
Americans don't trust each other anymore - 001sky
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20131130/DAACV0QO2.html
======
Futurebot
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:

[http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/software-
programming-...](http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/software-programming-
and-the-economics-of-trust-vs-transactions)

------
huragok
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).

~~~
alayne
You can't generalize across 300 million people based on one year of personal
experiences.

~~~
notdrunkatall
Sure you can. You may not be entirely correct, but there is nothing wrong with
stating an opinion based on personal experience.

------
hacknat
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?

Ecclesiastes 7:10

~~~
GregBuchholz
Yes, it seems weirdly PC to leave the changing demographic situation out of
the picture.

The Extraordinary 30-Year Growth of the U.S. Hispanic Population
[http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/08/extra...](http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/08/extraordinary-
growth-americas-hispanic-population/6733/)

US ethnic minorities make up 49.9 per cent of under-fives
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10117951/US-
ethnic-minorities-make-up-49.9-per-cent-of-under-fives.html)

~~~
bilbo0s
It's strange...

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.

------
Cowicide
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.

[http://boingboing.net/2013/10/21/the-true-story-about-the-
wo...](http://boingboing.net/2013/10/21/the-true-story-about-the-woman.html)

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.

It's been working.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I think it is more subtle than conspiracy theories.

~~~
Cowicide
How about you actually try to debunk the facts I present instead of inanely
and pompously labeling them a "conspiracy theory"?

------
grandalf
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.

~~~
0xEA
WW2 had a ton of propaganda about distrusting people, yet according to this
article that was a very trusting time.

~~~
Cowicide
>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.

------
lotharbot
> _" 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.

------
Zigurd
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.

------
hackula1
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.

~~~
ams6110
Mistrust or suspicion of different-looking people and/or foreigners is most
likely an evolutionary survival instinct: trust the tribe, fear invaders.

------
tokenadult
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.

[1]
[http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...](http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.html)

[2]
[http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf](http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf)

[http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html](http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html)

[3]
[http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...](http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.html)

[4]
[http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...](http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index.html)

[5] [http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-
Charter...](http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-
Charter/dp/1592984762/)

~~~
bmelton
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.

~~~
landryraccoon
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.

~~~
bmelton
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.

In short, I think we're probably both right. ;-)

~~~
dinkumthinkum
Oh yes, cul-de-sacs have a mind destroying force ... Really, is this what
science is giving us?

~~~
bmelton
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.

[1] -
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1523709](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1523709)
[2] -
[http://chd.sagepub.com/content/20/2/229.full.pdf+html](http://chd.sagepub.com/content/20/2/229.full.pdf+html)

~~~
dinkumthinkum
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.

~~~
bmelton
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.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
They are "insular" in a far less dramatic and hyperbolic sense.

------
bredren
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.

------
plainOldText
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.

~~~
deadghost
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?

------
brosco45
We don't even trust co-workers anymore.

~~~
GeneralList
I'm not even sure about myself.

------
rooshdi
Rapacious systems can only last so long before collective trust dissipates.

~~~
mwfunk
Also, collective systems can only last so long before they become rapacious.
:)

~~~
saraid216
Individuals can only last so long before they join collectives.

~~~
alayne
Collectives can only divide so long before they become indivisibles.

------
PythonicAlpha
Trust is a decision: A society, that does not have trust in each other, will
fail, sooner or later.

------
michaelochurch
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.

~~~
emmelaich
Great comment.

I think it's interesting that the word "trustworthy" doesn't appear in the
article.

And it only appears in these HN comments once. (well, twice now :)

------
thenerdfiles
How does this spill over into our trust of digital currencies like bitcoin,
litecoin, and others?

~~~
Glide
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.

~~~
pjscott
No paper trail? But that's what the Bitcoin mechanism _is_ \-- a way of
publicly recording all transactions!

~~~
csandreasen
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.

