Americans no longer put much trust in others as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, according to new research published in the Psychological Science journal.
"There's a growing perception that other people are cheating or taking advantage to get ahead, as evidenced, for example, by the ideas around 'the 1 percent' in the Occupy protests," said Jean M. Twenge, lead researcher and psychological scientist at San Diego State University.
Researchers compared two large, nationally representative surveys that included nearly 140,000 people from the U.S. The General Social Survey of adults (1972-2012) and the Monitoring the Future survey of 12th graders (1976-2012) both include questions that "measure trust in other people" and "gauge confidence in large institutions," according to the Association for Psychological Science.
"Compared to Americans in the 1970s-2000s, Americans in the last few years are less likely to say they can trust others, and are less likely to believe that institutions such as government, the press, religious organizations, schools, and large corporations are doing a good job," Twenge said.
Twenge and her colleagues W. Keith Campbell and Nathan Carter, both from the University of Georgia, attributed declines in trust to rises in income inequality and poverty.
Adult Americans who believed "most people can be trusted" fell from 46 percent in 1972-1974 to 33 percent in 2010-2012. The 12th graders showed similar results, with a drop from 32 percent in 1976-1978 to 18 percent in 2010-2012.
Institutional confidence also tracked its decline with the growing split between rich and poor. People have stopped trusting the media, medicine, corporations, universities and Congress over the last 40 years. Confidence in the military did rise over that period, though.
A greater proportion of 12th graders started to answer "no opinion" to questions about institutional confidence in the recent years. This suggests a possible decline in civic engagement and lack of social capital (trust, respect, cooperation, etc. between people), according to researchers.
"The decline of social capital is a profoundly negative trend for a democracy, a system of government predicated on the few representing the interests of the many," Twenge and her colleagues said.
