on a day-to-day basis, trust is of considerable importance. Most of us interact frequently with people we don’t know. To do this without feeling overly anxious or afraid, we have to trust that they won’t cheat us or harm us.

Some research concludes that trust is not only intrinsically valuable but is a key contributor to desirable outcomes, including a healthy economy, a healthy democracy, greater tolerance, stronger community, and more happiness.1 As a result, some analysts have argued that trust is vital for a good society.2

Others conclude that while trust is good, we don’t need a high level of trust in order to achieve other outcomes. As one puts it: “Trust is overrated. Sure, you need moderate trust for a functional society. But the highest-trust parts of America are places like the Dakotas, New Hampshire, and Montana — and the lowest-trust are places like San Francisco, Boston, Houston, and Denver. Do these cities really scare you? … My rule of thumb: we need enough trust to make credit cards work.”3

The same point could be made about countries. Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, and several other nations have similar or lower levels of trust than the United States (figure 3 above). Yet these countries are successful in many respects, and superior to the US in some important ones.4

The outcome with which trust most often has been linked is economic growth. Trust is thought to lubricate economic relationships, enabling economic actors to cooperate in prisoners-dilemma-type circumstances, in which each has an incentive to act selfishly but both would benefit if each acts in a cooperative fashion.5 This may well make a significant difference in developing nations. But it’s less likely to matter in the context of a rich democratic nation, where economic cooperation tends to be a function of incentives rather than of trust.6 Indeed, there is some evidence that cooperation in the United States increased between the 1950s and the 2010s despite the fact that trust declined sharply.7

At first glance, the over-time story in the United States is broadly consistent with the hypothesis that trust is good for economic growth. Growth was more rapid in the 1950s and 1960s, when trust was at its highest, than it has been since then. However, the strong economic growth during the mid-twentieth-century “golden age” almost certainly was in part a catch-up process coming on the heels of the Great Depression and World War II. Economic growth since 1980, in the United States and in other rich democratic countries, has been roughly on track with the historical average for the past century and a half.8

What does the cross-country pattern tell us? It’s shown in figure 4. It suggests little if any beneficial impact of trust.

Figure 4. Trust and economic growth
1979 to 2019. Trust: Share of adults saying “most people can be trusted.” The other response option is “You can never be too careful when dealing with others.” Data source: World Values Survey. Economic growth: Average rate of growth of inflation-adjusted and purchasing-power-parity-adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Economic growth is adjusted for starting level of GDP per capita; the vertical-axis measure is the residuals from a regression of average economic growth on 1979 level of GDP per capita. Data source: OECD. “Asl” is Australia; “Aus” is Austria. The line is a linear regression line. The correlation is +.10.

There is similarly little indication that other important outcomes, such as economic security and health, are significantly influenced by trust.9

WHY AREN’T WE MORE TRUSTING?

Americans are less trusting than their counterparts in many other rich nations, and we’ve become less trusting over time. Why is that?

Trust in government

Government is one of our most important institutions, and over time it has played a growing, and increasingly visible, role in the lives of citizens in affluent democratic nations. The degree to which people have trust or confidence in their government is likely to influence the degree to which they trust other individuals.

Figure 5 shows that Americans’ trust in their government was high through the 1950s. But in the 1960s and 1970s it dropped sharply, due to the Vietnam War (1964-75) and Watergate (1974). Since then it has decreased a bit more. The over-time pattern for generalized interpersonal trust is very similar.

Figure 5. Trust in government and generalized interpersonal trust
Share of US adults. Trust in government question: “Do you trust the government in Washington to do what is right always, most of the time, some of the time, or never?” The line shows the share responding always or most of the time. Data sources: Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government, 1958-2017,” using data from assorted public opinion surveys; American National Election Studies, sda.berkeley.edu, 2020, series V201233. Trust question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in life?” Response options: can trust, cannot trust, depends. The line shows the share responding can trust, with depends responses omitted. Data sources: 1972ff data from General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series trust; pre-1972 data from National Opinion Research Corp, cited in Robert E. Lane, “The Politics of Consensus in an Age of Affluence,” American Political Science Review, 1965, p. 879. The correlation is +.85.

The association across countries also is quite strong. As figure 6 reveals, nations where confidence in government is greater tend to have higher levels of generalized interpersonal trust.10 This too is likely to be causal.11

Figure 6. Confidence in government and generalized interpersonal trust
2010s. Confidence in government: Share of adults responding yes to the question “Do you have confidence in the national government: yes or no?” Data source: Gallup World Poll, via the OECD. Trust: Share of adults saying “most people can be trusted.” The other response option is “You can never be too careful when dealing with others.” Data source: World Values Survey. “Asl” is Australia; “Aus” is Austria. The line is a linear regression line. The correlation is +.76.

Civic engagement

Participation in civic groups and activities fosters social interaction. In so doing it facilitates communication and amplifies information about the trustworthiness of others. For these reasons, it’s reasonable to hypothesize that civic participation heightens interpersonal trust. Drawing on data across regions in Italy, across states in the US, and over time in the US, Robert Putnam has concluded that it’s the key determinant of trust.12

The over-time correlation is supportive. Civic engagement seems to have peaked around 1965 and then began falling.13 Figure 7 offers one way to see this. It shows the trend in membership in 32 national chapter-based associations that existed throughout much of the twentieth century. Membership rose steadily until the mid-1960s; after that it decreased steadily. The over-time pattern for trust is very similar.

Figure 7. Civic participation and trust
Civic participation: Membership in 32 national chapter-based organizations. Includes the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4-H, League of Women Voters, Knights of Columbus, Rotary, Elks, Kiwanis, Jaycees, Optimists, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, the NAACP, B’nai B’rith, Grange, Red Cross, and more. Data source: Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon and Schuster, 2000, figure 8. Trust: Share of adults. Question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in life?” Response options: can trust, cannot trust, depends. The lines show the share responding can trust, with depends responses omitted. Data sources: 1972ff data from General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series trust; pre-1972 data from National Opinion Research Corp, cited in Robert E. Lane, “The Politics of Consensus in an Age of Affluence,” American Political Science Review, 1965, p. 879. The correlation is +.80.

Figure 8 shows that civic participation (active group membership) is positively associated with trust across countries, though the correlation isn’t especially strong.

Figure 8. Civic participation and trust
2010s. Active group membership: share of adults who say they are an active member of a civic group or organization. Average for eight types of organization: religious, sports-recreation, art-music-education, charitable, professional, labor union, environmental, consumer. Question: “Now I am going to read off a list of voluntary organizations. For each organization, could you tell me whether you are an active member, an inactive member, or not a member of that type of organization?” Average over 2005-2014. Data source: World Values Survey, worldvaluessurvey.org. Trust: Share of adults saying “most people can be trusted.” The other response option is “You can never be too careful when dealing with others.” Data source: World Values Survey. “Asl” is Australia; “Aus” is Austria. The line is a linear regression line. The correlation is +.36.

Ideally, we would want to see whether change in civic participation correlates with change in trust across countries, but we lack the needed over-time data on active group membership. One analysis of over-time trends in the US states finds a correlation between changes in civic engagement and changes in interpersonal trust but concludes that trust is more the cause than the effect.14

Education

Education is one of the best predictors of differences in trust among individuals: people with more schooling tend to be more trusting. We can see this if we look across individuals within the US, as figure 9 shows. And we can see it if we look across the world’s rich democratic nations, as figure 10 reveals.

Figure 9. Education and trust across individuals in the US
2010-2022. Share of US adults who feel “most people can be trusted.” Question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in life?” Other response options: you can’t be too careful; depends. Data source: General Social Survey, series trust, educ.

Figure 10. Education and trust across countries
2010s. Education: Average literacy and numeracy score on the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills, 2013. Data source: OECD, Skills Outlook, 2013, tables A2.2a and A2.6a. Trust: Share of adults saying “most people can be trusted.” The other response option is “You can never be too careful when dealing with others.” Data source: World Values Survey. “Asl” is Australia; “Aus” is Austria. The line is a linear regression line. The correlation is +.52.

Yet it’s unlikely that education has been a key contributor to the decline in trust in the United States. For one thing, the over-time correlation isn’t supportive. Educational attainment has been rising steadily over the past half century while trust has been falling, as figure 11 shows. In addition, as we see in figure 12, trust has been decreasing at roughly the same pace among Americans with varying levels of education. That isn’t what we would expect to see if education were driving the reduction in trust.

Figure 11. Education and trust
Education: Share of Americans age 25-34 who have completed 4 or more years of college. Data source: Census Bureau, “Years of School Completed by People 25 Years and Over, by Age and Sex,” using Current Population Survey (CPS) data. Trust: Share of adults. Question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in life?” Response options: can trust, cannot trust, depends. The lines show the share responding can trust, with depends responses omitted. Data sources: 1972ff data from General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series trust; pre-1972 data from National Opinion Research Corp, cited in Robert E. Lane, “The Politics of Consensus in an Age of Affluence,” American Political Science Review, 1965, p. 879. The correlation is -.75.

Figure 12. Trust by education
Share of US adults. Education numbers refer to years of schooling completed. Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series trust, educ.

Safety

Where there is more violence, trust is likely to be diminished.15 One commentator puts it as follows: “If in recent decades you lived in a neighborhood that has become much more densely populated with people who will cheat, rob, assault, and perhaps even murder you, you would be a fool not to have become more untrusting and less likely to assume that other people will treat you fairly.”16 As we see in figure 13, in the 1960s and 1970s the pattern in the United States was consistent with this hypothesis: violent crime increased sharply and trust declined sharply.

But since the early 1990s the story has been very different. Violent crime has fallen dramatically. Yet there has been no rise in trust.

Figure 13. Violent crime and trust
Violent crime: homicides per 100,000 population. Data source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, using FBI Uniform Crime Reports data. Trust: Share of adults. Question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in life?” Response options: can trust, cannot trust, depends. The lines show the share responding can trust, with depends responses omitted. Data sources: 1972ff data from General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series trust; pre-1972 data from National Opinion Research Corp, cited in Robert E. Lane, “The Politics of Consensus in an Age of Affluence,” American Political Science Review, 1965, p. 879. The correlation is +.15.

The cross-country pattern, shown in figure 14, also isn’t supportive of a causal link. The US has by far the highest murder rate, yet we’re not nearly the lowest on trust.17

Figure 14. Violent crime and trust
Homicides: Per 100,000 population. Data source: OECD. Trust: Share of adults saying “most people can be trusted.” The other response option is “You can never be too careful when dealing with others.” Data source: World Values Survey. “Asl” is Australia; “Aus” is Austria. The line is a linear regression line, calculated with the United States and Finland excluded.

Ethnic diversity

Some studies have found that societies with more ethnic diversity tend to have lower interpersonal trust.18 However, other studies find no such link.19 Figure 15 suggests little or no correlation across the rich democratic nations.

Figure 15. Ethnic fractionalization and trust
2010s. Ethnic fractionalization: Probability that two randomly drawn individuals of a country belong to two different ethnic groups. Data source: Alberto Alesina et al, “Fractionalization,” Journal of Economic Growth, 2003. Trust: Share of adults saying “most people can be trusted.” The other response option is “You can never be too careful when dealing with others.” Data source: World Values Survey. “Asl” is Australia; “Aus” is Austria. The line is a linear regression line. The correlation is -.10.

In the United States the over-time trend in ethnic diversity is largely a function of trends in immigration. The foreign-born share of the US population decreased from the 1920s through the 1960s. The 1965 immigration reform reversed the trend, as we see in figure 16.20 The broad pattern is consistent with the hypothesis of a causal effect: when the foreign-born share was at its lowest, in the middle of the twentieth century, trust was highest. However, what happened in the 1960s and 1970s is inconsistent with that conclusion: the foreign-born share was quite low, yet trust declined sharply and rapidly.

Figure 16. Immigration and trust
Immigration: Foreign-born share of the population. Data source: Census Bureau. Trust: Share of adults. Question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in life?” Response options: can trust, cannot trust, depends. The lines show the share responding can trust, with depends responses omitted. Data sources: 1972ff data from General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series trust; pre-1972 data from National Opinion Research Corp, cited in Robert E. Lane, “The Politics of Consensus in an Age of Affluence,” American Political Science Review, 1965, p. 879. The correlation is -.93 (but see the discussion in the text).

We don’t have good over-time data on ethnic heterogeneity across countries. However, we know that immigration has increased sharply in some nations and not in others. Sweden and Denmark offer an instructive comparison. The two countries are similar in many ways, and historically both have been ethnically homogeneous. In the past two decades, though, Sweden has absorbed a large immigrant inflow while Denmark has had relatively little immigration. Despite this difference, trust has remained at a very high level in both countries during this period (figure 3). Then again, according to the World Values Survey data, trust has increased more in Denmark than in Sweden in recent decades.

Income inequality

Income inequality may be corrosive of trust. One hypothesis is that visible inequality leads people to think cheating must be rife. “When 1 percent of the population takes home more than 22 percent of the country’s income,” writes Joseph Stiglitz, “reasonable people, even those ignorant of the maze of unfair policies that created this reality, can look at this absurd distribution and be pretty certain that the game is rigged.”21

Another hypothesis suggests that more income inequality yields less personal interaction and therefore less familiarity with people from other income classes. “We tend to choose our friends from among our near equals,” say Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, “and have little to do with those much richer or much poorer. And when we have less to do with other kinds of people, it’s harder for us to trust them. Our position in the social hierarchy affects who we see as part of the in-group and who as out-group — us and them — so affecting our ability to identify with and empathize with other people.”22

A third hypothesis holds that income inequality reduces trust by enhancing a sense that the middle class is modest in size while the poor are numerous and lack incentives to adhere to norms of honesty. “If the bottom groups are poor,” according to Christian Albrekt Larsen, “then it is fair to imagine that they have a lot to gain by cheating…. [Also,] the middle may easily imagine that persons at the bottom do not have much reputation to lose. Along the same line of reasoning it is fairly easy to understand why the middle might perceive imagined fellow citizens belonging to the middle as trustworthy. Persons in the middle of society are fairly well-off and therefore their (perceived) gain from cheating is lower. At the same time the losses connected with being caught cheating seem to be much higher…. But most importantly, persons in ‘the middle’ have much more reputation to lose.”23

As predicted, trust is negatively correlated with the level of income inequality across countries, across the American states, and over time for the US as a whole.24 However, trust began decreasing in the United States in the 1960s (or possibly the 1970s), which is prior to the rise in income inequality, and the decline in trust does not seem to have accelerated once inequality began to increase.25 This suggests that, if income inequality and trust are correlated over time, the causal direction may well run from trust to inequality rather than the other way around.26

Figure 17 shows change in trust by change in income inequality across countries. Income inequality is measured in two ways — in the first chart as inequality between the top 1% of households and the rest, in the second chart as inequality within the bottom 99%.27 The predicted association is negative; countries with larger increases in income inequality should be more likely to have experienced stagnant or falling trust. That’s what we observe in the first chart, but the association is quite weak. And in the second chart the association is positive. Neither pattern offers support for the hypothesis that income inequality is bad for trust.

Figure 17. Change in income inequality and change in trust
Change is measured over the years 1979 to 2019. Top 1% income share: pretax income excluding capital gains. Data source: World Inequality Database. Bottom 99% Gini: posttransfer-posttax household income. Data source: Standardized World Income Inequality Database. Trust: Share of adults saying “most people can be trusted.” The other response option is “You can never be too careful when dealing with others.” Data source: World Values Survey. The lines are linear regression lines. “Asl” is Australia.

An analysis of over-time patterns in the US states offers additional grounds for skepticism about the impact of income inequality on trust. Between 1980 and 2000, trust didn’t tend to decrease more in states in which income inequality increased more.28

Culture

Studies comparing across countries or across regions within countries have found lower generalized trust where the culture prioritizes family (southern Italy) or collectivism (Japan, southern United States). Family-centered or collectivist culture is thought to foster strong bonds with insiders but wariness of outsiders.29

Once again, however, the over-time correlation isn’t supportive: family and collectivism have weakened in the US during the past half century, so neither helps to account for the decline in generalized trust.30

Causes: summing up

Trust in government probably is the most important determinant of generalized interpersonal trust. Civic engagement also is a likely contributor. Education, safety, diversity, income inequality, and culture might have some impact, but if so it’s likely a small one.

SUMMARY

Americans are less trusting than they were in the middle of the twentieth century, and they’re less trusting than their counterparts in many other rich democratic countries. Trust in government and civic engagement appear to be the chief causes. While some believe trust is a vital contributor to other valuable outcomes, the evidence in support of this view is thin.

  1. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, Princeton University Press, 1993; Francis Fukuyama, Trust, Free Press, 1995; Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon and Schuster, 2000; Richard Layard, Andrew Clark, and Claudia Senik, “The Causes of Happiness and Misery,” in World Happiness Report, edited by John Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute, Columbia University, 2012; Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc, “Trust, Well-Being and Growth: New Evidence and Policy Implications,” in Handbook of Economic Growth, edited by Philippe Aghion and Steven N. Durlauf, Elsevier, 2014; Giuseppe Nicola Giordano, Jan Mewes, and Alexander Miething, “Trust and All-Cause Mortality: A Multilevel Study of US General Social Survey Data (1978–2010),” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 2019. ↩︎
  2. Putnam, Making Democracy Work; Putnam, Bowling Alone; Fukuyama, Trust. ↩︎
  3. Bryan Caplan and Zach Wienersmith, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, FirstSecond, 2019, p. 103. ↩︎
  4. Lane Kenworthy, “Economic Growth,” The Good Society; Kenworthy, “Longevity,” The Good Society; Kenworthy, “Safety,” The Good Society; Kenworthy, “Families,” The Good Society; Kenworthy, “Income Distribution,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  5. Robert D. Putnam, “The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life,” The American Prospect, 1993; John Helliwell and Robert D. Putnam, “Economic Growth and Social Capital in Italy,” Eastern Economic Journal, 1995; Stephen Knack and Philip Keefer, “Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1997; Christian Bjørnskov, “How Does Social Trust Affect Economic Growth?,” Southern Economic Journal, 2012. ↩︎
  6. Lane Kenworthy, “Social Capital, Cooperation, and Economic Performance,” in Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective, edited by Bob Edwards, Michael W. Foley, and Mario Diani, University Press of New England, 2001. ↩︎
  7. Mingliang Yuan et al, “Did Cooperation Among Strangers Decline in the United States? A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of Social Dilemmas (1956–2017),” Psychological Bulletin, 2022. ↩︎
  8. Lane Kenworthy, “Economic Growth,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  9. Lane Kenworthy, “Longevity,” The Good Society; Kenworthy, “Social Democratic Capitalism,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  10. The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) has a similar question, which asks “Do you agree or disagree: Most of the time we can trust people in government to do what is right.” That measure, too, is strongly correlated with interpersonal trust across countries. ↩︎
  11. Bo Rothstein, The Quality of Government, University of Chicago Press, 2011. ↩︎
  12. Putnam, Making Democracy Work; Putnam, Bowling Alone. ↩︎
  13. Lane Kenworthy, “Civic Engagement,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  14. Eric M. Uslaner and Mitchell Brown, “Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement,” American Politics Research, 2005. ↩︎
  15. Catherine E. Ross, John Mirowsky, and Shana Pribesh, “Disadvantage, Disorder, and Urban Mistrust,” City and Community, 2002; Sandra Susan Smith, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism Among the Black Poor, Russell Sage Foundation, 2007; Danielle Raudenbush, “‘I Stay by Myself’: Social Support, Distrust, and Selective Solidarity Among the Urban Poor,” Sociological Forum, 2016. ↩︎
  16. Charles Murray, Coming Apart, 2012. ↩︎
  17. Lane Kenworthy, “Safety,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  18. Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara, “The Determinants of Trust,” Journal of Public Economics, 2002; Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies, 2007; Willie Belton, Yameen Huq, and Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere, “Social Capital in the U.S: A Tale of Conflict, Contact or Total Mistrust?,” Discussion Paper 8384, IZA, 2014; Peter Thisted Dinesen and Kim Mannemar Sonderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: Evidence from the Micro-Context,” American Sociological Review, 2015; James Laurence and Lee Bentley, “Does Ethnic Diversity Have a Negative Effect on Attitudes towards the Community? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Causal Claims within the Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion Debate,” European Sociological Review, 2016. There are exceptions, such as Birte Gundelach, “In Diversity We Trust: The Positive Effect of ethnic Diversity on Outgroup Trust,” Political Behavior, 2014. ↩︎
  19. Jong-sung You, “Social Trust: Fairness Matters More Than Homogeneity,” Political Psychology, 2012. ↩︎
  20. Lane Kenworthy, “Migration,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  21. Joseph E. Stiglitz, “In No One We Trust,” New York Times, December 21, 2013. ↩︎
  22. Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level, p. 51. See also Eric Uslaner, The Moral Foundations of Trust, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Christian Albrekt Larsen, The Rise and Fall of Social Cohesion, Oxford University Press, 2013. ↩︎
  23. Larsen, The Rise and Fall of Social Cohesion, p. 88. ↩︎
  24. Bo Rothstein and Eric Uslaner, “All for All: Equality, Corruption, and Social Trust,” World Politics, 2005; Andrew Leigh, “Does Equality Lead to Fraternity?,” Economics Letters, 2006; Henrik Jordahl, “Inequality and Trust,” IFN Working Paper 715, Research Institute of Industrial Economics, 2007; Christian Bjørnskov, “Social Trust and Fractionalization: A Possible Reinterpretation,” European Sociological Review, 2008; Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level, ch. 4; OECD, “Trust,” Society at a Glance, 2011; Sander Steijn and Bram Lancee, “Does Income Inequality Negatively Affect General Trust?,” Discussion Paper 20, GINI Project, 2011; Larsen, The Rise and Fall of Social Cohesion. ↩︎
  25. Robert Putnam and Anant Thaker, “Equality and Social Capital: What’s the Connection?,” unpublished, 2010; Kenworthy and Smeeding, “Growing Inequalities and Their Impacts in the United States,” figure 4.3.4. ↩︎
  26. Putnam and Thaker, “Equality and Social Capital: What’s the Connection?” ↩︎
  27. For more detail, see Lane Kenworthy “Income Distribution,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  28. Malcolm Fairbrother and Isaac W. Martin, “Does Inequality Erode Social trust? Results from Multilevel Models of US States and Counties,” Social Science Research, 2013, using General Social Survey data. ↩︎
  29. Fukuyama, Trust; Brent Simpson, “The Poverty of Trust in the Southern United States,” Social Forces, 2006. ↩︎
  30. Lane Kenworthy, “Families,” The Good Society; Ronald Inglehart, Roberto Foa, Christopher Peterson, and Christian Welzel, “Development, Freedom, and Rising Happiness: A Global Perspective,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2008. ↩︎