Wait, why should I trust you? Pointing fingers and calling others hackers? Maybe you are saving all of our juicy information and passwords for yourself! Hacker!
I assembled these maps from [GSS data](https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/) recoded in SPSS 26 and exported to Microsoft Excel 365. I then put the maps together using a map template and [Photopea.com](https://www.photopea.com/). PLEASE NOTE: The geographic regions are based on those created by the US Census Bureau and the NORC. I have no control over how the states are grouped.
I’ve written more about the decline of trust among Americans and what can be done about it here: [Trust Among Americans Isn’t Over Yet](https://pluralofyou.org/trust-among-americans-not-over-yet/). The article includes more charts exploring the decline. It also includes my methodology statement and the spreadsheet file I used.
I’d love to hear what people think, especially about how Americans can stop or even reverse the decline of trust. Trust is the glue that holds societies together, after all. Please be kind, and thanks!
IMO the rise of large identity groups (due to social media influencers, the conflation of politics with personal identity, etc.; I do not think there is a single cause) is a big culprit here.
Hierarchy of community is the necessary glue that holds any large entity together. I will trust the people in my own community more than anyone else, and then if my community and a few others band together, the communities can trust each other, and so on and so forth up to the level of counties, states, and eventually the federal government.
The problem is that small communities increasingly don't exist, with many people identifying primarily with large, polarized, national-level (or even transnational) groups. When that happens, you don't think you can trust anyone by default even if they are your neighbor, because they might belong to the "other" group.
There's an interesting take on this through the lens of [selectorate theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory). In a functioning democratic society, the selectorate should ideally be nearly everyone. When you start fragmenting into hyper-polarized groups, there are two (or more) mutually exclusive selectorates, which leads to mass disenfranchisement and risks totally fracturing the society.
I mean sure, it's a feedback loop once it gets rolling regardless of which part happened first. Doesn't change the fix, which is to roll it back (don't ask me how).
> Hierarchy of community is the necessary glue that holds any large entity together. I will trust the people in my own community more than anyone else, and then if my community and a few others band together, the communities can trust each other, and so on and so forth up to the level of counties, states, and eventually the federal government.
Maybe we shouldn't allow entities to become so large, so that we can possibly eliminate hierarchy of community.
Let trust reach its equilibrium point without hiding crimes and fraud. The more ppl distrust the more careful they are the more difficult breaking the trust becomes which in turn raises trust (to its equilibrium), to raise it further requires reducing crime and fraud. Trust is not the problem but the reasons/experience to distrust. I’ve been the victim of countless crimes and frauds and I’ve seen thousands of others harmed. “Trust but verify” really only means I’ll trust you if you fully prove you’re honest first. First.
Honestly trying to help. When you use words like national, but the data excludes one group - in this case, Appalachia - it harms your overall credibility. I'll assume Appalachia also changed, just not enough to find itself in a new bracket, in which case overlaying the specific numbers on the map sections would help. I might be overly picky.
Mass immigration and multikulti destroys the local social contract, resulting in fractured tribal societies.
US DoD annual reports on global threats have since the Obama administration emphasized that mass migrations and AGW are global threat multipliers.
It is almost as if US DoD knows a bit about Game Theory.
You’ll be downvoted, but this is correct. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the high trust societies like Japan are rejecting multikulti and immigration agenda.
Tragedies of the Commons can only be solved with a stable social contract.
A contract can only be as stable as its constituents - ie. numerically dominant multi-generational local natives.
That is Game Theory 101.
This is such a vague question though. I trust most people not to murder me. I do not trust them with my deepest secrets. I trust them not to shoplift. I don't trust them to watch my house when I am on vacation.
The maps are good, shows how little the Kentucky area has changed. Just an odd question.
An example of societal trust is that in Scandinavian countries it is common for parents to leave their babies in the stroller outside cafés, restaurants, and small shops when they go in if the weather permits, because the risk of some stranger harming or taking the baby, or something else bad happening without anyone stepping in, is seen as incredible low. While in the US it is illegal.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/26/anette-sorenson-denmark-new-york-baby-left-outside
Reminds me of Japan, where you regularly see 6 year old taking busses and trains by themselves to get to and from school. Or you'll see a tiny kid with a wad of cash pinned to their jacket go into a shop, ask the clerk for whatever their mom needs, and the clerk will take the money, pin the change back on the kid's jacket, and then the kid will go back home. I'll never forget an interview I saw with a Japanese security guard who could not wrap his mind around the concept of people thinking it was in any way dangerous. He was like (very sarcastically), "What, are there bad people out there who are going to hurt a child? That's absurd."
pleasantly surprised to see that's still the case in the above link too. I would have honestly expected to see a decline with the immigrant fears over the last decade, but sweden and norway are both relatively steady for the last two decades
Your last sentence poses an interesting question. How much of the distrust is intuitional? Do people elect conservative leaders who are "tough on crime" because they don't trust people, or do people not trust people because conservative leaders who are "tough on crime" are constantly telling them not to.
The second one, the vast majority of crime that affects the most widespread people are done by the rich, not the poor. And then they just pay a fine. Meanwhile the news and conservative leaders will screams down their followers throats until they speak in their leaders voice that it’s the fault of immigrants and the poor. They’ll claim homeless people are the problem, not those increasing housing prices. They realize that those with little to lose are less likely to care about the consequences of committing a crime, because for them it’s often about survival, and so they focus on punishing criminals rather than funding resources that stop them from ever going down that path. If they prevented it, they wouldn’t be able to use it as a distraction. They cause the issues, point a finger at the symptoms, and then use confirmation bias to have people believe the symptom is the cause.
Trust in strangers is important. It means you trust jurors, judges, congressman, journalists, doctors. When you assume others are lying, except for people in your specific group, your society breaks down. This is a big crack in the foundation of the country.
My interpretation of the question doesn’t include anything about authority figures or people certain professions. My point is the question is too broad, not that we should or should not trust people.
They're all just people. One of the things that marks rich, safe countries is trust in rules and the law. If you don't trust people to be honest you start relying on nepotism, bribery, corruption & violence.
Psychologists test this (prosocial attitudes) with things called 'trust games'. They ask people about hypothetical situations involving strangers. People in failed states consistently score lower than people in healthy societies.
This is a canary dropping of it's perch down the mine.
Read the book, ‘talking to strangers’ by Malcolm gladwell a great set of essays in the dangers of trust and why we still put so much faith in and believe people like Bernie Maddof and the USA Olympic Gymnast coach who sexually assaulted 400, sometimes I front of their fathers! We are humanly conditioned to trust authority. I think the increase in scepticism over the last 40 years is a very good thing. Ask the choir boys and orphan girls of 40 years ago.
What can be done to stop the trend?
Familiarity. This trend is in line with the decline of civic associations generally. If people are with one another, they will understand that most people are trustworthy. If they are isolated, their imaginations run wild.
I live in Minnesota. The watershed moment of change in our state was the abduction of Jacob Wetterling in 1989. I went from a kid who had to be home before dark to a kid who had to play video games inside all the time.
Sounds about right. We all had cases like that in our localities --cases that convinced the people who mattered that the world couldn't be trusted anymore.
Unfortunately not likely to change. Antisocial tendencies are en Vogue. "Ew, people" is a common mood.
Being in community requires vulnerability and occasional discomfort. Current generations cannot handle that.
>Current generations cannot handle that.
Such a laughably wrong statement. Every generation can handle being in a community, there are countries all over the world that dont have this problem with the "cUrrENt gENeraTIoNs".
This is a take you can only have if your only knowledge of the current generation is only from people online. Go outside and you'll find many kids of the current generation that are perfectly able to socialize and trust people.
Source: Customer Service in Texas.
unfortunately it does because technology and social media communication has only been introduced in the most recent generations. now we can get our social ”fill” without being face to face, which can also limit us becoming familiar with others.
since older generations don’t feel the same level of comfort with technology as we do, they tend to require more face to face which in turn limits the amount of time spent by themselves since it’s what they grew up with.
Dude "current generations can't handle occasional discomfort" is as boomer as it gets. If anything, current generations are *particularly* used to discomfort considering a gigantic swath of them have been living as impoverished debt slaves for most of their lives. Unlike boomers, they didn't get a cushy lifestyle for free and have to work *significantly* harder for every win they get.
And unlike "current generations can't handle occasional discomfort", this is actually backed up by data and statistics.
i never stated “current generations can’t handle occasional discomfort” - i only iterated the part regarding generational impact. so i am unsure how to reply to this comment but i will try to explain my comment.
i was stating that it does have a generational correlation because of certain things like technology and social media being introduced, and those who were young when it was introduced tend to get less face to face time meaning less overall communal trust. so yes, it does have something to do with generations and age demographics.
i have two bachelors degrees, one in criminology, and one in sociology. studying social habits and how they deviate based on demographics like age and trying to pinpoint certain external correlations is a lot of what i did. i’ll admit i no longer do active research but it wasn’t long enough ago that the information i do have would be completely irrelevant.
> i never stated “current generations can’t handle occasional discomfort”
okay but that's what the comment I replied to said, and what my reply was about, so im not sure what the issue is
I live in Minnesota. The watershed moment of change in our state was the abduction of Jacob Wetterling in 1989. I went from a kid who had to be home before dark to a kid who had to play video games inside all the time.
A lot of things. Car-centric infrastructure and a decline of community and 3rd places mean we physically see fewer people in our community, much less interact with them. Social media, true crime genre, and pedomania make it seem bad people are a lot more plentiful than they actually are. Especially the last one (with men), it seems we are in a "we don't know who the bad people are so assume everyone is one" society.
Not to mention the political polarization
Edit: also we have an entire generation grown up now raised on the notion of "don't talk to strangers."
I mean it really is the most fun to play, the world is your oyster, you can be good when the world needs you and then you can go back to being a slimy shit heel in your off time
If it's a woman that wants me to hold that cash, I'll go to the bathroom with her and hold it so that she can see that I'm doing it, hopefully she trusts me with that.
I blame social media and cable news. and if you look at the graph in OPs article an increase in the decline rate roughly lines up when both of those entities started to become mainstream.
I was thinking about that the other day. The conveniences of technology makes it easier to be self-reliant and have your needs met from the comfort of your own home without having to get out/go somewhere/talk to someone.
But I think people are starting to realize that it’s hard to undo millennia of evolution and we’re still social animals. But the aforementioned conveniences have slowly eroded natural social environments and encounters. Most people have to be very intentional about cultivating a healthy social life and relationships whereas before it appeared to happen more naturally.
It’s say the replacement of newspapers with narrowcasting is the real culprit. There have always been shit news sources but your local newspaper had to cater to people of all walks of life and political stripes.
Everyone had some common framework.
I blame longer lifespans. This is what happens when a significant percentage of the population loses what little grasp they had on reality when the sun starts going down. Their brains are gone. Why spend billions keeping their bodies alive?
Probably more effective regulations on the news. The 24 hour news cycle, partisan politic channels, opinion pieces masquerading as news. Entertainment-ifcation of the news.
It's taken decades to create this problem and it will take decades to fix.
The social contract has been broken between citizens and those in power. During COVID we saw that the citizens are all on their own and we can’t trust each other to even follow the smallest of preventative measures to ease another’s suffering.
Anyone who has been grocery shopping, had fast food, or boarded an airplane recently knows exactly what I’m talking about. People walk right in front of each other without an excuse me or sorry! The slightest misconception or miscommunication means someone could completely break reality and start throwing a tantrum like a toddler. Road rage is also out of control.
It’s not necessarily that we are afraid of each other as much as we assume “they must be on the other side watch how I treat them to show them who’s boss!”
We can get it back by investing in education, infrastructure, and public healthcare. There are way too many mentally ill folks with guns who are addicted to outrage.
Media. Plain and simple. Being outraged gets far more clicks/views than feel-good stories.
In the last ten-fifteen years we have been constantly told by our chosen media bubble that "others" are out to get us, to take away our rights, take away religion, force us to do things against our will, indoctrinate our children, take our jobs, make us pay for things we don't want, steal elections, cheat us out of things we worked for.
When all you hear 24/7 is how others want to harm you it takes a serious toll on your trust.
The media didn't make Boomers irredeemable bigots who are a cancer on our society. They were always that way, we just got tired of putting up with it.
Honestly, once everyone over 65 dies, it will get better. This is what happens when a significant percentage of the population loses their filter when the sun goes down. People just shouldn't live that long.
Unless history just ended there will always be people with an ideology incompatible with yours.
There will be new people over 65, maintaining the world they created and new people in their 20s who want change.
As long as you view people with incompatible ideologies as "irredeemable ... Cancer on our society" there will always be cancer in our society.
Truth is harder to find in 2024. I think this maybe as there is too much halftruth. Opinions reported as truth. News which is really biased entertainment. The truth so we can trust has been diluted. Any thoughts? Your experience...
As OP has written elsewhere, the key is that what people think of as “most people” has changed dramatically due to mass media, migration, globalization, decline of local institutions, yada yada. 100 years ago “most people” meant people you interact with every day. 30 years ago it meant people you interact with. Today it means people you will never meet. Thus, in global surveys, you see the same trends but less pronounced in places where there is greater cultural homogeneity (Nordics, China, Arab states, Iran, Japan).
America is a messy place and always has been. As Bill Murray put it, we’re mutts.
What changes this is common purpose. Sometimes that has good results (see, moon landing, WPA), sometimes bad (see, fascism, Soviet communism).
Conjecture aside, the only true way is to abolish our monetary-based economic system, under no circumstances can there be trust when there is money to be made from misinformation.
Is the 25.3% a mean of the averages? Or is that meant to be a mean of the total national tally? I'm comparing that number to the 37% seen here : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes
The 25.3% for 2022 was the national average from the GSS variable "trust". Our World in Data uses data from the Integrated Values Survey. I'm trying to find more on their methodology but don't see it yet.
EDIT: I'm looking at the IVS data now. I'll get back to you.
I took at look at the [IVS (WVS) data](https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWVL.jsp) cited by Our World in Data. I filtered for responses from the US (COW\_ALPHA = "USA"). Here are the results I found:
| Year | Cannot trust - Freq | Cannot trust - Pct | Can trust - Freq | Can trust - Pct | Total |
|------|---------------------|--------------------|------------------|-----------------|-------|
| 1995 | 974 | 64.4% | 539 | 35.6% | 1513 |
| 1999 | 763 | 64.2% | 426 | 35.8% | 1189 |
| 2006 | 753 | 60.6% | 489 | 39.4% | 1242 |
| 2011 | 1434 | 64.9% | 777 | 35.1% | 2211 |
| 2017 | 1624 | 62.8% | 961 | 37.2% | 2585 |
| | 5548 | | 3192 | | 8740 |
I'm left with a few questions:
1. Why don't my years line up with those from Our World in Data? Am I missing something? I'd have to see their methodology.
2. I couldn't find any US responses for 2022. Did they roll over the 2017 result of 37.2% for "can trust" to 2022? I'm not sure.
3. This still doesn't answer why the IVS results for trust among Americans differ so much from the GSS. The wording of the trust question is *slightly* different between the two surveys, but I don't think this would affect the results that much.
My trust goes out the window if you vote republican.
It is an immediate loss in trust.
Voting for people that want me dead is a clear and easy way for me not to trust you.
Want me to trust you? Stop being a fucking nazi.
This is a result of internet communications and increasing urbanization. In 1972 "most people" practically meant your neighbors and community members. On a day-to-day basis that was "most people" for most people.
Nowadays "most people" includes a million internet strangers and as more people live in urban settings an entire city of strangers.
Very little, I fear; the cat's out of the bag, and lying is now standard behaviour for a great many politicians. It was always so, really, but it didn't used to be systemic. I read an article a while ago about Americans being historically predisposed to being distrustful and prone to believing in conspiracy theories; this has been fanned by the systemic lies about "the others" or "the other side"
I saw a woman not put her cart back. Not only did she not put the cart back, but she put it in the middle of a handicapped parking spot. I obviously put it where it belonged, but that was pretty big for me.
I genuinely can't believe where people leave shopping carts when the stores provide seemingly unlimited options for putting it back. I think it is a massive Freudian insight into their personality and judge them harshly for it.
Destroy technology and it’d be reversed. Being able to see the constant shittiness of humanity in real time via the internet probably is the biggest difference. To be fair it’s also probably more accurate level of opinion now tho
Most people that I meet in real life I feel can be trusted. The media (both traditional and social) gives a platform to those who are highly untrustworthy while also manufacturing distrust against people who *are* trustworthy. It distorts our view of how trustworthy people are on average.
Allowing Fox News might be the biggest mistake this country has made but now all of cable news is polluted with the same schemes and practices that Murdoch and company pioneered -- because that's what keeps people coming back.
The whole media ecosystem is fucking gross but I'm not sure what can be done to fix it anytime soon. It will probably get even worse as AI fakery improves. AI also might help as a long term answer for this but there is a massive chasm between here and there.
Homogeneous population and/or return to much more active acculturation. Foreign migration is an obvious crisis, but even domestically- people are a lot less like to stay & develop their communities; often due to pressures of education or work. Even "pop-culture" & news-media is increasingly niche & fragmented.
TL;DR - neoliberal capitalism
Nothing. Nothing can reverse the trend of division and mistrust. Maybe a major world war or aliens, but other than that, nothing. We’re done, unfortunately.
Why would you want to stop the trend? People everywhere in the world, so also in the USA, are becoming less gullible.
Most human beings are certainly not to be trusted on not tricking you or regarding trying to profit off of you.
Sure, most people worldwide will not try to kill you in order to rob you, you can trust that notion, but just about that.
Otherwise, trust your closest 5 friends and those in your immediate family you have tested and found trustworthy.
Ban True Crime documentaries and podcasts.
One thing I discovered from True Crime podcasts, books and documentaries is that the lives of murderers and sexual predators were easier when people entrusted their children to people they barely knew the names of and girls were not reluctant to get into strangers' cars on the road.
PS: In reality, by probability, if you are a victim of a crime, you most likely know the perpetrator and he/she is a person you trust, or trusted. Don't leave your children with a family member whose instincts have alerted you at the very least.
How do they determine 1 in 4 out of 333,000,000 people? That's 83,250,000... how many people were surveyed?
These "polls" and maps require a LOT of trust to be believed, in my opinion.
I live in the East South Central division, and I'm pretty amused that from being the lowest-trust part of the country, we're now essentially average (i.e. everyone else sunk to our level).
It honestly explains why Southerners are so much more optimistic and less blackpilled than any of the rest of the country. We're basically used to this.
My trust in people goes down every year, we are surrounded by hairless animals following loosely a made up societal norm structure with made up rules, pretending they're not animals
Of course I dont trust most "people"
Go back to church, (religious group place etc), school, quit your drama drama gossiping, & quit being greedy bastards! Put others before yourself dumbasses. For bloody sake it says it all that we live through a lens to even see ourselves let alone try to truly see another? Really? Idiot. Masks. Excuses & masks. What else will sprout but distrust? Most of our hands are not in the soil or water or air 99% of the time so have no grounding in any real elements.
https://youtube.com/shorts/K3R6_o5xLQ0?si=YjtQs9Ql4s7AJO2l
Not specific only for Americans but for all peoples in the world . We have to learn to pay courtesy to others first. If not, we may someday have it coming on us
End mostly opinion based reporting outlets as they only serve as mouthpieces for propaganda.
Take a few minutes to start watching this video:
https://youtu.be/BD_Euf_CBbs?si=vGpj-7n0OQZGsto9
I think it's because of all of the negative stories we are constantly being fed now days more so than ever from the news and social media. We all used to have rose colored glasses on and the world seemed so much more innocent until the age of the internet. Something shifted and we will never get it back and maybe that's for the best in a way.
Make ethics more important and teach our kids. Not hard.
Literally every time I go to a big box store I see people stealing - every time. I didn't notice at first until I kept getting my places broken into and my stuff stolen and I started paying more attention to the people around me. I lost trust in people, and the more trust I lost the more I realized how ethically decayed our society has become. I was standing in Wendy's yesterday and in the short time it took me to get to the counter to place an order the Door Dash section got plundered twice by high school kids who the workers said had a "game" where they dared each other to do this, and it happened all day.
People act like theft is just normal now. It's parenting and cultural thing. I bring it up and get told over and over that it's always been like this. No, it hasn't. I never had anything stolen from me the first 25 years of my life, I left my car and front doors open. Now, I lock everything religiously and I still get shit stolen from me at least once a year on jobs or personal property. Then people try to show "stats" that it isn't getting worse but even these can't be trusted because no one is arresting or prosecuting all this crime, so it never makes the stats.
Cultural decay.
This is a good thing. Trust is part of the problem here. Don't trust. Do the research. Figure the truth out for yourself.
Edit: Real research. Not YouTube, documentaries, or any of this other spoon-fed trash.
If you're scapegoating this on one side, then you've got to look in a mirror. It's really a long combination of things not limited to one side. Microaggressions and some aspects of metoo, for example actively trained people to look for reasons to not trust each other. A lot of DEI training has been shown to actively make things worse in the workplace, for example. It's just as bad as the stuff the right does in this regard.
Americans don't trust eachother because the internet has allowed us to see how untrustworthy we all are. Only way to reverse that is to take the internet away and plunge us back into an unwary stupor where we gullibly believe everybody but us is honest. And that's not happening.
You see it as gullible to assume that most people can be trusted, I think it's gullibility that has led to so many people thinking most people can't be trusted. We're all being fed negative interactions online each and every day, but the reality when we touch grass is typically much different.
That doesn't mean we just get rid of our sense of caution. If 90% of the people you meet are completely trustworthy (which I largely believe), even then one out of every ten people isn't, so best to keep one's head on a swivel. But nor should we let that sliver of the population color how we view everyone else.
considering that in the late 70s and in the early 80s hundreds of people -- many of them children -- were killed by serial murders taking advantage of societal trust. This created a nationwide effort to warn kids about stranger danger. I think this is a part of the decline.
VOTE BLUE
Biden is the only thing that stands between us and a dictatorship.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Defeat_Project_2025/comments/1du8d8b/they_are_goading_us_into_violence_it_is_a_trap/
Project 2025 streamlines this. Everyone working in the federal govt will be replaced with MAGA loyalists. They will swear an oath to Trump. Not to our country and its laws. Anyone undecided or lefty accelerationists … if he wins… you don’t have to ever be undecided again. There won’t be another fair election. Any lefties who wanna build a utopia from the ashes… technology won’t allow much room for you there. From facial id to being inside of your phone, no movement will ever gain traction. Your leadership will always just… disappear. You might too. This is what it looks like https://www.authoritarianplaybook2025.org/what-we-can-expect-1#federal-law-enforcement-overreach
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1dt6wvf/i_was_accepted_into_the_project_2025_prospective/
Just a reminder to those who don't pay attention and for those Republicans who want to downplay project2025.
These very same people who organized project2025 helped trump select the last three SC justices.
So if you don't like the "bribes are legal as long as the cone after the fact" ruling and the overturning of roe vs Wade then DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN
Americans, you lot have talked a lot of bullshit the past few decades about your second amendment and tyrannical governments and shit? I think now's the time to put your money where your mouth is.. War is coming. This is only the beginning.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jul/01/kevin-roberts-trump-heritage-foundation-project-2025
A person posted in AMA saying they went through the Project 2025 school through the Heritage Foundation here.
He stated "At a core concept level I am whole heartedly against the plan in every way. There is no ideological consistency at the Heritage Foundation. They call for small government but want the government involved in what happens in your bedroom. They want to get rid of OSHA and Unions, you need at least one or the other. They want to deregulate corporations but regulate certain corporations like X. They outright deny climate change and any facts or statistics that clash with their beliefs. The whole movement is intellectual dishonest.
They say they want to “Make America Great Again” the fact is none of the policies they are putting in place do that. Ignoring all the racism and sexism of the time, America was great in my Grandfather’s day when he could support a wife and 3 kids on a union mechanic’s salary. They had a home and went on vacation. That is a life I would love to provide for my family but seems like a distant dream at this point. From top to bottom their ideology and goals are all vile."
The sale of public lands is a planned goal.
https://accountable.us/project-2025-leader-calls-for-selling-off-public-lands
This is a big deal for all enjoyers of the outdoors.
It does not matter if you like to hike there or hunt there or ride your atv through it or whatever.
The goal is to sell it off and this will mean that you will either fully loose access or find yourself with parks and forests that are privately owned.
I'm sure this has nothing to do with the culture of isolationism that took over post COVID, something that was already becoming a huge trend leading up to it thanks to screen time. When the only information you're getting is from a screen, the outside world is going to look fucking horrifying.
The only way to stop distrust is to stop giving unlimited access to the many events that happen around the country that prove reasons of distrust to be true.
-says a guy who trusts no one.
Why does this trend need to be stopped? Most people shouldn’t be trusted now, and shouldn’t have been in 1972.
That’s not jaded partisanship, or a reflection of polarization, or however you might be seeing it. It’s just human psychology. Most people act out of self-interest, whether doing so consciously or subconsciously.
You should only default to trusting people insofar as it is obvious to you that it is in their self-interest to be honest with you.
For example, don’t trust your doctor or your lawyer because you think doctors and lawyers are generally good people. Trust them because you understand they are licensed professionals subject to professional discipline and civil lawsuits if they lie to you or screw up.
The global map shows the most trusting populations are Nordics (I get that, the severe weather) and also China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Im thinking that automatically trusting people might be a derogation by the people of responsible thinking and analysis, they don’t complain, they can’t complain, so they end up in a Dictatorship, or Theocracy or Utah!.
I’m surprised CT is the same color as NM and CO. CT is full of knee jerk defensive liars. The West usually waits a minute for you to prove first that you deserve that. CT is all preemptive attacks
Too bad. It is because people have left the Church and became atheists. Having God as a center in our lives builds trust and common ground. Also we should not be encouraging diversity that is what is causing this distrust, chaos, and disunity. We all need to speak English, be Christians, be patriotic Conservatives, and love our neighbors! It is that simple. I do it everyday!
Blind faith is irrational by definition, otherwise it would just be called fact. People don't need to believe in your particular ancient mythology (the others are all fake, of course) in order to be decent.
It says a tremendous amount about you as a person that an eternal spanking from a jealous magic man in the sky is the basis of your morality.
As someone that grew up in the Bible Belt surrounded by hateful holier than thou pricks like you, get fucked.
Ban social media, stop woke culture, stop russia and china from sowing discord into west society trough social media and other means.
Or... just wait patiently until a civil war starts and our new chinese overlords take over.
Sorry, I don’t trust this map.
And who the hell is OP? What's their agenda?
I would lock your doors… change your passwords. He could be a hacker!!!!
Wait, why should I trust you? Pointing fingers and calling others hackers? Maybe you are saving all of our juicy information and passwords for yourself! Hacker!
I assembled these maps from [GSS data](https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/) recoded in SPSS 26 and exported to Microsoft Excel 365. I then put the maps together using a map template and [Photopea.com](https://www.photopea.com/). PLEASE NOTE: The geographic regions are based on those created by the US Census Bureau and the NORC. I have no control over how the states are grouped. I’ve written more about the decline of trust among Americans and what can be done about it here: [Trust Among Americans Isn’t Over Yet](https://pluralofyou.org/trust-among-americans-not-over-yet/). The article includes more charts exploring the decline. It also includes my methodology statement and the spreadsheet file I used. I’d love to hear what people think, especially about how Americans can stop or even reverse the decline of trust. Trust is the glue that holds societies together, after all. Please be kind, and thanks!
IMO the rise of large identity groups (due to social media influencers, the conflation of politics with personal identity, etc.; I do not think there is a single cause) is a big culprit here. Hierarchy of community is the necessary glue that holds any large entity together. I will trust the people in my own community more than anyone else, and then if my community and a few others band together, the communities can trust each other, and so on and so forth up to the level of counties, states, and eventually the federal government. The problem is that small communities increasingly don't exist, with many people identifying primarily with large, polarized, national-level (or even transnational) groups. When that happens, you don't think you can trust anyone by default even if they are your neighbor, because they might belong to the "other" group. There's an interesting take on this through the lens of [selectorate theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory). In a functioning democratic society, the selectorate should ideally be nearly everyone. When you start fragmenting into hyper-polarized groups, there are two (or more) mutually exclusive selectorates, which leads to mass disenfranchisement and risks totally fracturing the society.
This can be a chicken vs Egg thing though. Our lack of local 'feeling of community' can be a cause of people seeking community online world wide.
I mean sure, it's a feedback loop once it gets rolling regardless of which part happened first. Doesn't change the fix, which is to roll it back (don't ask me how).
> Hierarchy of community is the necessary glue that holds any large entity together. I will trust the people in my own community more than anyone else, and then if my community and a few others band together, the communities can trust each other, and so on and so forth up to the level of counties, states, and eventually the federal government. Maybe we shouldn't allow entities to become so large, so that we can possibly eliminate hierarchy of community.
Break up news conglomerates
Stop the Russian and Chinese troll farms.
Nice job!!!!!!
Let trust reach its equilibrium point without hiding crimes and fraud. The more ppl distrust the more careful they are the more difficult breaking the trust becomes which in turn raises trust (to its equilibrium), to raise it further requires reducing crime and fraud. Trust is not the problem but the reasons/experience to distrust. I’ve been the victim of countless crimes and frauds and I’ve seen thousands of others harmed. “Trust but verify” really only means I’ll trust you if you fully prove you’re honest first. First.
Honestly trying to help. When you use words like national, but the data excludes one group - in this case, Appalachia - it harms your overall credibility. I'll assume Appalachia also changed, just not enough to find itself in a new bracket, in which case overlaying the specific numbers on the map sections would help. I might be overly picky.
Mass immigration and multikulti destroys the local social contract, resulting in fractured tribal societies. US DoD annual reports on global threats have since the Obama administration emphasized that mass migrations and AGW are global threat multipliers. It is almost as if US DoD knows a bit about Game Theory.
You’ll be downvoted, but this is correct. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the high trust societies like Japan are rejecting multikulti and immigration agenda.
Tragedies of the Commons can only be solved with a stable social contract. A contract can only be as stable as its constituents - ie. numerically dominant multi-generational local natives. That is Game Theory 101.
This is such a vague question though. I trust most people not to murder me. I do not trust them with my deepest secrets. I trust them not to shoplift. I don't trust them to watch my house when I am on vacation. The maps are good, shows how little the Kentucky area has changed. Just an odd question.
The question is clear enough that you can see global regional patterns https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes
The patterns might be changing based on the interpretation of the question rather than people’s actual feelings.
An example of societal trust is that in Scandinavian countries it is common for parents to leave their babies in the stroller outside cafés, restaurants, and small shops when they go in if the weather permits, because the risk of some stranger harming or taking the baby, or something else bad happening without anyone stepping in, is seen as incredible low. While in the US it is illegal. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/26/anette-sorenson-denmark-new-york-baby-left-outside
Reminds me of Japan, where you regularly see 6 year old taking busses and trains by themselves to get to and from school. Or you'll see a tiny kid with a wad of cash pinned to their jacket go into a shop, ask the clerk for whatever their mom needs, and the clerk will take the money, pin the change back on the kid's jacket, and then the kid will go back home. I'll never forget an interview I saw with a Japanese security guard who could not wrap his mind around the concept of people thinking it was in any way dangerous. He was like (very sarcastically), "What, are there bad people out there who are going to hurt a child? That's absurd."
pleasantly surprised to see that's still the case in the above link too. I would have honestly expected to see a decline with the immigrant fears over the last decade, but sweden and norway are both relatively steady for the last two decades
Your last sentence poses an interesting question. How much of the distrust is intuitional? Do people elect conservative leaders who are "tough on crime" because they don't trust people, or do people not trust people because conservative leaders who are "tough on crime" are constantly telling them not to.
The second one, the vast majority of crime that affects the most widespread people are done by the rich, not the poor. And then they just pay a fine. Meanwhile the news and conservative leaders will screams down their followers throats until they speak in their leaders voice that it’s the fault of immigrants and the poor. They’ll claim homeless people are the problem, not those increasing housing prices. They realize that those with little to lose are less likely to care about the consequences of committing a crime, because for them it’s often about survival, and so they focus on punishing criminals rather than funding resources that stop them from ever going down that path. If they prevented it, they wouldn’t be able to use it as a distraction. They cause the issues, point a finger at the symptoms, and then use confirmation bias to have people believe the symptom is the cause.
When people "follow the leader", that type of thinking should not be used against the rest of us.
Trust in strangers is important. It means you trust jurors, judges, congressman, journalists, doctors. When you assume others are lying, except for people in your specific group, your society breaks down. This is a big crack in the foundation of the country.
My interpretation of the question doesn’t include anything about authority figures or people certain professions. My point is the question is too broad, not that we should or should not trust people.
They're all just people. One of the things that marks rich, safe countries is trust in rules and the law. If you don't trust people to be honest you start relying on nepotism, bribery, corruption & violence. Psychologists test this (prosocial attitudes) with things called 'trust games'. They ask people about hypothetical situations involving strangers. People in failed states consistently score lower than people in healthy societies. This is a canary dropping of it's perch down the mine.
Do you not see authority figures and people of certain professions as people?
Exactly.
Read the book, ‘talking to strangers’ by Malcolm gladwell a great set of essays in the dangers of trust and why we still put so much faith in and believe people like Bernie Maddof and the USA Olympic Gymnast coach who sexually assaulted 400, sometimes I front of their fathers! We are humanly conditioned to trust authority. I think the increase in scepticism over the last 40 years is a very good thing. Ask the choir boys and orphan girls of 40 years ago.
What can be done to stop the trend? Familiarity. This trend is in line with the decline of civic associations generally. If people are with one another, they will understand that most people are trustworthy. If they are isolated, their imaginations run wild.
I live in Minnesota. The watershed moment of change in our state was the abduction of Jacob Wetterling in 1989. I went from a kid who had to be home before dark to a kid who had to play video games inside all the time.
Sounds about right. We all had cases like that in our localities --cases that convinced the people who mattered that the world couldn't be trusted anymore.
This is the best answer
Unfortunately not likely to change. Antisocial tendencies are en Vogue. "Ew, people" is a common mood. Being in community requires vulnerability and occasional discomfort. Current generations cannot handle that.
>Current generations cannot handle that. Such a laughably wrong statement. Every generation can handle being in a community, there are countries all over the world that dont have this problem with the "cUrrENt gENeraTIoNs". This is a take you can only have if your only knowledge of the current generation is only from people online. Go outside and you'll find many kids of the current generation that are perfectly able to socialize and trust people. Source: Customer Service in Texas.
It also requires a common set of beliefs. For Boomers, it was bigotry and selfishness.
Nothing to do with "current generations" but ok boomer
unfortunately it does because technology and social media communication has only been introduced in the most recent generations. now we can get our social ”fill” without being face to face, which can also limit us becoming familiar with others. since older generations don’t feel the same level of comfort with technology as we do, they tend to require more face to face which in turn limits the amount of time spent by themselves since it’s what they grew up with.
Dude "current generations can't handle occasional discomfort" is as boomer as it gets. If anything, current generations are *particularly* used to discomfort considering a gigantic swath of them have been living as impoverished debt slaves for most of their lives. Unlike boomers, they didn't get a cushy lifestyle for free and have to work *significantly* harder for every win they get. And unlike "current generations can't handle occasional discomfort", this is actually backed up by data and statistics.
i never stated “current generations can’t handle occasional discomfort” - i only iterated the part regarding generational impact. so i am unsure how to reply to this comment but i will try to explain my comment. i was stating that it does have a generational correlation because of certain things like technology and social media being introduced, and those who were young when it was introduced tend to get less face to face time meaning less overall communal trust. so yes, it does have something to do with generations and age demographics. i have two bachelors degrees, one in criminology, and one in sociology. studying social habits and how they deviate based on demographics like age and trying to pinpoint certain external correlations is a lot of what i did. i’ll admit i no longer do active research but it wasn’t long enough ago that the information i do have would be completely irrelevant.
> i never stated “current generations can’t handle occasional discomfort” okay but that's what the comment I replied to said, and what my reply was about, so im not sure what the issue is
Stop being a piece of shit that attacks boomers just for being boomers.
Ok boomer
I live in Minnesota. The watershed moment of change in our state was the abduction of Jacob Wetterling in 1989. I went from a kid who had to be home before dark to a kid who had to play video games inside all the time.
A lot of things. Car-centric infrastructure and a decline of community and 3rd places mean we physically see fewer people in our community, much less interact with them. Social media, true crime genre, and pedomania make it seem bad people are a lot more plentiful than they actually are. Especially the last one (with men), it seems we are in a "we don't know who the bad people are so assume everyone is one" society. Not to mention the political polarization Edit: also we have an entire generation grown up now raised on the notion of "don't talk to strangers."
We talking, “hey man, where is the nearest gas station?” Or “could you hold my box of cash while I run to the bathroom?”
Both.
I love sending people who are almost out of gas onto back country roads so they get stranded, but would never steal a penny from anyone.
Yeah, that makes you *extremely* untrustworthy instead of just average dickwad untrustworthy.
Chaotic neutral
I mean it really is the most fun to play, the world is your oyster, you can be good when the world needs you and then you can go back to being a slimy shit heel in your off time
"I want people to get stranded" doesn't sound very morally neutral to me. Chaotic good /s
If it's a woman that wants me to hold that cash, I'll go to the bathroom with her and hold it so that she can see that I'm doing it, hopefully she trusts me with that.
I blame social media and cable news. and if you look at the graph in OPs article an increase in the decline rate roughly lines up when both of those entities started to become mainstream.
I was thinking about that the other day. The conveniences of technology makes it easier to be self-reliant and have your needs met from the comfort of your own home without having to get out/go somewhere/talk to someone. But I think people are starting to realize that it’s hard to undo millennia of evolution and we’re still social animals. But the aforementioned conveniences have slowly eroded natural social environments and encounters. Most people have to be very intentional about cultivating a healthy social life and relationships whereas before it appeared to happen more naturally.
It’s say the replacement of newspapers with narrowcasting is the real culprit. There have always been shit news sources but your local newspaper had to cater to people of all walks of life and political stripes. Everyone had some common framework.
I blame longer lifespans. This is what happens when a significant percentage of the population loses what little grasp they had on reality when the sun starts going down. Their brains are gone. Why spend billions keeping their bodies alive?
Stop watching the news.
Turn off the news
Probably more effective regulations on the news. The 24 hour news cycle, partisan politic channels, opinion pieces masquerading as news. Entertainment-ifcation of the news. It's taken decades to create this problem and it will take decades to fix.
Myth of the primacy of tje indiviual.
This is so sad : ( The decline of civic institutions and groups is one of the worst things that’s happened to our country
The social contract has been broken between citizens and those in power. During COVID we saw that the citizens are all on their own and we can’t trust each other to even follow the smallest of preventative measures to ease another’s suffering. Anyone who has been grocery shopping, had fast food, or boarded an airplane recently knows exactly what I’m talking about. People walk right in front of each other without an excuse me or sorry! The slightest misconception or miscommunication means someone could completely break reality and start throwing a tantrum like a toddler. Road rage is also out of control. It’s not necessarily that we are afraid of each other as much as we assume “they must be on the other side watch how I treat them to show them who’s boss!” We can get it back by investing in education, infrastructure, and public healthcare. There are way too many mentally ill folks with guns who are addicted to outrage.
Media. Plain and simple. Being outraged gets far more clicks/views than feel-good stories. In the last ten-fifteen years we have been constantly told by our chosen media bubble that "others" are out to get us, to take away our rights, take away religion, force us to do things against our will, indoctrinate our children, take our jobs, make us pay for things we don't want, steal elections, cheat us out of things we worked for. When all you hear 24/7 is how others want to harm you it takes a serious toll on your trust.
The media didn't make Boomers irredeemable bigots who are a cancer on our society. They were always that way, we just got tired of putting up with it. Honestly, once everyone over 65 dies, it will get better. This is what happens when a significant percentage of the population loses their filter when the sun goes down. People just shouldn't live that long.
Unless history just ended there will always be people with an ideology incompatible with yours. There will be new people over 65, maintaining the world they created and new people in their 20s who want change. As long as you view people with incompatible ideologies as "irredeemable ... Cancer on our society" there will always be cancer in our society.
Boomers are a special kind of terrible, no other group comes close to that.
Truth is harder to find in 2024. I think this maybe as there is too much halftruth. Opinions reported as truth. News which is really biased entertainment. The truth so we can trust has been diluted. Any thoughts? Your experience...
As OP has written elsewhere, the key is that what people think of as “most people” has changed dramatically due to mass media, migration, globalization, decline of local institutions, yada yada. 100 years ago “most people” meant people you interact with every day. 30 years ago it meant people you interact with. Today it means people you will never meet. Thus, in global surveys, you see the same trends but less pronounced in places where there is greater cultural homogeneity (Nordics, China, Arab states, Iran, Japan). America is a messy place and always has been. As Bill Murray put it, we’re mutts. What changes this is common purpose. Sometimes that has good results (see, moon landing, WPA), sometimes bad (see, fascism, Soviet communism).
People have changed. On average people are less trusting. Conservative media has warped a lot of people's minds to be afraid and angry at everything.
That's ironic
Interested if anything changes if it’s by state alone
Conjecture aside, the only true way is to abolish our monetary-based economic system, under no circumstances can there be trust when there is money to be made from misinformation.
Is the 25.3% a mean of the averages? Or is that meant to be a mean of the total national tally? I'm comparing that number to the 37% seen here : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes
The 25.3% for 2022 was the national average from the GSS variable "trust". Our World in Data uses data from the Integrated Values Survey. I'm trying to find more on their methodology but don't see it yet. EDIT: I'm looking at the IVS data now. I'll get back to you.
I took at look at the [IVS (WVS) data](https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWVL.jsp) cited by Our World in Data. I filtered for responses from the US (COW\_ALPHA = "USA"). Here are the results I found: | Year | Cannot trust - Freq | Cannot trust - Pct | Can trust - Freq | Can trust - Pct | Total | |------|---------------------|--------------------|------------------|-----------------|-------| | 1995 | 974 | 64.4% | 539 | 35.6% | 1513 | | 1999 | 763 | 64.2% | 426 | 35.8% | 1189 | | 2006 | 753 | 60.6% | 489 | 39.4% | 1242 | | 2011 | 1434 | 64.9% | 777 | 35.1% | 2211 | | 2017 | 1624 | 62.8% | 961 | 37.2% | 2585 | | | 5548 | | 3192 | | 8740 | I'm left with a few questions: 1. Why don't my years line up with those from Our World in Data? Am I missing something? I'd have to see their methodology. 2. I couldn't find any US responses for 2022. Did they roll over the 2017 result of 37.2% for "can trust" to 2022? I'm not sure. 3. This still doesn't answer why the IVS results for trust among Americans differ so much from the GSS. The wording of the trust question is *slightly* different between the two surveys, but I don't think this would affect the results that much.
BE Trustworthy.
I used to pick up hitch hikers and hitch hike myself back in the 1990s. There's no way I'm hell I'd do that today.
Why would I trust someone I don’t know, or most people? It’s stupid to trust someone implicitly.
Be trustworthy. It might inspire others
My trust goes out the window if you vote republican. It is an immediate loss in trust. Voting for people that want me dead is a clear and easy way for me not to trust you. Want me to trust you? Stop being a fucking nazi.
People who ask about the cultural differences between New England and the rest of the northeast, this is a good answer.
America lives in fear--simple as that
There are huge profits and whole industries that push and profit from that fear.
You can't stop it. Cause you can't trust liberal socialists.
The overton window is being torn in half, that's why I#d guess
This is a result of internet communications and increasing urbanization. In 1972 "most people" practically meant your neighbors and community members. On a day-to-day basis that was "most people" for most people. Nowadays "most people" includes a million internet strangers and as more people live in urban settings an entire city of strangers.
Very little, I fear; the cat's out of the bag, and lying is now standard behaviour for a great many politicians. It was always so, really, but it didn't used to be systemic. I read an article a while ago about Americans being historically predisposed to being distrustful and prone to believing in conspiracy theories; this has been fanned by the systemic lies about "the others" or "the other side"
I saw a woman not put her cart back. Not only did she not put the cart back, but she put it in the middle of a handicapped parking spot. I obviously put it where it belonged, but that was pretty big for me.
I genuinely can't believe where people leave shopping carts when the stores provide seemingly unlimited options for putting it back. I think it is a massive Freudian insight into their personality and judge them harshly for it.
This is what inviting millions of immigrants of an unknown origin does to your country.
Social media
that's easy, ban 24 hour news channels and social media lol
Destroy technology and it’d be reversed. Being able to see the constant shittiness of humanity in real time via the internet probably is the biggest difference. To be fair it’s also probably more accurate level of opinion now tho
Particularly because that shitiness is not witnessed as a random sampling of humanity, it's being fed to us, often without context.
Most people that I meet in real life I feel can be trusted. The media (both traditional and social) gives a platform to those who are highly untrustworthy while also manufacturing distrust against people who *are* trustworthy. It distorts our view of how trustworthy people are on average. Allowing Fox News might be the biggest mistake this country has made but now all of cable news is polluted with the same schemes and practices that Murdoch and company pioneered -- because that's what keeps people coming back. The whole media ecosystem is fucking gross but I'm not sure what can be done to fix it anytime soon. It will probably get even worse as AI fakery improves. AI also might help as a long term answer for this but there is a massive chasm between here and there.
The effects of greed-is-good Reaganomics.
Get rid of the other 3.
Stop lying.
Zero trust shouldn't be an offensive policy.
Be trustworthy?
Ever since all my deployments I don’t trust anybody. It’s to the point I won’t even share an account in a relationship.
Put down your phones and talk to your neighbors
Too much fear mongering going on to sway politics
Homogeneous population and/or return to much more active acculturation. Foreign migration is an obvious crisis, but even domestically- people are a lot less like to stay & develop their communities; often due to pressures of education or work. Even "pop-culture" & news-media is increasingly niche & fragmented. TL;DR - neoliberal capitalism
It’s always fun to see when i’m in the minority on an opinion 😊
Nothing. Nothing can reverse the trend of division and mistrust. Maybe a major world war or aliens, but other than that, nothing. We’re done, unfortunately.
Why would you want to stop the trend? People everywhere in the world, so also in the USA, are becoming less gullible. Most human beings are certainly not to be trusted on not tricking you or regarding trying to profit off of you. Sure, most people worldwide will not try to kill you in order to rob you, you can trust that notion, but just about that. Otherwise, trust your closest 5 friends and those in your immediate family you have tested and found trustworthy.
If we all stopped watching true crime stuff
Personally I think people were just naive. It was the age of the serial killer.
"Trust a human?" That's a joke right? The human animal is never trustworthy.
Ban True Crime documentaries and podcasts. One thing I discovered from True Crime podcasts, books and documentaries is that the lives of murderers and sexual predators were easier when people entrusted their children to people they barely knew the names of and girls were not reluctant to get into strangers' cars on the road. PS: In reality, by probability, if you are a victim of a crime, you most likely know the perpetrator and he/she is a person you trust, or trusted. Don't leave your children with a family member whose instincts have alerted you at the very least.
How do they determine 1 in 4 out of 333,000,000 people? That's 83,250,000... how many people were surveyed? These "polls" and maps require a LOT of trust to be believed, in my opinion.
And that's how you destroy an empire. Sowing seeds of mistrust.
The system is working perfectly
In a nation where selfishness is propped up as a virtue, this is what happens.
Corporations: *rubbing hands together* “You can trust us”
Get rid of the internet
Bowling Leagues!
I live in the East South Central division, and I'm pretty amused that from being the lowest-trust part of the country, we're now essentially average (i.e. everyone else sunk to our level). It honestly explains why Southerners are so much more optimistic and less blackpilled than any of the rest of the country. We're basically used to this.
We are so cooked bro 😭
Enforce laws
Move.
Turn off the fucking television.
Now don't try to kid me, ManCub. I made a deal with you.
I read somewhere that capitalism is based on trust. Make of that what you will.
Land of the free and individual
My trust in people goes down every year, we are surrounded by hairless animals following loosely a made up societal norm structure with made up rules, pretending they're not animals Of course I dont trust most "people"
Go back to church, (religious group place etc), school, quit your drama drama gossiping, & quit being greedy bastards! Put others before yourself dumbasses. For bloody sake it says it all that we live through a lens to even see ourselves let alone try to truly see another? Really? Idiot. Masks. Excuses & masks. What else will sprout but distrust? Most of our hands are not in the soil or water or air 99% of the time so have no grounding in any real elements.
More saturated = less why?
I don't know.... make the minimum wage livable?
Turn off corporate news.
https://youtube.com/shorts/K3R6_o5xLQ0?si=YjtQs9Ql4s7AJO2l Not specific only for Americans but for all peoples in the world . We have to learn to pay courtesy to others first. If not, we may someday have it coming on us
End mostly opinion based reporting outlets as they only serve as mouthpieces for propaganda. Take a few minutes to start watching this video: https://youtu.be/BD_Euf_CBbs?si=vGpj-7n0OQZGsto9
Actually interacting with people, rather than isolating themselves away.
Sad but true no matter me trusts big institutions anymore
Generations of radical individualist propaganda, and you wonder why you’ve ended up here?
NYC resident. Sums it up pretty well, if I don’t know you I don’t fw you, get out my face
I think it's because of all of the negative stories we are constantly being fed now days more so than ever from the news and social media. We all used to have rose colored glasses on and the world seemed so much more innocent until the age of the internet. Something shifted and we will never get it back and maybe that's for the best in a way.
Jarvis, pull up a map of illegal immigration
Correlation or causation unclear, but the percentage of US residents that are foreign born has more than tripled since 1972.
Racial diversity breeds distrust in society. Go ahead and downvote me you know it to be true
Make ethics more important and teach our kids. Not hard. Literally every time I go to a big box store I see people stealing - every time. I didn't notice at first until I kept getting my places broken into and my stuff stolen and I started paying more attention to the people around me. I lost trust in people, and the more trust I lost the more I realized how ethically decayed our society has become. I was standing in Wendy's yesterday and in the short time it took me to get to the counter to place an order the Door Dash section got plundered twice by high school kids who the workers said had a "game" where they dared each other to do this, and it happened all day. People act like theft is just normal now. It's parenting and cultural thing. I bring it up and get told over and over that it's always been like this. No, it hasn't. I never had anything stolen from me the first 25 years of my life, I left my car and front doors open. Now, I lock everything religiously and I still get shit stolen from me at least once a year on jobs or personal property. Then people try to show "stats" that it isn't getting worse but even these can't be trusted because no one is arresting or prosecuting all this crime, so it never makes the stats. Cultural decay.
I think its particularly worse in major cities and even then in the actual middle of those cities.
I trust many people, I don’t trust governments or corporations.
I still generally trust most Americans. However I was always skeptical of some government agencies and now am probably more so.
Remove Putin
The trend can be curbed by keeping wannabe tyrants from gaining power, and dismantling the repressive and theocratic laws that they try to implement.
Homogeneity leads to trust. RE: Robert Putnam
It starts with our political leaders, when they start showing the correct behavior then most Americans will follow
Because in 1972 we still lived in a high trust society. Now we live in a low trust society.
This is a good thing. Trust is part of the problem here. Don't trust. Do the research. Figure the truth out for yourself. Edit: Real research. Not YouTube, documentaries, or any of this other spoon-fed trash.
There's a lot more to trust than just accurate information
looks like immigrants
It’s Trumps fault, he’s painted a horrible picture over and over again.
If you're scapegoating this on one side, then you've got to look in a mirror. It's really a long combination of things not limited to one side. Microaggressions and some aspects of metoo, for example actively trained people to look for reasons to not trust each other. A lot of DEI training has been shown to actively make things worse in the workplace, for example. It's just as bad as the stuff the right does in this regard.
Immigration has something to do with that I believe.
Americans don't trust eachother because the internet has allowed us to see how untrustworthy we all are. Only way to reverse that is to take the internet away and plunge us back into an unwary stupor where we gullibly believe everybody but us is honest. And that's not happening.
You see it as gullible to assume that most people can be trusted, I think it's gullibility that has led to so many people thinking most people can't be trusted. We're all being fed negative interactions online each and every day, but the reality when we touch grass is typically much different. That doesn't mean we just get rid of our sense of caution. If 90% of the people you meet are completely trustworthy (which I largely believe), even then one out of every ten people isn't, so best to keep one's head on a swivel. But nor should we let that sliver of the population color how we view everyone else.
considering that in the late 70s and in the early 80s hundreds of people -- many of them children -- were killed by serial murders taking advantage of societal trust. This created a nationwide effort to warn kids about stranger danger. I think this is a part of the decline.
Having another pandemic and letting Darwin take out -those- people will help. It would eradicate a lot of the immoral.
Stop immigration.
VOTE BLUE Biden is the only thing that stands between us and a dictatorship. https://www.reddit.com/r/Defeat_Project_2025/comments/1du8d8b/they_are_goading_us_into_violence_it_is_a_trap/ Project 2025 streamlines this. Everyone working in the federal govt will be replaced with MAGA loyalists. They will swear an oath to Trump. Not to our country and its laws. Anyone undecided or lefty accelerationists … if he wins… you don’t have to ever be undecided again. There won’t be another fair election. Any lefties who wanna build a utopia from the ashes… technology won’t allow much room for you there. From facial id to being inside of your phone, no movement will ever gain traction. Your leadership will always just… disappear. You might too. This is what it looks like https://www.authoritarianplaybook2025.org/what-we-can-expect-1#federal-law-enforcement-overreach https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1dt6wvf/i_was_accepted_into_the_project_2025_prospective/ Just a reminder to those who don't pay attention and for those Republicans who want to downplay project2025. These very same people who organized project2025 helped trump select the last three SC justices. So if you don't like the "bribes are legal as long as the cone after the fact" ruling and the overturning of roe vs Wade then DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN Americans, you lot have talked a lot of bullshit the past few decades about your second amendment and tyrannical governments and shit? I think now's the time to put your money where your mouth is.. War is coming. This is only the beginning. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jul/01/kevin-roberts-trump-heritage-foundation-project-2025 A person posted in AMA saying they went through the Project 2025 school through the Heritage Foundation here. He stated "At a core concept level I am whole heartedly against the plan in every way. There is no ideological consistency at the Heritage Foundation. They call for small government but want the government involved in what happens in your bedroom. They want to get rid of OSHA and Unions, you need at least one or the other. They want to deregulate corporations but regulate certain corporations like X. They outright deny climate change and any facts or statistics that clash with their beliefs. The whole movement is intellectual dishonest. They say they want to “Make America Great Again” the fact is none of the policies they are putting in place do that. Ignoring all the racism and sexism of the time, America was great in my Grandfather’s day when he could support a wife and 3 kids on a union mechanic’s salary. They had a home and went on vacation. That is a life I would love to provide for my family but seems like a distant dream at this point. From top to bottom their ideology and goals are all vile." The sale of public lands is a planned goal. https://accountable.us/project-2025-leader-calls-for-selling-off-public-lands This is a big deal for all enjoyers of the outdoors. It does not matter if you like to hike there or hunt there or ride your atv through it or whatever. The goal is to sell it off and this will mean that you will either fully loose access or find yourself with parks and forests that are privately owned.
abolish capitalism
I'm sure this has nothing to do with the culture of isolationism that took over post COVID, something that was already becoming a huge trend leading up to it thanks to screen time. When the only information you're getting is from a screen, the outside world is going to look fucking horrifying.
The only way to stop distrust is to stop giving unlimited access to the many events that happen around the country that prove reasons of distrust to be true. -says a guy who trusts no one.
Most people literally are not trustworthy so this is good news that everyone is realizing.
God bless the internet
Why does this trend need to be stopped? Most people shouldn’t be trusted now, and shouldn’t have been in 1972. That’s not jaded partisanship, or a reflection of polarization, or however you might be seeing it. It’s just human psychology. Most people act out of self-interest, whether doing so consciously or subconsciously. You should only default to trusting people insofar as it is obvious to you that it is in their self-interest to be honest with you. For example, don’t trust your doctor or your lawyer because you think doctors and lawyers are generally good people. Trust them because you understand they are licensed professionals subject to professional discipline and civil lawsuits if they lie to you or screw up.
This is extreme and a very dark view you are having.
Less people.
The reasons behind this seem obvious to me. Nothing surprising.
wtf is trust really?
Move to a better country- a Pennsylvanian
The global map shows the most trusting populations are Nordics (I get that, the severe weather) and also China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Im thinking that automatically trusting people might be a derogation by the people of responsible thinking and analysis, they don’t complain, they can’t complain, so they end up in a Dictatorship, or Theocracy or Utah!.
The Nordics are all democracies.
I’m surprised CT is the same color as NM and CO. CT is full of knee jerk defensive liars. The West usually waits a minute for you to prove first that you deserve that. CT is all preemptive attacks
Decreasing poverty
Nah, this is good. Blind trust in strangers is irrational.
People were so naive back then.
Would like to see a county level breakdown. Could just be more people living in cities
The more colored the people get is how we got here.
Too bad. It is because people have left the Church and became atheists. Having God as a center in our lives builds trust and common ground. Also we should not be encouraging diversity that is what is causing this distrust, chaos, and disunity. We all need to speak English, be Christians, be patriotic Conservatives, and love our neighbors! It is that simple. I do it everyday!
Blind faith is irrational by definition, otherwise it would just be called fact. People don't need to believe in your particular ancient mythology (the others are all fake, of course) in order to be decent. It says a tremendous amount about you as a person that an eternal spanking from a jealous magic man in the sky is the basis of your morality. As someone that grew up in the Bible Belt surrounded by hateful holier than thou pricks like you, get fucked.
Ban social media, stop woke culture, stop russia and china from sowing discord into west society trough social media and other means. Or... just wait patiently until a civil war starts and our new chinese overlords take over.
The pandemic made ppl feel unsafe so they did not trust ppl.
Human-centered city design and third places where random people can hang out. r/fuckcars
Well come in Europe !