As shown in the chart for general responses to trust, the percentage of all respondents who said that most people can be trusted dropped from about 46% in 1972 to about 32% in 2012. For the sake of comparison, I included the “Can be trusted” line to the other charts as a dotted line.

Gender was the factor with the weakest correlation to trust. Males were more likely to trust most people than females, but only slightly. In another study of trust with similar results, Karen K. Clark and associates explained the difference as a possible effect of gender discrimination. I should emphasize that, as the gender chart shows below, the correlation between gender and trust was significant but almost negligible. I only included it because gender is a common factor in social analysis, and I knew some readers would be curious.

Residents of the South, defined here as the region from Texas to the South-Atlantic coast, were less likely to trust people than residents of other regions. Bless their hearts! Results for the Northeast, Midwest, and West were all higher but mixed (see here), and were combined in the regional chart below. The lack of trust among Southerners was probably related to the presence of other factors from this analysis, especially race.

I have also animated data for more specific regions below. To view the frames as an album, click here.

Marital status had a weak correlation with trust. Married respondents were more likely to trust most people than those who were not married. Trust among those who were divorced or separated, widowed, or never married was also mixed (see here), though never-marrieds began to trust people less than other respondents in the 2000s.

Explaining marital status and trust is complicated, in part because social norms toward marriage have changed since the 1970s. For example, Pew recently found that fewer Americans were getting married. Further, researchers at the Urban Institute projected that fewer Millenials would marry before age 40 than members of previous generations. Those norms and others were possibly in play here.

Speaking of the under-40 crowd, aging had a positive correlation with trust. Trends for age divisions beyond younger (18 to 39) and older (40 and above) were scattered (see here), but reducing ages to two groups allowed for a more distinct chart.

Over the last four decades, the youngest Americans were among the least trusting.

Studies have shown across time and place that trust generally increases with age, so its decline among young Americans has inspired confusion for researchers. Robert Putnam attributed it to the influences of television, the Internet, and other, socially isolating inventions, though not everyone has agreed with him. Dietland Stolle and Laura Nishikawa found that the media has influenced some parents to instill distrust in their children, despite how the parents themselves may have felt about trust. As with the other factors in this analysis, it is safe to assume that many influences converged on this relationship.

Birth cohorts are often studied in works on social capital, a concept that refers to shared social resources like norms, networks, and trust. Putnam popularized the theory that cultural differences between birth cohorts, e.g. the Silents and the Baby Boomers, were responsible for a decline in social capital in the United States and therefore a decline of trust. Putnam’s theory has since been expanded, and challenged, by others.

The correlation between birth cohorts and trust coincided with the findings about Millenials that I mentioned earlier. The cohort chart below shows a consistent gap in trust between generations, with later cohorts trusting less than earlier ones. More specifically, an average of 19% of Millenials reported that they trusted most people. For contemporary theories that might be associated with this effect, Google the phrase “why are millenials”.

Baby Boomers and Generation X were the only groups in this analysis to show upward trendlines for trust.

I lived through the 1980s and 1990s, and I remember when Gen-Xers faced many of the same criticisms that have been heaped upon the twenty-somethings of the 2010s. Perhaps Millenials, too, will achieve an upward trend in trust as they age, but that remains to be seen. The fact remains that, despite their upward swing, only 1 in 4 Gen Xers on average have said that most people can be trusted.

Condition of health was correlated with trust, but the two concepts were difficult to detangle. Every article I found in a search modeled trust (or social capital) as a predictor of health. In other words, increased trust (or social capital) had a direct positive effect on subjects and their health conditions. I would argue that, given the health chart below, the inverse of that relationship should also be considered.

On average, respondents in excellent health were 19% more likely to trust people over the 40-year period than those in fair or poor health. Latent factors were certainly involved here, as being healthy in itself would not cause a person to be more trusting.

Unsurprisingly, happiness was correlated with trust. The two concepts were tough to pull apart, as either one could have preceded the other. Three Italian researchers found that, among other factors, a decrease in social connections among Americans over time was correlated with a decrease in their happiness. Regardless of what the causal direction may be, the happiness chart below shows that respondents who were “very happy” or “pretty happy” were more trusting than those who were “not too happy” (and yes, the wording of those options was carefully chosen).

I wanted to analyze the trends in trust among socio-economic classes. Unfortunately, the GSS’s data on class is a mess. Social desirability bias has tainted the survey’s major variable on class, leading hundreds of respondents to misidentify as “working class” or “middle class”. Inflation has also depreciated the survey’s data on incomes, and attempts to create new, adjusted variables for income have complicated even simple distinctions of class by earnings.

Instead of class, I decided to use two variables based on opinions about finances and incomes. One asks, “[W]ould you say that you are pretty well satisfied with your present financial situation, more or less satisfied, or not satisfied at all?” The other asks, “Compared with American families in general, would you say your family income is far below average, below average, average, above average, or far above average?” These are, at best, acceptable substitutes for measures of class, but they did lead to interesting findings.

People who were satisfied or “more or less satisfied” with their finances agreed that most people could be trusted more often than those who were not satisfied. Similarly, those who felt their families earned above average or average were more trusting than those who felt their families earned below the average.

Americans with “above average” family incomes were the second most likely group to trust in this analysis, with an average of 53% agreeing that most people could be trusted.

The charts on finances and incomes below raise economic issues, including income inequality. Eric Uslaner has written at length about the effect of income inequality on trust. He found that people were less inclined to trust one another where incomes were perceived to be more unequal. That effect could have been involved here, given that economic inequality has increased in the United States since the 1970s.

Education created drastic differences between respondents. On average, Americans with college degrees were 32% more likely to say most people could be trusted than those without high school diplomas. Note that “any college degree” includes junior college degrees, four-year undergraduate degrees, and graduate degrees.

Americans with college degrees shared the highest percentage for trust on average, with 55% saying most people could be trusted.

The relationship between education and trust has been hard to reduce. Studies consistently find that education has a positive effect on trust, but no one is sure of why. Research indicates that education sets off a domino effect of other factors that influence trust, including improved social skills, improved occupational opportunities, and improved economic outcomes, though experts do not always notice the same effects.

The education chart below, ranked by highest degree completed, displays the results.

Finally, race was the most highly correlated characteristic with trust in this analysis. Whites were 25% more likely to say that most people could be trusted than non-whites. Separating non-whites into “Black” and “Other” revealed a striking statistic (see here).

Blacks were the least trusting group in this analysis. On average, only 15% said that most people could be trusted.

There are numerous explanations for the disparities of trust between whites, blacks, and other races in the United States. All of them incorporate concepts like discrimination and inequality, as well as events from the history of race relations among Americans. That said, I will defer the discussion on race and trust to scholarly texts.

In most years that the GSS has been collected, few respondents have identified as belonging to other races besides black or white and answered the question for trust. For instance, only four respondents who identified as “Other” for race in 1972 answered trust, when the desired sample size for all groups per year was 100 or more. Because of this limitation, I collapsed “Black” and “Other” into “Non-white” to create a more reliable value.

The race chart below shows the comparison between whites and non-whites. Note that this chart does not consider ethnic affiliations, which would include Hispanics and Latinos.

This analysis had three limitations. First, survey research is an imperfect method of measurement, and can only be used to make inferences about human behavior. (On that note, two researchers have objected to the wording of the variable trust.) Second, the results were not meant to imply causal effects, especially absolute ones. For example, getting married or turning 40 would not cause a person’s trust to increase. Third, the Pearson’s correlation scores for these factors, which measured their covariance with trust on a scale of 0 to 1, ranged from .103 to .205 (excluding gender, which scored a scant .040). This range suggests significant but weak correlations, even by the relaxed standards of social science. The reasons for these weak correlations varied, as latent factors influenced the results of each category. Despite these limitations, the fact that the decline of trust varied between groups remains clear.