Trust Others? Yah, You Betcha!
Why do people trust or distrust others? In “Where You Stand Depends Upon Where Your Grandparents Sat,” Eric Uslaner argues that generalized trust in other people is, to a degree, inherited. Americans whose ancestors come from countries characterized by high levels of trust — such as the Nordic countries — are themselves more trusting. Moreover, trust is even higher among Americans from these countries who live among others with the same ancestry.
I’ve summarized his findings above with a graph, using the same data but presenting only simple descriptive statistics. This is my graph, not his, so do not consider it an exact replication. But it captures the flavor of his analysis, which controls for a variety of other factors besides ancestry. In a more elaborate model, those of Nordic, British and German ancestry are more trusting. The effect of Nordic ancestry is about twice as large as that of British ancestry, and about 5 times as large as that of German ancestry. Those of African and Spanish/Latino ancestry are less trusting, controlling for other factors.
The apparent “inheritability” of trust leads to some interesting implications:
If trust is culturally transmitted, then suggestions that we can boost it by joining more clubs or watching less television (Putnam 2000) may be, in Samuel Johnson’s characterization of second marriages, “the triumph of hope over experience.” Generalized trust is rather stable over time because it has deep social roots and does not shift with each new experience…Building trust is not so easy, especially if it follows people from their family’s “old country.”
Comments
I think it might have to do with where people live, at least where their parents lived. For example, look at where Norwegian-Americans live:
http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo200/pct_norwegian.pdf
Posted by: chrismealy | December 31, 2008 02:01 PM
You could also hypothesize that people who ended up on the winning side of various racial divides are more trusting than those who lost. Just saying. Italians faced more discrimination than Scandinavians but not as much as Latinos, and certainly not as much as African-Americans. Racism continues to exist, reinforcing that type of mistrust.
Posted by: North | December 31, 2008 05:25 PM
These results dovetail somewhat with our own results from laboratory experiments in Sweden and the United States in which we had subjects play the “Trust Game.” Within-group trust and trustworthiness behaviors are heritable, in spite of very different average levels of trust between those two countries.
But I would NOT say the social capital argument is moot. Our paper suggests that the environment plays a VERY big role. It would be the worst kind of genetic determinism to claim otherwise.
Here’s the paper if you are interested:
Heritability of Cooperative Behavior in the Trust Game
PNAS 105 (10): 3721-3726 (11 March 2008)
http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/heritability_of_cooperative_behavior.pdf
And here’s the abstract:
Although laboratory experiments document cooperative behavior in humans, little is known about the extent to which individual differences in cooperativeness result from genetic and environmental variation. In this article we report the results of two independently conceived and executed studies of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, one in Sweden, and one in the United States. The results from these studies suggest that humans are endowed with genetic variation that influences the decision to invest—and to reciprocate investment—in the classic trust game. Based on these findings, we urge social scientists to take seriously the idea that differences in peer and parental socialization are not the only forces that influence variation in cooperative behavior.
Posted by: James Fowler | January 1, 2009 08:15 PM