TruthBook Religious News Blog

Trust is essential to strong relationships and a healthy society, but it has been declining for decades, report Pamela Paxton and Jeremy Adam Smith. How can America learn to trust again?

"Trust no one."

That was the slogan of the TV series The X-Files, which followed two FBI agents in their quest to uncover "the truth" about a government conspiracy. Perhaps the most defining series of the 1990s, The X-Files touched a cultural nerve and captured a mood of growing distrust in America.

In the six years since the series ended, however, our trust in each other has declined even further, despite a brief rebound after September 11. The mood of cynicism and distrust captured by The X-Files in the '90s seems just as relevant today indeed, a new X-Files movie was released this past summer. The decline or absence of trust also figures prominently in more recent hit TV series like Mad Men, Survivor, and The Sopranos.

In fact, "trust no one" has essentially served as Americans' motto over the last two generations. For 40 years the years of Vietnam, Watergate, junk bonds, Monica Lewinsky, Enron, the Catholic Church sex scandals, and the Iraq war our trust in each other has been dropping steadily, while trust in many institutions has been seriously shaken in response to scandals.

This trend is documented in a variety of national surveys. The General Social Survey, a periodic assessment of Americans' moods and values, shows a 10-point decline from 1976 to 2006 in the number of Americans who believe other people can generally be trusted. The General Social Survey also shows declines in trust in our institutions, although these declines are often closely linked to specific events. From the 1970s to today, trust has declined in the press (24 to 11 percent), education (36 to 28 percent), banks (35 percent to 31 percent), corporations (26 to 17 percent), and even organized religion (35 to 25 percent). And Gallup's annual Governance survey shows that trust in the government is even lower today than it was during the Watergate era, when the Nixon administration had been caught engaging in criminal acts. It's no wonder popular culture is so preoccupied with questions of trust.

Some researchers, such as Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam, have argued that this rise of distrust reflects profound generational shifts. Americans born roughly between 1910 and 1940 were a particularly civic and trusting generation, these researchers claim, forged in the crises of the Great Depression and World War II crises that required people to rely on one another and band together. Government dealt with these crises effectively through New Deal programs and military victory over the Axis powers, winning the confidence of its citizens. That generation is now dying out, replaced by younger people who, according to this theory, are progressively less trusting (starting with Baby Boomers, whose slogan allegedly was, "Don't trust anyone over 30"). In fact, a series of focus groups, conducted in 2001 by Harvard University's GoodWork Project, revealed an "overwhelming" distrust of politicians, the political process, and the media among the teenagers they interviewed. This generational decline implies that America's waning trust in others will not easily recover.

But why have succeeding generations become progressively less trusting? There are a number of possible explanations, none of them definitive.

For starters, trust in others depends on how much contact people have with other people-and Americans today are measurably more isolated than previous generations. They have fewer close friends, for example, and are less likely to join voluntary associations such as bird-watching groups and church choirs. This is important, because people who belong to such associations tend to become more trusting as a consequence. Experiments, as well as experience, show that people trust people they know before they trust strangers—and so the more people you know, the more you trust. Researchers Nancy Buchan, Rachel Croson, and Robyn Dawes found that even when they created pseudo-groups by randomly giving study participants instructions on differently colored pieces of paper, the participants trusted members of their color "group" more than the others. The more memberships we have in groups—almost any group—the more trust we have in our lives.

The rise of television and electronic media as a major source of entertainment and news may exacerbate isolation, and thus play a role in the decline of trust. When the GoodWork Project ran another series of focus groups with adults in 2004, researchers "found that individuals typically blame the media for loss of trust."

Again, the effect appears to be generational. "Most of the young people we interviewed have a default stance of distrust towards the media," says Carrie James, research director of GoodWork. According to James, young people simply feel less tied to larger institutions and American culture—they might trust family and close friends, but "they don't have good mental models" of how to trust more distant figures.

Falling and rising

The news is not all bad. Trust in institutions hasn't fallen in a straight line; instead, it rises and falls in response to specific events. Consider how people answered the question about their confidence in religion between 1987 and 2006. In early 1987, 30 percent of the population said they had a "great deal" of confidence in organized religion. In 1987, however, several televangelist scandals erupted, including that of Jim Bakker. By 1988, confidence in organized religion had dropped to 21 percent. Americans' confidence then rebounded from 1988 to 2000, eventually climbing back to pre-scandal levels. Then in 2002, as a result of the Catholic Church's sex scandals, confidence in religious institutions dropped dramatically again, to 19 percent. Since 2002, confidence in organized religion has again rebounded—to 25 percent in 2006.

Unfortunately, Americans' trust in one another does not generally react to historical events the way their trust in institutions does. In fact, according to the General Social Survey, trust in each other has declined much more steadily and consistently than has our trust in institutions. Since there are few, if any, scandals that seem to impugn the "average person," it takes a major event to influence America's trust in individuals in the way that their trust in institutions is routinely influenced.

Research has identified steps institutions can take to promote trust and help reduce distrust. For example, by protecting minority rights (through voting protections and antidiscrimination policies), a government can facilitate trust and cooperation among individuals who might otherwise be wary of each other. Indeed, looking at 46 countries over a 10-year period, one of us (Pamela Paxton) found that more democratic countries—countries that safeguard these kinds of rights—produce more trusting citizens.

In the end, it is our natural drive to trust that offers our best hope of rebuilding trust in America. That drive was summed up by the tagline for a recent summer film: "I want to believe." Which film? The new X-Files movie. As the switch suggests, even in the worst of times, lurking under our suspicious gaze lies a need to trust in each other.

Labels: General Social Survey, Jeremy Adam Smith, Pamela Paxton, trust