In None We Trust

Do we live in a society?

alex colville is so wes anderson coded it’s insane

All the people on Nazi Twitter (so, Twitter, honestly) are talking about empathy, social trust, and “moral circles”. The whole thing is pretty stupid and focused on a stupid meme misreading of a study about “liberals” (in the US sense) giving more moral weight to foreigners than to their own family. The whole thing is as stupid and puerile as you can imagine from Twitter, in large part as an unfathomably unintelligent defense of Donald Trump’s foreign aid cuts.

Anyways my problem with the current discourse isn’t that conservatives get foreign aid wrong (I have my thoughts on it! It’s been a long-standing issue of mine, even), but rather, that they just get social trust itself wrong. So I’ll get around to it.

You’ve Got A Friend

What even is social trust? When you hear “high trust society”, (if you’re not using it as a strange dogwhistle) what you imagine is basically Gilmore Girls: closely-knit communities where everyone knows everyone, people don’t lock their doors at night, civic life is thriving, and people are confident and optimistic about the state of affairs present and future.

That is pretty much it: most research defines it as closely interconnected networks ruled by norms and beliefs that enable robust cooperation. It’s also closely related to another concept, social capital: the social characteristics of individuals that enable them to benefit from interactions with others. This includes personality traits such as charisma, the individual’s social status, and their access to networks such as through membership in organizations, like churches, clubs, sports leagues, etc. For a community to have social capital, the main driver has to be the latter - dense, interconnected networks of individuals with positive interactions with each other.

That’s a bit vague, so let’s delve into it a bit deeper. Social capital, in general, has four distinct components: social participation (in civic activities), political participation (in elections, debates, meetings), trust in others, and trust in institutions. At the individual level, the two major drivers of social capital are employment and education - such that people with jobs or degrees are more engaged in their communities, but higher levels of either doesn’t necessarily mean that a community has more social capital. This tracks with the fact that major indicators of social capital, like blood donations, participation in political rallies, cheating in official forms, and electoral turnout, aren’t well correlated to each other or to specific forms of trust. When looking at it from a broader perspective, the only variable that predicts social capital well is generalized interpersonal trust - that is, how much people trust each other.

But what does a high-trust society look like? Conservatives would like you to think that it’s tightly knit families and communities built around them, with a high degree of respect for traditional authority and collective harmony. This is not the case. Societies with close, strong family ties in fact have lower social trust and lower political trust, and instead prize conformism and obedience above civic engagement. This has economic consequences: states that banned cousin marriage are richer than those who didn’t, for instance. Western culture is largely not like this because of the role of the Catholic Church, which both expanded the scope of trust, and reduced the importance of kin. Cultures that value collective harmony also have worse outcomes for women, with overall negative consequences for society in general. (I’ve written about it in some detail in the past)

In reality, social trust is driven by trust in those outside the family: it’s trust in those that the person doesn’t know. Whereas tightly-knit communities are driven by mutual obligation, “high trust” loosely knit cultures are driven by moral universals - such that the major drivers of behavior are not kin group preference, but rather internal moral feelings of shame and guilt. Cultures of “honor” are low in trust and high in internal control: herders are both more likely to want, value, and take revenge and also more likely to engage in female genital mutilation to prevent promiscuity in “their” women (Spanish summary here on that paper). Similarly, close-knit low trust societies have more conservative, self-reliant, and nationalist beliefs, whilst loosely-linked higher trust societies have more liberal, “globalist”, and redistributionist beliefs. The important thing here is that universalist values tend to be closely associated with social trust, trust in institutions, and civic engagement: people whose moral standpoint is aligned with “far off foreigners” instead of considering caring about others a luxury are more likely to be engaged and trusting members of the community.

The asylum where they raised me

In the movie Parasite, the plot tracks two families: the Parks, who are wealthy, and the Kims, who are not. The Kims scheme, plot, and con their way into the domestic service of the Park family, and during a weekend outing stay at their home and converse about an unexpected quality the Parks have: they’re nice. Mrs Kim responds: “They are nice because they are rich”. Is she, economically speaking, correct?

Yes. As mentioned above, education and employment (both positively linked to income) are predictive of social capital and social trust. Higher education, higher income individuals report higher social trust, as well as higher personal wellbeing. People value their social capital quite highly - in fact, as highly as actual money, and the highest valuations are in the highest social capital areas. Higher income is systematically linked to higher social trust and higher social capital. People with higher social capital tend to have more friends and a more active social life. Generally, more vibrant and active friend groups increase social trust, both groups that are homogenous in their trust levels, and groups that are not. Thus, being exposed to a broader network of ideas and having access to a network to communicate them too is a positive trait and correlates with success. Surprisingly, government outcomes don’t tend to explain social trust very well: infrastructure projects don’t seem to increase tax compliance, crime rates aren’t very predictive of social capital one way or the other, and economic outcomes seem to dominate - people who grew up during low growth times tend to exhibit lower social trust, and people exposed to discrimination and unemployment have lower trust in others and government too.

But the other side of the equation is that higher trust makes you rich. Strong social ties within communities can attract investment to the community, such that neighborhoods where a Starbucks opens have higher rates of entrepreneurship in large part thanks to new social networks forming in the coffee shops. This tracks with broader research finding that being socially active is generally beneficial: for teenagers, having one more friend resulted in an increase to earnings or 7% to 14%, and having friends with academically supportive family backgrounds increases grades (for all races and income groups). Plus, having a broader social group increases your chances of finding a job, has a significant impact on your employment prospects, and increases your wages for similar positions, mainly because referrals are a big deal. Overall, being popular in your social circle is associated with significantly higher earnings, and having a broad social circle in general improves labor and education outcomes for young people. Civil war veterans who lived near other veterans, especially those they knew, lived longer lives. In general, having relationships of proximity and mentorship benefit workers enormously. Contrarily, “antisocial” behavior is bad: people pass up on advantageous transactions or good opportunities out of fear of being cheated. By some estimates, Morocco loses around 3% of its GDP to low social trust. Higher-trust areas are more effectively able to partake in complex, specialized economic activities, leading to higher wealth.

And lastly, the big one is that social capital is associated with higher economic mobility: having more connected, civically engaged, and institutionally assured communities increases the odds of poor children of rising up the ranks - at least as long as the communities are actually interconnected, and not just a bunch of kin groups lumped together. It’s very important to note that the mobility effects come almost exclusively from economic interconnectedness, and primarily from friendships: having deep social ties and not just vague acquaintances across class lines is beneficial. The importance of communities for intergenerational mobility is key: children’s outcomes are most related to the parents of their peers during childhood, implying that the relationship is driven by social interaction and by adults being “good role models” for kids, similarly to how women whose friends’ mothers worked had higher labor participation rates. In this sense, communities improve life outcomes mainly through childhood exposure (particularly to others), meaning that moving from low-income, low-education, low-social capital locations to ones that improve on those axes is beneficial for children.

In this house, we believe…

One final thing that I think this helps clarify is the seemingly both-sided link between ethnic diversity and social trust: areas with more ethnic diversity consistently score lower on social trust indicators, and seem to score lower in social capital more broadly when certain cultural specifications are considered. But, as mentioned above, more universalistic values emerged from higher social trust and social capital, and racial diversity didn’t seem to be negatively affecting high-opportunity communities in terms of social mobility.

So what gives? Well, a lot of high diversity areas like Montgomery County, Maryland (one of the top 10 opportunity zones in the US) have high levels of immigration. Immigrants in the US seem to have much higher economic mobility than natives regardless of various characteristics like education or race, and seems to be driven by community choice - they go to where it’s good to live. Likewise, immigrants who have established social groups among the existing immigrant community have better labor market outcomes than “pioneers” who arrived without a community. But immigrant enclaves are harmful for education and income and beneficial for communal ties, and disestablishing them was economically beneficial but communally perjudicial. This seems… contradictory and fraught. But it clicks when realizing that integrating immigrants into mainstream society tends to raise their social connectivity but also raise the general openness of social groups to immigrants afterwards, just like growing up in ethnically diverse areas increases openness to living in diverse areas later in life, and like early 20th century refugees who spoke English were more adequately integrated into society. It’s important to note that a major case is marriage: less integrated immigrant groups are both a cause and a consequence of lower intermarriage, driven mainly by low-trust kin-centric beliefs on both sides - and across time, inequality (a major driver of socioeconomic mobility) decreases when homogamy decreases. Similarly, while educational homogamy (that is, the share of marriages between spouses with equal education) tends to correspond to preferences for a match, racial homogamy is mostly about search frictions - people don’t frequently know many individuals of different races. So, as mentioned above, the channel through which ethnic diversity and immigration tends to influence social capital is mainly social interaction and friendship: if communities are diverse and well integrated, this is beneficial, while it is harmful for non-integrated ones.

But if having high social trust is positive, why don’t societies just shift value systems? Well, because it’s costly. People underrate trust in others because they want to avoid being tricked and conned - especially when social trust itself is linked to cheating in experiments, and particularist groups are more likely to cheat those outside the “Inner circle”. Parents transmit these values to their children, such that society is stuck in a low-trust, particularlist equilibrium. Believed differences in social preferences among men are women are largely false. The “false consensus” problem is significant: people tend to think that others are more regressive than they really are: sexist views, in men, are less common than people think, and keep men back from expressing their real beliefs, just like misperceptions of social conservatism discourage women from working, and affect the distribution of household chores from recalled experience.

It’s especially noteworthy that people falsify their own preferences to avoid social stigma: Saudi husbands are actually overall fairly supportive of their wives working, but voice opposition in order to secure the approval of other men, while women are overall misinformed about their labor market outlook and the desires and aspirations of other women. Qataris express concern for women working, particularly in close proximity to men, mainly as a product of other people’s opinions of them. And in the US, single and “taken” women answer surveys about ambition similarly in private, but differently (more conservatively) in public, in order to not scare away potential boyfriends - it is social norms, not prejudice, are holding women back.

But, contrary to belief, people can be induced to act differently: the social trust level of the environment changes the social trust level of immigrants, such that “high-trust” values spread even to newcomers (if, of course, properly integrated). This is generally in line with the evidence: people underestimate how likely they are to change other people’s minds when they have similar underlying beliefs. Being exposed to people who are different than you helps you become more respectful and accepting of them: exposure to immigrants raises generosity to others like the immigrant, class prejudices in Indian schools declined when exposed to other-caste students, and being exposed to talented female coworkers increases approval of working women among men. Additionally, people value information more from people they know - for example, when a friend experiences housing price increases in a distant place, people consider that place a better place to live, without a similar reaction to similar news from friendless places. When people’s friends adopt a product, people are more likely to consider or even adopt it themselves, and during COVID, having friends who either socially distanced or suffered from the disease themselves raised people’s chances not just of isolating but of preaching to others to isolate too.

It happened here

I think that social trust and social capital being good makes it especially important to note that they’ve declined quite precipitously lately - which, as I’ve written before, is linked with the generalized political crisis we’re living through. From the 1950s until the 1990s social capital declined quite substantially, and while the trend from the first 15 years of the 21st century seems ambiguous, after that it does not: after the pandemic, social capital declined precipitously in developed countries

Well, what happened? I think two major things. The first is lower economic growth: as mentioned above, people faced with unemployment have lower social trust, and individuals exposed to lower economic growth during their formative years are more likely to have a “zero sum” mentality, such that people who have been exposed to hardship are more “us-or-them”, whilst those coming from prosperity have higher trust in others. Generally, zero-sum beliefs are closely linked with lower social trust in general, which is particularly damaging for the center left: lower social trust also impacts future values and attitudes towards government, and trust is broadly correlated with socially liberal and economically left wing beliefs. This is due to the fact that more individualistic and more particularist moral values are linked with right wing vote shares. Notably, opinions on COVID policy were driven by social trust, and not by a standard left/right ideology.

The second crucial factor is a rapid increase in loneliness, especially post pandemic. Loneliness in general is inimical to social trust and social capital, and during the 1950s to 1990s drop in social capital, declines in entertaining friends and relatives were a significant factor. Especially after the pandemic, loneliness among the population has skyrocketed to never before seen levels, and being what in less kind and less gentle times would be called “a loser” is being mainstreamed and normalized for the youth, as men and women date less, party less, and have less sex than ever. The decline in marriage and dating has extremely corrosive social and political consequences, while in-person socialization is being replaced with social media, which is harmful for mental health.

I think that social media is an uniquely important problem here: people are alone and are replacing “hanging out with friends” with “scrolling”. The political scientist Henry Farrell writes that social media, especially the algorithm, is creating a warped sense of “the public”: instead of forming opinions on what others think through interaction with any real mass, we (especially on Twitter) interact with an astroturfed lawn of antisocial, regressive, low-trust ragebaiters. . People are increasingly incapable of connecting with others around topics, and instead rely on social media and online content to learn about them - that’s why personal style in fashion seems pretty much dead. Farrell compares this with how the different propensities of paid versus unpaid porn viewers warps the videos on display, and I think this is quite apt at explaining a lot of current discourse about gender, dating, and sex: a substantial number of (not exclusively) men, especially in the ragebait astroturf field, seem to get their opinions on the topic basically exclusively from internet porn. People used to “learn” about sex and “normal” sex lives via either sex or direct conversation with friends, and now they don’t have that input, and fixate on extremely graphic and lurid fantasies.

Conclusion

So, uh, is society fucked? Well, no. As said above, you can change people’s minds, at least in some cases. And focusing on participating in society more broadly - more friends, more group activities, more civic engagement writ broadly - is probably important. So touch grass and go do something instead of posting about it (which is, of course, hard and unaffordable in many cases).

And vote for people who want to build bike lanes.