Resolves YES if my current position on the high-trust or low-trust nature of american society is changed meaningfully. I don't have to fully change my mind, just learn new things that importantly move my understanding here.
This will necessarily be very fuzzy though. Hence the 1.5k bounty to give it a try!
My current position isn't well-researched (partially because I want at least one of these to resolve yes lol) but motivated by a basic feeling that any time someone calls out a decline in public social trust, their examples are trivially falsified by five minutes of research. Like, 'the media lies a lot now, whereas in the past they were honest', 'there are so many scams now, whereas in the past people were nice and didnt steal things', etc
Here's an example of the kind of evidence that hasn't persuaded me: Americans' Trust In Media Remains Near Record Low or Public Trust in Government: 1958-2022.
The main reason this hasn't persuaded me is that - most americans still trust some sort of media - when they say they don't trust the media, they mean "I distrust <specific media organ> and trust <new media organ>". And the lack of trust in the government has not corresponded to a corresponding reduction in reliance on government services - quite the opposite. I'm generally suspicious of polls
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I don't know about trust in general, but one area in particular where trust in the US has definitely decreased over time (at least compared to 30-40 years ago) is in the area of parental (and societal) fears over child safety. It is obvious that parents became more fearful for their kids safety over this time period (despite the fact that most neighborhoods have become safer over the same time period). There are many anecdotal examples of this (e.g. the yearly scares over Halloween like https://reason.com/2022/10/06/undeterred-by-past-failures-the-press-goes-all-in-on-rainbow-fentanyl-panic/). Surveys show that parents are overly fearful of letting their kids do things on their own https://reason.com/2023/11/01/trick-or-treat-helicopter-parents-study-michigan/ (I'm not aware of similar surveys in the past which would show an increase in helicopter parenting over time, but I'm reasonably certain that parental anxiety has increased). One concrete measure of this fear is the overzealous laws which have been passed to redefine and criminalize parental "neglect" and mandate safety features such as seatbelts (ref https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception). This whole trend of reduced childhood independence is, of course, bad for children's mental health.
It seems quite probable to me that the increase in the rate of fear by parents for their children is related to a decreased level of trust more broadly, though that would be difficult to establish empirically, since (as you say) the accurate and broad measures of "low-trust" vs. "high-trust" are hard to come by.
There is some evidence that (counter-intuitively) a decrease in trust in the government actually leads to an increase in the size and scope of government (https://reason.com/2013/07/14/no-one-trusts-the-government-which-is-ba/)
I'm still thinking we're not lower-trust than in the past. The polls seem to show a 10% movement, which isn't a lot. If I generally trusted polls on fuzzy social phenomena, i'd resolve this yes, but I don't trust trust surveys any more than happiness surveys.
this article https://archive.is/Q1Eqw is nice
Nice market, I've heard this meme a bunch of times (sometimes worded as social "cohesion"). I too am skeptical of the methods. There are lots of different ways you could define this stuff. So many degrees of freedom would be easy to exploit, even accidentally. And the kinds of "trust" that are the most-productive could be different over time. A general conclusion would have to use some super general measures.
The threat of a large-scale civil war seems less-credible today, than long ago. But in surveys, fewer say they can generally trust people.
Nearly every business works with all the races, unlike the past. But church attendance is way down, and people say they have fewer friends. Speaking of friends, one of my friends says that social cohesion is way down. I'll use this market to collect notes.
I see there is the Vanderbilt Unity Index, and it has plummeted. I like that it combines a few different measures, but I haven't researched it or thought about it much. I guess it depends on what we want our measure of "trust" to do for us.
Have you seen Peter Turchin's stuff?
https://peterturchin.com/a-feature-article-in-nature-on-cliodynamics/ (Note the date: 2012)
I am generally not a fan of Turchin's ideas, and often replacing analysis of complex social issues with poorly constructed datasets and then doing "hard analyses" on those datasets just fails. (not that generally doing "hard analysis" on politics or history is bad, it's often interesting if done well)
Just eyeballing the graph, one: riots and lynchings remain low, and 'all' seems entirely driven by terrorism. I'd have to look at the terrorism he's referring to. If political violence is rare, I wouldn't expect higher than historically common rates to be a main component of why a society is low-trust. Although if it was really common, that'd count
@jacksonpolack I think he's counting the typical mass shooting as terrorism.
I guess I'm more impressed since I saw this around the time of publication, and rolled my eyes at his claim that there would be an increase in instability around 2020, and then lived to see the current situation. But I agree his overall methodology is somewhat dodgy.
I guess I'm more impressed since I saw this around the time of publication, and rolled my eyes at his claim that there would be an increase in instability around 2020, and then lived to see the current situation. But I agree his overall methodology is somewhat dodgy.
My guess is 'instability 2018-2023' is a coinflip, so predicting it isn't that impressive. Like, there were multiple different statistically independent instabilities depending on how you define things (j6, covid, ukraine)!