In that study, they boiled the phenomena down several factors: poverty/hopelessness (amazingly, rich people find the world to be a friendlier place), discrimination, personal trauma, divorced parents, detachment from neighbors (which is more common in urban populations), a lack of group memberships/activities, being unmarried (or in an unhappy marriage), and a lack of religious belief.

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Well, how many of these have nothing to do with accurately experiencing the supposed shitty general public? Having divorced parents or failing to join a bowling league say nothing about how trustworthy other people are. The ones that do (experiencing discrimination, social rejection, crime) sure as hell haven't gotten worse since the 1960s. If you think it was easier to be gay, or trans, or black in 1968, then you should get a refund on your education. Hell, if you think it was easier to just be a weird nerd in the 1980s, I've got some goddamned horror stories I could tell you.

The change is in people's perceptions, not the reality.

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In fact, when you change the poll so that instead of asking if "other people" can be trusted, it limits it to "your neighbors," the numbers double -- 39 percent of people 18-29 say their neighbors can be trusted, an astounding 73 percent of senior citizens say so. Which is to say, the closer you get to people, the more you realize they're not monsters. Likewise, while people (falsely) think crime is going up nationwide, most say they're not afraid to walk home alone at night -- numbers that have continued to get better over the last few decades. They can tell the actual neighborhoods they personally experience have gotten safer, but the neighborhoods that exist in their imaginations are goddamned hellholes.

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I also don't think it's a coincidence that trust levels go up with education. College means being forced to interact with people, to take classes and live in dorms and do group projects. The actual reality of other people, experienced by being in the same room with them, is generally better than what you assume about them from afar. If you've read my other columns, you can guess where this is headed ...