The Compassionate Instinct

At age 63, 45 years after she finished high school, Chia decided to go to college and get her degree. “My whole life, I’d never known what I wanted to do,” she says. “Volunteering helped me uncover who I was and gave me the confidence to figure it out—and go get it.”

Maybe someday, physicians and psychiatrists will write prescriptions for charitable donations and citizen action instead of scrips for pills and psychotherapy. But for now, women like Kate Hanni, Laura Dean-Mooney, Karen Gleason, and Chia Hamilton will go on prescribing activism for themselves—and offering sustenance to others in the process.

“Helping others is the best medicine for anyone who has been traumatized,” Kate Hanni says. “I got to face my fears much more effectively than I would have if I’d stayed at home and kept going to therapy. Activism gets you out of yourself and into action. It makes you feel like you’re part of something greater than you.”

For Kate, it’s more than a feeling. Two years ago she was a traumatized victim, unable to work, sleep, eat, or be alone, even in her own home. Today she’s the spokesperson for the national movement of outraged air travelers, named one of the nation’s 25 Most Influential Executive Women in Travel by Forbes in 2008. Once too terrified to travel, Kate has organized events in every major city, founded a rock group called The Toasted Heads (whose signature tune is a version of “We Gotta Get Outta This Place,” suitable for singing while stranded on a plane), and stormed the halls of Congress on a regular basis.

“This cause gave me a purpose for living that’s so exciting,” Kate says. “I wake up and jump out of bed to get started every day. I’ve never felt better.”

Kate pauses. When she speaks again, her voice is somber. “And it wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the horrifying events of the past.”

AMERICA’S TRUST FALL

Jeremy Adam Smith and Pamela Paxton

“TRUST NO ONE.”

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

Since the series ended in 2002, however, our trust in each other has declined even further, despite a brief rebound after September 11. The mood of cynicism and distrust captured by The X-Files in the ’90s seems just as relevant today—indeed, a new X-Files movie was released in 2008, and a Leonardo DiCaprio movie released the following month took the slogan one step further: “Trust no one. Deceive everyone.” The decline or absence of trust also figures prominently in more recent hit TV series like Mad Men, Survivor, and The Sopranos. In fact, “Trust no one” has essentially served as Americans’ motto over the last two generations: For 40 years—the years of Vietnam, Watergate, junk bonds, Monica Lewinsky, Enron, the Catholic Church sex scandals, and the Iraq war—our trust in each other has been dropping steadily, while trust in many institutions has been seriously shaken in response to scandals.

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

But research on trust isn’t all doom and gloom; it also offers reason for hope. A growing body of research hints that humans are hardwired to trust. Indeed, a closer examination of surveys shows that trust is resilient: major events can stoke our trust in institutions, just as other events can inhibit them. The science of trust suggests that humans want to trust, even need to trust, but they won’t trust blindly or foolishly. They need solid evidence that their trust is warranted. Using this research as a guide, we can begin to understand why trust has been declining, and how we might rebuild it.

WHY TRUST MATTERS