The Compassionate Instinct

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

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

Of course, the most civic and trusting generation that survived the Depression and World War II grew up without TV or the Internet. Successive generations have watched more TV, in different ways, and with different program content than the older generation. Today’s young people also spend a great deal of time surfing the Internet. Both media have the effect of isolating us during leisure time and repetitively highlighting the most dangerous and corrupt aspects of our society. For better and for worse, the seemingly boundless supply and demand for voracious media coverage of scandals means that Americans are painfully aware of our shortcomings and the shortcomings of our leaders.

It’s also likely that growing economic inequality is contributing to our crisis of trust. Inequality in America declined during the mid-twentieth century, when our most trusting generation came of age, but the gap between rich and poor has widened dramatically since then: since 1979, for example, the after-tax income of the richest 1 percent of Americans increased by 176 percent, but it only increased by about 20 percent for everyone else, with the poorest Americans earning just 6 percent more than they did at the end of the 1970s. As many studies and surveys reveal, most recently a 2007 report from the Pew Research Center, people feel more vulnerable when they’re at a social disadvantage, making it more risky to trust others. Thus, those of lower income and racial minorities tend to answer more often that people will “take advantage” of them.

It may also be true that America’s growing diversity hurts social trust. Many researchers have found that diverse neighborhoods and nations are less trusting than homogenous ones, though diversity is also linked to a high degree of economic vitality and cultural creativity. When Robert Putnam analyzed data from his Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey—which covered 41 communities across the United States—he found that cross-group trust was high in rural, homogeneous South Dakota and relatively low in heterogeneous urban areas like San Francisco. As America urbanizes and diversifies, trust is declining—at least in the short run.

FALLING AND RISING

The news is not all bad. Trust in institutions hasn’t fallen in a straight line; instead, it rises and falls in response to specific events.

Consider how people answered the question about their confidence in religion between 1987 and 2006. In early 1987, 30 percent of the population said they had a “great deal” of confidence in organized religion. In 1987, however, several televangelist scandals erupted, including that of Jim Bakker. By 1988, confidence in organized religion had dropped to 21 percent. Americans’ confidence then rebounded from 1988 to 2000, eventually climbing back to pre-scandal levels. Then in 2002, as a result of the Catholic Church’s sex scandals, confidence in religious institutions dropped dramatically again, to 19 percent. Since 2002, confidence in organized religion has again rebounded—to 25 percent in 2006.

Similarly, the stock market crash of 1987 and the S&L bailout of 1989 hurt trust in banks and financial institutions. But public trust in finance gradually recovered (helped along by the boom years of the ’90s) until it received another shock, the accounting scandals of 2002. We see a similar dip in Americans’ trust in business: In 2000, 29 percent of respondents said they had a great deal of confidence in major companies. In 2002 (after the Firestone tires recall, Enron, and the wider accounting scandals), that number had dropped to 18 percent. It is too early to say what precise effect the current mortgage crisis will have on trust in banks and business, but based on past patterns, we can predict that trust in both institutions will decline significantly.

So the pattern with institutions is less of general decline than of negative responses to scandals, followed by gradual recoveries. These scandals often focus public attention on a few fallible individuals—the embezzlers or child molesters. But once the shock of the scandal fades, the public returns to trusting the institution as a whole, rather than judging it by its most untrustworthy members.