Title: Americans and Social Trust: Who, Where and Why | Pew Research Center
Headings: Americans and Social Trust: Who, Where and Why
Americans and Social Trust: Who, Where and Why
An International Perspective
Why Do We Trust?
Where Do We Trust?
At What Age Do We Trust?
Other Groups that Have a Distinctive Take on Trust
Group Traits that Matter Just a Little – or Not at All
About the Survey
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Content: liberals and conservatives; Protestants and Catholics and the secular — all of these groups have roughly similar levels of trust. As for the population as a whole, Americans are closely divided on the following question: “ Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” Some 45% of respondents in the Pew survey say the former, while 50% say the latter. These responses have fluctuated very little during the four decades that survey research organizations have been asking this question, save for a period in the 1990s when measured levels of interpersonal trust dipped for a number of years, triggering a flurry of speculation and scholarship about the reasons for the decline. But since then, social trust has rebounded to roughly the same level it had been before the trough. 2
The new Pew survey did not probe into the psyches, values or the life experiences of respondents, so it can offer no clues about how these factors might affect a given individual’s inclination to trust other people. Rather, it provides a look at how different demographic groups responded to a battery of three questions about social trust: Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?