A lot of this is covered in the excellent book "The Cheating Culture", which I recommend. "Bowling Alone", as the article mentions, covers the "stay home and do your own thing" part of it, but the economic system we've set up, I believe, is far a far stronger influence. We've set up a system that's dog-eat-dog, every man for himself, "everything that happens to you is your own fault", "lift yourself up by your bootstraps" and approaching hypercompetition. When it feels like you're one medical emergency, job loss, or bad debt away from homelessness, and have only pathetic (and painted as only for life's losers) safety nets there for you, you're out of necessity going to have to trust less. Add in the fact that many areas in this country have to deal with the daily threat of violence, and you get a toxic brew of distrust.
This is sad for more than sentimental reasons, as the article mentions. The "Economics of Trust" is important for easy dealmaking, credit, and other things. More here:
And who could blame them. As an outsider who didn't grow up in the U.S. but has spent the past year living here, people are generally amiable and friendly but will take advantage of you for a mile if you give an inch. Rabid consumerism, shows of status, workaholism and an overwhelming feeling of fuck you got mine seems to pervade the collective psyche because you can't really lean on others (save for a few nonconformists).
I think you're experiencing some culture shock. Even if you can trust people to be decent, you still have to share norms as to what the other guy considers "decent". Americans tend to have a fairly individualist/independent view of ethical behavior that can be jarring to someone not used to it but it doesn't prevent social cohesion or a trusting society.
I believe TyphonBlue's Theory of Apexuality[0] could also explain a lot of this:
> The third term is ‘Apexual’. This is a portmanteau of ‘Apex’ and ‘sexual’ and refers to a male-bodied individual who derives its primary identity from its position within a status hierarchy rather then a positive relationship with other male-bodied individuals.
[...]
> In light of that can you actually trust apexuals to have the best interests of the male-bodied at heart even if they are male bodied themselves?
Americans also live in a much more diverse and accepting society than they did 40 years ago. Let's give it some time, hmmm?
Articles like this make me peevish. I really dislike articles that glorify the 1950s-1990s, in anyway, without acknowledging what a strange time it was. Post-war America deserves far more criticism than it ever receives; I often think this is because boomers have a hard time criticizing the era they grew up in.
Citing a similar poll from the 1970s is a brief glimmer into a period that wasn't actually that long ago. Did people from the 1970s actually trust each other more, or did they just say that they did? What about the 1920s? The 1870s? The 1840s? Did Americans trust each other more then?
because traditional minorities, ie - slave descended blacks and native americans, make up a smaller portion of the population today than they did in 1960. But the explosive growth in the non-traditional minorities MORE than makes up for the decline. Add in the fact that many of the new arrivals speak english only as a second language... and you would think some degree of mistrust would not be a surprise considering our history.
The KJV is wrong in its translation (why did you even reach for it?). My degree was in Ancient Semitic Literature. A better translation is the NRSV which is as follows:
Do not say, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
The proverb isn't about squelching inquiry, it's about squelching the belief that the past generation was better than the next. It follows a long litany of proverbs, in context, that describe how to accept the reality that has been given to you.
In my opinion, decades of corporatist conditioning and manufacturing consent are at least partially responsible for this situation. The corporate mass media has induced distrust in Americans with one another in many ways. One of which is all those articles portraying average Americans as extremely litigious and corrupt with bunk stories on hot McDonald's coffee, etc.
The media focuses much more on crime and how we hurt each other than on the many more cases in which we cooperate and help one another.
In more recent years, corporations and parts of the military-industrial complex have been poisoning Americans against each other via the Internet by astroturfing comment threads, etc. and spreading general fear, uncertainty and doubt with a nice sprinkling of intolerance and hatred.
The mass media glosses over corporate welfare while focusing like a laser on welfare fraud by the poor, etc. They want us to despise each other to gain by the oldest tactic in the book - divide and conquer.
There has been over a decade of propaganda telling people not to trust each other... all post-9/11 messaging intended to create insecurity in the population.
>WW2 had a ton of propaganda about distrusting people
Yes, but that propaganda was nothing compared to the much more advanced and sophisticated level of indoctrination techniques we have in more modern history via mainstream television and radio.
And, don't forget WWII had wonderful internment camps and plenty of racism towards blacks in America. So it wasn't the most trusting place for everyone.
WWII propaganda was about Americans coming together to kick Japan and Germany's ass. Unless you were Japanese or German, most of the propaganda and the general sentiment around the war effort was about all Americans joining forces to win the war. There's even a part in one of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" propaganda films calling on Americans of all ethnicities to set aside their differences and work together to win the war.
It is worth noting that before the early 2000s, the same messages of distrust came from citizens. Forums, IRC, Internet culture in general promoted distrust of the government, distrust of businesses small and large, and an attitude of "we are smarter than normal people".
All across the Internet, people like you and me would post about how incompetent the average American is. We would aspire to be independent, logical thinkers, but unfortunately, this mindset almost requires the distrust of other people.
Now that the Internet has become widely adopted in the mainstream, this type of thinking pervades, and perhaps has penetrated the mainstream attitude.
> "Americans have abandoned their bowling leagues and Elks lodges to stay home and watch TV. Less socializing and fewer community meetings"
Americans have just as many social and community interactions as ever -- but a much higher percentage are semi-broadcasts through social media.
Hanging out with your friends at the bowling league, you might be a little bit cautious about expressing political views, and when there is disagreement it will be set aside by the tenth frame. As a result, people learned to trust each other in spite of disagreement. Online, certain views tend to be broadcast, and when there is disagreement it often turns into a quick unfriending and behind-the-back trash talking about what an intolerant jerk the ex-friend is. As a result, people learn that outsiders are bad people who should never ever be trusted.
This article, if not the study itself, is a hash of influences and results.
It seems as if the government makes larger, and riskier mistakes, but it's not as if Vietnam wasn't a similarly large disaster for its time.
The large prison population makes this "African-Americans consistently have expressed far less faith in 'most people' than the white majority does. Racism, discrimination and a high rate of poverty destroy trust." no surprise. But it seems like discrimination and institutionalized hostility toward blacks was at least as bad in the past.
So is it distrust of government? Commerce? One's neighbors? Hard to tell from the article. Some parts of society deserve less trust and we are more aware why this is so.
The stuff we are going through right now might seem scary, but McCarthyism was not exactly the golden age of trust. It was not so long ago that "mainstream" society did not trust blacks, working women, the japanese, or jews. We (royal "we" here, emphasis on the royalty) still don't seem to trust gays, atheists, or many other groups. Mistrust is what keeps humanity sharp, but it is also what has been holding us since the beginning.
I'll note for other readers of Hacker News who don't know (and thus don't trust) the domain of this submitted article that it is actually a syndicated news story from the Associated Press, and I would have to say that I think the article is well reported. (In other words, I trust the statistics behind the article, which come from the federal government's National Social Survey.)
The article includes some dire warnings about decline of social trust in the United States during the last forty years, and also some ideas about how social trust can increase. "People do get a little more trusting as they age. But beginning with the baby boomers, each generation has started off adulthood less trusting than those who came before them." I daresay it is correct that MOST Americans become more trusting as they age. In my middle age, I feel very comfortable both in the community I live in and as I travel about the United States. (I have been to all of the fifty United States, and to other territories of my country.)
To take the article seriously, and to suggest a possible help that was not suggested in the article, I will propose for your thoughtful discussion (I trust you here on Hacker News) one policy that might help. Let's take care of the economic gap problem mentioned in the article and some other factors that harm social trust by building all of the public school systems in the United States on the foundational principle of family choice. I have seen an example of how this policy could help where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. That reduces the effect of family income differences on the availability of adequately funded schools. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."[1] Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.[2]
The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment[3] and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.[4] And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.[5]
Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices. And I think that builds social trust by making school communities more nearly communities of choice than communities of compulsion.
The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. And the social trust level in Minnesota seems to be above the United States national average, although I'd have to check the National Social Survey data to be sure about that. A good country to compare in this regard to the United States would be the Netherlands, which by its constitution has had pervasive school choice for the last century.
I trust the reports, and I trust the data, but the trend has been pretty obvious, I'd wager, and predictable for some time now.
People in the suburbs increasingly migrate to cul-de-sac communities, which isolate them from the rest of the world, to make them feel safer, depriving their children of the much-needed contact with a diverse population that builds trust.
Beyond that, the news is more and more pervasive, and more and more sensationalist than it's ever been. Every tragedy is made public, and the more grave and more egregious, the more media coverage it gets. People grow up believing that child abductions are the norm, and even likely, when the reality is that stranger abductions are less likely than they've ever been -- but the Amber Alert system (at least in the DC area here) broadcasts on highways, making it impossible to believe that a kid isn't abducted every two seconds.
Humans are built to be paranoid. Historically, the person who heard a strange noise outside their shelter and didn't react was mauled by a bear, or lion, or what have you, while the more alert human that took to defensive measures was more likely to survive. Having established our positions as apex predators, in cities this is far less likely to be needed, but our brains still seek danger patterns, cling to them, and those instincts aren't able to be quashed by rationality or statistics. We see something like the Newtown shooting and instinctively feel that all our children are in immediate danger, despite its actual unlikeliness. The media catches another school shooting and reinforces it even more in our brains that there is a very real danger, and breeds distrust and paranoia, triggering an instinct to be even more isolationist, and more paranoid, breeding more and more distrust, which further fuels the cycle for the next news article we see reinforcing our beliefs.
This isn't meant to blame the news, or humans, or any particular person at all, but the idea is that we should all at least attempt to be more data-driven, more pragmatic, and to try and find data that doesn't agree with our assumptions. It's harder than it sounds. In most humans, the brain simply rejects data that doesn't agree with its pre-formed hypotheses, but scientists are better equipped here than the average human, as we revel in data, enjoy being proven wrong, and strive towards better results, not just a reinforcement of the bad data we already believe.
I have to disagree with your characterization of people in suburbs. The only anecdote of trusting behavior given in the article was of a rural farmer in an isolated area - and it was given in contrast to people from urban New York or New Jersey coming up and being amazed about it.
Here's another hypothesis - tribal or rural cultures will be more trusting by nature. Human beings are naturally paranoid but NOT of each other. If you are competing with other species and the environment for survival, it doesn't make sense to view your own species as a threat. Indeed, it benefits your family or tribe if you all cooperate. However, in densely populated urban environments, your competition is all human beings. If you are metaphorically eaten or taken advantage of, it will be by another human. It's much less likely in a city that you will die because of exposure, or weather or a wild animal. Thus, because the threat is from people, you must be more wary of people.
I'm not super confident about this of course - it's probably both simplistic and wrong on a few levels, but I think whatever the answer is, it's not just that urban people are trusting and rural people are paranoid.
I may have overcharacterized, but I was specifically referring to those in cul-de-sac neighborhoods, not all suburbanites in general.
More traditional gridded suburbs, especially those with large communal parks, probably bely the behavior I described, but I'm mostly speaking intuitively on the matter, as I'm not aware of any studies.
There is existing data that strongly suggests corroboration here. Isolationist and/or segregated communities breed distrust of those outside the community. Cul de sacs are but a softer implementation of that segregation. Buying trends indicate that in most cases, cul de sac purchases are done with less diversity in mind -- whites buy in predominately white cul de sacs, minorities do the same; which just compounds the self-reinforcing price strata already existing within neighborhood communities.
That said, despite your low-brow dismissal, I'm not suggesting that cul de sacs are evil. They are very good at building close-knit, but very small communities. Kids that play in cul de sacs generally do so in plain view of everybody else, and with less traffic interruption, encouraging play and discouraging deviant behavior.
Cul de sac kids have a greater sense of trust with those within the immediate community, but at the expense of less trust for those outside that community -- just as isolated communities tend to do.
It is not a low brow dismissal, appealing to a HN meme doesn't save your position. :) A cul-de-sac is hardly an isolationist community. If anything you could probably go find data these people are more naive or trusting than the norm. Your position is just a rehash of the unquestioned assumptions of "suburbanites" that I think probably have a little but more to do, ironically, with "media conditioning" than even you might think.
My position doesn't apply to all, or even most suburbanites, nor is it entirely critical. I don't know why you're taking offense to it, especially offense that you haven't bothered to refute.
Cul de sacs are insular, and that's considered a selling point of them. I'll grant that they're not quite as extreme as gated communities, but that they exist for the purposes of insulating one from traffic otherwise associated with more frequented byways. That isn't a contrivance, it's their stated purpose. It shouldn't come as a shock that insulation from use as a thoroughfare would extend to insulation from outside contact, as that's the obvious result.
You seem to suggest those poor, sheltered suburbanites are al wrong. So should I have believed the guy at the bus stop when he told me he would sell a Rolex for $100 or the nice man at the gas station that asked for money for gas in his car with a long story, though he had no car in sight?
It's nice and hip to just imply people are not worldly but it may be that their distrust is justified.
You said some nice things about science ... But which set of assumptions really need to be examined here?
I didn't suggest that they were wrong. I suggested that their environment isn't conducive to fostering trust of 'outsiders'. I don't know if that's good or bad, nor do I know especially if it's better or worse to trust someone who just happens to live near you.
My thought is that a healthy distrust is perhaps the way to go, but that's a judgement on values, and shouldn't be relied upon as advice.
Putnam's data aside, we've seen the Contact Hypothesis show true in regards to homosexuals. Once a pariah, a generation of contact with homosexuals has trended towards acceptance.
Also interesting is that in Putnam's hypothesis, the last bullet relating to diversity indicates media influence -- "More time spent watching television and more agreement that 'television is my most important form of entertainment'".
I'm interested in Putnam's work though, but I'd like to see if other causes can't be seen as contributing factors. Thanks for the link.
Thank you for the additional links, but by my tally this article only cites two statistics without bothering to explore how the statistics could be irrelevant to the overall point that the article is making. I find the generalized claim that overall "trust" has declined to be an extremely difficult point to support. I would have appreciated a more thoroughgoing portrait of the point than just two data points and some generalized citations that social scientists "think x".
In my opinion this is a great example of a misuse of statistics. I'm not saying the article's claims are incorrect, but it did a poor job of convincing me of anything.
What about that whole thing about geographic proximity to the school in question?
How does one reconcile a particular choice if it involves a long commute or relocation? And do families living in close proximity receive priority enrollment over students residing outside of a given district?
I don't know. I know you have an agenda with homeschooling but I'm not really seeing how this actually connects in a serious way to what the article is talking about. It seems more complex than this, no?
I'm amazed this made it onto and off the front page with 50+ comments and not a single mention of a startup or tech startup ideas on how to solve this growing problem.
I'm most interested in how you can offer people the potential for trust (or to put it in terms of michaelochurch's comment, reduction of "mistrust.") I believe the establishment of reputation around a useful and flexible digital identity will be _the_ way that people combat distrust among each other. Social proof will come in the form of reviews based on past behavior.
There has been such a tiny amount of innovation or success in reputation systems, I believe this is a massive open opportunity.
Interestingly enough, in the developer community we fork and clone each others' repos like never before; I bet most people don't check the source code, unless they need to make changes. I believe there's still some trust left.
I think the keywords are "developer community". People aren't going to trust each other if there's no sense of community. Are the people around you friends you haven't met or just plain strangers?
The clearest finding was that the more diverse the area, the less people trusted each other.
I grew up in Hawaii, arguably one of the most racially and culturally diverse populations in the world. As an adult I've lived in 10-15 cities on the mainland and none of them had as much warmth and acceptance in the culture as Hawaii does. If I had to pick one reason for that, I'd say it is because Hawaii has less correlation between race and wealth than most places in the US. Still not completely egalitarian, but closer.
If I had to pick one reason for that, I'd say it was because Hawaii is an island. Island cultures are notoriously laid back and friendly around the world.
Sorry to do this, but it has to be done. Mistrust != distrust.
Distrust is when you don't trust someone. Mistrust is when you trust someone you should not.
For a more serious note, I've noticed this trend as well. One of the reasons I expect Silicon Valley's decline into irrelevance to be even faster than it looks is that it really was the pay-it-forward culture that made something of the place. That's what built it, in the 1970s. Now that it has been replaced by Sean Parker and Snapchat and "fuck you, I've got mine", it has no locational advantage other than history.
Probably makes it worse. If you tell people the currency doesn't leave a paper trail then they'll worry about people scamming them or screwing them over in some way, shape, or form.
I've never understood the whole "Bitcoin transactions are anonymous" theory. If anything, the Bitcoin model promotes a sort of hyper-transparency. The anonymity today lies in the fact that no one knows what wallet is linked to what person/business. If it becomes a widely-accepted currency among retailers, it would eventually become trivial to look at any given wallet and see that $x was spent at Amazon on this day, $x was spent on groceries, so-and-so filled up their gas tank at this particular station, etc. You can shuffle coins between wallets to obscure your tracks somewhat, but you're still broadcasting every transaction you make to the world.
I think this is horrible for the average person, but would be a great thing to implement for transactions where you would want some form of accountability, like political donations, charities, investments, taxes, etc. If I give my money to some organization, I can use the block chain to see that they're using the money they receive for exactly the purposes I expect them to be using it for.
That point raises, I believe, the question of what exactly is motivating these digital currencies' adoption, assuming that the strongest economic power has a growing rate of social distrust.
Because bitcoin is an algorithmic solution to exactly that problem - trust in a distributed system, casually known as the Byzantine Generals Problem, or Two Generals problem [1].
The innovators and early adopters were motivated by their understanding of the utility in finally achieving a solution to that problem in the context of digital currency (not historically possible for digital currencies till the invention of 1) the Internet and 2) the BitTorrent protocol, so essentially a major breakthrough and first in human history). They provided the critical mass, social proof, and wealth effect that then drove later adoption.
Just to nitpick a bit, the Two Generals problem is actually different than the Byzantine Generals Problem. 2GP deals with the (simpler) case of achieving consensus in a distributed system with unreliable communications. That is, messages can be reordered, lost or arbitrarily delayed, but end hosts are assumed to be trustworthy. BGP deals with the aforementioned scenario where nodes can be malicious as well.
Yes, good distinction. I should have linked the Byzantine Fault Tolerance page [1] since it describes that distinction better. Not sure why I went with Two Generals since I looked at both.
This is sad for more than sentimental reasons, as the article mentions. The "Economics of Trust" is important for easy dealmaking, credit, and other things. More here:
http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/software-programming-...