Title: Americans' Trust in Government, Each Other, Leaders | Pew Research Center
Headings: Trust and Distrust in America
Trust and Distrust in America
Many Americans think declining trust in the government and in each other makes it harder to solve key problems. They have a wealth of ideas about what’s gone wrong and how to fix it

Content: The new survey of 10,618 U.S. adults, conducted Nov. 27-Dec. 10, 2018, using the Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel, covers a wide range of trust-related issues and adds context to debates about the state of trust and distrust in the nation. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points. In addition to asking traditional questions about whether Americans have confidence in institutions and other human beings, the survey explores links between institutional trust and interpersonal trust and examines the degree to which the public thinks the nation is shackled by these issues. This research is part of the Center’s extensive and ongoing focus on issues tied to trust, facts and democracy and the interplay among them. Here are some of the main findings. Levels of personal trust are associated with race and ethnicity, age, education and household income. To explore these connections, we asked questions about people’s general trust or distrust in others, their sense of the exploitative tendencies or fairness of others, and their assessment of the overall helpfulness or selfishness of others. Then, we built a scale of personal trust and distributed people along a spectrum from least trusting to most trusting. About a fifth of adults (22%) display consistently trustful attitudes on these questions, and roughly a third (35%) express consistently wary or distrustful views.