Living in an Age of Mistrust

An Interdisciplinary Study of Declining Trust and How to Get it Back

Andrew I. Yeo, Matthew N. Green, Andrew I. Yeo, Matthew N. Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351736541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Trust is a concept familiar to most. Whether we are cognizant of it or not, we experience it on a daily basis. Yet trust is quickly eroding in civic and political life. Americans' trust in their government has reached all-time lows. The political and social consequences of this decline in trust are profound. What are the foundations of trust? What explains its apparent decline in society? Is there a way forward for rebuilding trust in our leaders and institutions? How should we study the role of trust across a diverse range of policy issues and problems?

Given its complexity, trust as an object of study cannot be claimed by any single discipline. Rather than vouch for an overarching theory of trust, Living in an Age of Mistrust synthesizes existing perspectives across multiple disciplines to offer a truly comprehensive examination of this concept and a topic of research. Using an analytical framework that encompasses rational and cultural (or sociological) dimensions of trust, the contributions found therein provide a wide range of policy issues both domestic and international to explore the apparent decline in trust, its impact on social and political life, and efforts to rebuild trust.

Part I
Foundations of Trust

1
Trust

An Analytical Framework for Contemporary Policy Problems

Andrew I. Yeo and Matthew N. Green

Trust is a crucial element of social, political, and economic life. Take for instance the fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, of an African-American teenager in 2014 and rising tensions between law enforcement and the black community that followed. The mobilization, unrest, and violence that unfolded in the aftermath of the shooting was seen as a manifestation of deep-seated racial tensions between the black community and mostly white police force. Underneath the racial conflicts, however, was the lingering notion of mistrust between these two groups. Controversial policies such as racial profiling, which may or may not be justified empirically, are nonetheless rooted in and can help foster a sense of mistrust toward male black youth at both an individual and institutional level. Likewise, higher incident rates of police brutality directed against black suspects have led African Americans to mistrust not only law enforcement officials but the American justice system itself.

Issues of trust, and especially its absence, have been central to many other domestic and international issues. Global financial panics are triggered when trust in financial institutions and markets erode. U.S. and Iranian diplomats seek to build trust (or overcome mistrust) as they move to implement a nuclear non-proliferation agreement in exchange for the removal of international sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy. In U.S. politics, polarization between liberals and conservatives in the U.S. Congress have undermined trust among political leaders, thereby increasing the propensity for political gridlock. It may have even contributed to the unexpected election of Donald Trump, a businessman and reality TV star with no prior political experience, to be the 45th President of the United States.

Finding news stories about the lack of trust is easy. Many of today’s top headlines scream of broken trust. Public opinion data also point to a downward trend in trust in the United States. Robert Putnam¹ records a decay in generalized trust over the past several decades, while Eric Uslaner² finds that generalized trust has declined in the United States, from nearly 60 percent in 1960 to just 34 percent in 2003, though it may have leveled off in recent years.³ And if confidence serves as a proxy for trust, our trust in major institutions such as the government, corporations, and banks has also been in decline.⁴

We should not forget that even amid these depressing signs of eroding public trust, a core foundation of trust in individuals and institutions remains ubiquitous, at least in democratic societies. In fact, we often take for granted the high degree of trust that surrounds us. Children trust their parents. Students trust their teachers. Athletes trust their coaches to call the right plays. Managers trust their employees to work productively. Citizens trust their municipal government to provide public works and services. American shoppers trust in the quality of “Made in the USA” products they purchase, and that the green pieces of paper or the thin plastic cards in their wallets have value and can be used as exchange for goods and services.

At the same time, this foundation of trust can easily lull us into complacency. There is no guarantee that trust will remain. Even if it does, the declining public trust captured by recent surveys may still lead to negative social and political consequences. Recent reports of Americans openly carrying military-grade weapons in public or forming well-armed survivalist communities suggest a small but growing segment of the public that has lost trust in their fellow citizens and in society’s ability to provide them with safety and security.⁵

In short, trust greases the wheels of life. As Uslaner writes, “Trust is the chicken soup of social life. It brings us all sorts of good things, from a willingness to get involved in our communities to higher rates of economic growth and, ultimately satisfaction to government performance.”⁶ Its absence may therefore lead to moral decay at the individual and societal level. As the authority of state institutions withers, social capital declines, and basic norms and social conduct whither.⁷ Understanding where trust comes from, why it has apparently fallen, and how to restore it is therefore critical.

The Complexity of Trust and the Need for an Inter-Disciplinary Approach

Trust is a concept familiar to most people. We know when we trust someone or something. Whether we are cognizant of it or not, we experience trust on a daily basis. Yet the paradox of trust is its deceptive simplicity. While it is easy to remark that we trust or do not trust something or someone, trust is in fact a multifaceted concept situated at different levels.⁸ For example, is the type of trust needed to complete commercial transactions the same as the type of trust one places in a family member? Why, as the humorist Jon Stewart put it, do people deeply distrust members of the opposite political party, yet trust strangers to yield to them when merging into traffic—even if their cars have bumper stickers indicating affiliation with that very same party?⁹ Is trust something that needs to be “earned,” or are there certain shortcuts that get us to trust others quickly?

Behind the basic dictionary-level definition of the term—belief in the truth or reliability of a person or thing—there is considerable complexity, and numerous definitions of trust exist in scholarly literature.¹⁰ Social scientists Karen Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi argue that trust exists “when one party to the relation believes the other party has incentive to act in his or her interest or to take his or her interests to heart.”¹¹ This rationalist account of trust, rooted in an expectation of how another individual or institution will behave, resonates with that offered by international relations scholar Andrew Kydd, who defines trust as “a belief that the other side is trustworthy, that is willing to reciprocate cooperation.”¹² It is also adopted by social psychologists such as Frost, Stimpson, and Maughan who define trust as “an expectancy held by an individual that the behavior of another individual or group of individuals would be altruistic and personally beneficial to himself.”¹³

Other definitions point toward trust as a dispositional variable, something that is inherent in one’s character or worldview. Uslaner sees trust rooted within a moral foundation, based on an ethical assumption that “others share your fundamental moral values and therefore should be treated as you would wish to be treated by them.”¹⁴ In sharp contrast to strategic and particularized trust, this moralistic or generalized trust typically “does not depend on personal experiences or on assumptions that others are trustworthy,” but is instead a “general outlook on human nature.”¹⁵ For example, in Chapter 5, Marc Hooghe makes reference (but ultimately challenges) to research that alludes to the inter-generational trusting disposition of Scandinavian immigrants in the United States.

Dispositional trust is an important area of inquiry among scholars studying infant development, early childhood psychology, and sociology of the family. The literature here suggests that trust is formed in the earlier stages of life into young adulthood, through a set of experiences that mark how trusting an individual might be toward others. For instance, Browne and D’Antonio, in Chapter 3 of this volume, explore some of the early determinants of trust, including family structures and the level and degree of attention given to children by their parents. Such findings are corroborated by additional studies in this area. For instance, researchers have also found that supportive co-parenting leads to higher parental efficacy scores with more stable infant temperament.¹⁶ Although such studies point to the malleability of trust early in life, they also imply the dispositional nature of trust.”¹⁷

Seeking a middle ground, the public intellectual Francis Fukuyama and philosopher Martin Hollis find a happy medium between moral (or generalized) and rational (or particularized) based conceptions of trust. Fukuyama writes, “Trust arises when a community shares a set of moral values in such a way as to create regular expectations of regular and honest behavior.”¹⁸ Meanwhile, Hollis combines elements of reciprocity with the pursuit of the common good as the basis for his definition of trust.¹⁹

These differing perspectives on trust underscore not only the complexity of the concept, but also that trust as an object of study cannot be claimed by any single discipline. Trust has been well explored in fields such as psychology, sociology, political science, philosophy, theology, business, economics, law, biology, and anthropology. We do not pretend to resolve these competing disciplinary approaches in a single volume, and remain open to different interpretations, recognizing that trust and its impact on social, political, and economic life is best explored from an interdisciplinary perspective rather than from a single disciplinary angle.²⁰ Nonetheless, some analytical framework is still needed to provide a common basis for examining trust and its relationship to contemporary policy problems. In particular, we want to know a) where trust comes from and how it is formed, b) why it breaks down, and c) how it can be sustained, strengthened, and rebuilt.²¹ Needless to say, the answers to these questions will vary depending on what the object of trust is (i.e. people, institutions, or processes), the context in which trust is being evaluated (i.e. among or between individuals, groups, states), and other external conditions that might bear on trust relations (i.e. history, geography, social, and political context).

Relational Trust: Between Rational and Normative Dimensions

Our analytical framework for studying trust in social and political life adopts a relational understanding of trust. This is not to argue that generalized or dispositional trust is not also embedded within particular relationships. For example, the origins of dispositional trust, particularly as it relates to the studies of child development and families, have been well researched.²² Its potential to cultivate social benefits, such as predicting trust in society’s institutions including schools, hospitals, the police, regulatory agencies, insurance companies, and so forth, seem fairly intuitive.²³ But how such generalized trust explains the recent documented decline in trust is not always clear. It may explain why there are variable rates of generalized trust across different generations; if those born in the 1920s are more trusting than those born in the 1960s, perhaps it is because parenting styles varied systematically across those generations.²⁴ However, others have theorized that generational differences have m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author Biographies
• Preface
• PART I Foundations of Trust
• PART II Trust and Minority Groups
• PART III Trust and Institutions
• PART IV Trust, Diplomacy, and Peacebuilding
• Index