Conferences

It is commonly agreed that generalized interpersonal trust is doing a lot of good things to communities and societies. Much of the research on trust is based on the standard question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” It is assumed that countries in which many citizens choose “trust” are characterized by a high level of trust in a wide circle of people – generalized social trust. However, actually we have very little information about who “most people” are for the respondents. In other words: we do not really know to what extent our standard measure actually measures generalized trust, and whether it is working better in some countries than in others. It is perfectly possible that people in some of the high-trust countries think primarily of kin and family as “most people”, hence their high level of trust could be confined to a narrow circle of familiar and similar others only.

With data from the most recent World Value Surveys wave 5, I analyse how wide the radius of trust is in 45 countries. With the help of a new item battery specifying targets of trust such as “family” or “people of other religion”, it is possible to measure the impact thick (particularized) trust and thin (generalized) trust have on the answers to the standard trust question. Thereby we can indirectly approach which kind of people respondents primarily have in mind when rating the trustworthiness of “most people”. The analysis reveals (1) that in most countries, trust as measured with the standard question depends more on thin trust than on thick trust; and (2) that the radius of trust varies considerably between societies. The latter means that with the standard question we tend to overestimate the level of generalized trust in some countries (e.g. in China and South Korea), while underestimating it in others (e.g. in Italy and Poland). It is further shown that the radius of t rust varies systematically across countries, with more modern and individualistic societies having wider radii of trust.