“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust” - how to rediscover trust in modern society

We should be considering how we redesign institutions on a scale that promotes trust as well as efficiency.

(the quotation in the headline is, of course, from Peter Pan)

Aaron Renn asks an important question:

“As I’ve pointed out many times, we are becoming a lower trust society. That’s alarming. But how do we reverse course and start restoring general trust? That’s a much harder question.”

Most of the reporting about trust focuses on people’s trust in institutions rather than on wider social trust. In the latter case, at least in the UK, we have seen some improvements since the 2000s in measures of social trust:

“...the proportion of Britons who feel that “most people can be trusted” is now at a high, having rebounded since the late 1990s, with the UK also ranking among the highest internationally for this sense of trust.”

At the same time, levels of trust in institutions and government have not recovered and, in many cases, have deteriorated:

“The 41st British Social Attitudes (BSA) report, published today by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), reveals that the public is as critical now of how Britain is governed as they have ever been. The political and policy challenges faced by the country in the second half of the 2019-24 parliament have significantly undermined the public’s trust and confidence in politicians and the political system.”

It is very clear that, while declines in social trust tracked declines in institutional trust, recent measures have shown that this is more of a correlation than evidence of a connection between how much we trust our neighbour and how much we trust institutions. Edelman, who publish an annual trust barometer, reports a continuing decline in institutional trust up to 2024 with what we can now safely call distrust of government and media driving that decline. Trust in business and NGOs has not shown the same marked decline (although the survey still tells us people hate the rich).

If trust in each other is rising but trust in private and public institutions is declining the way to respond to Aaron Renn’s question is to ask what those institutions are doing wrong. Robert Puttnam sets out an argument that, I suspect, would resonate with Christian thinkers like Renn:

“The first thing that changed was that ordinary Americans became convinced — some through religion, others not — that they had a moral duty to worry about other people, and their morality changed from an “I” morality to a “we” morality. Conversely, the first thing that turned in the other direction [in the 1960s] was actually our sense of moral obligation orders. We went from a “we” society to an “I” society.”

This suggests that, in the manner of Geert Hofstede’s ideas, Britain is becoming less “I” and more “we” but that this moral imperative is not reflected in our institutions which remain overwhelmingly liberal and individualistic in their worldview. Hofstede, as I’ve written before, developed the idea of ‘power distance’ to explain some of the problems with the relationship between people and the institutions and governments that make decisions about their lives. Hofstede also made a distinction between ‘collectivist’ and ‘individualist’ cultures - between ‘I’ and ‘we’, to continue that framing. But when we look at the most trusting societies, what we see isn’t that traditional distinction between the collective and the individual but rather a more nuanced set of factors. These include wealth and education since richer, better educated people display (and report) higher levels of both social and institutional trust. This reminds us that economic status is a significant determinant of however powerful (or powerless) people feel:

“When I have simulated a mild version of this experience for middle-class people – using a household budgeting game on a computer where they’re randomly assigned to be poor or financially comfortable – participants have found it to be profoundly disempowering. Those assigned to be poor reported a lower sense of power, and outlooks assumed to be the product of a freely chosen mindset (self-efficacy and locus of control) were diminished by the mere momentary lived experience of trying to meet one’s needs when one does not have enough.”

It is widely recognised that this sense of powerlessness contributes to poorer communities having much lower levels of trust, both of neighbours and of institutions. In dealing with institutions people from these communities struggle to understand the language of institutional bureaucrats, feel excluded and patronised. In response, institutions respond to people’s lack of trust by assuming that this represents a desire to ‘get one over’ the institution and its bureaucrats. As a result mutual trust is replaced with credentials, ID systems and paperwork. In a world of declining trust (at least in big institutions) our political culture responds by assuming that ‘I know Mary and her family’ can be substituted by photoID, customer numbers, data protection rules, and pronouns.

The problem with these substitutes for trust is that they act to promote a sense of mistrust. As you go through a series of questions - a sort of impersonal but personal intrusion - so you can talk to your bank about your money, it is hard not to feel that the bank simply doesn’t trust you. Now, as you wander down to the village hall to do your civic duty by voting for a politician you don’t know and who doesn’t know you, the authorities have deemed that saying you are Mary Smith of 110 The Beeches isn’t sufficient for them to allow you to cast your vote. Instead, you are required to produce a form of identification complete with a photograph proving that you are Mary Smith of 110 The Beeches. There is no trust given us, so we should perhaps not be surprised when levels of trust fall. The problem is that, because institutions no longer trust us, they justify actions that punish everyone for the problems caused by a tiny minority.

It is interesting that the people shaking their heads in incredulity about the idea of rounding off the ends of kitchen knives in order to reduce the number of stabbings are the same ones who demanded that Mary Smith provide ID so she can vote. The assumption that nobody can be trusted isn’t something associated with one or other social or political grouping but with an authoritarian mindset. Of course the response will be either ‘it doesn’t matter’ or the slightly more sinister ‘if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear’. Except that, in a world where institutions and authorities don’t trust you, you thinking you have nothing to hide and, therefore, nothing to fear makes no sense. And it does matter that a pizza restaurant in a Leeds suburb is required to have a doorman. It does matter that our governments pressure communications companies to get access to your and my private messages.

There seem to be two aspects of trust at play. The first is a sociological dimension as described by Puttnam and Hofstede where morality, economic status and feelings of power or access to power interact to create social and institutional trust. The second is a psychological dimension where how others behave and perceptions of personal risk cross over to determine levels of trust. For the first, social, dimension the issue of trust seems resolvable: adopt a morally trusting ideology, reduce poverty and place power closer to people. But in the second, psychological, dimension reducing mistrust requires behavioural change from both people and also institutions, at the same time. Our question becomes whether the social dimension is downstream of the behavioural dimension or whether changing one dimension will lead to changes in the other?

Trust matters because distrust is expensive and inconvenient. If we are to foster trust then people need to be closer to power and to feel that public (and private) institutions are on their side. If we are confident, for example, that criminals will be caught then we are less concerned about the behaviour of those we deal with. If we know the people making decisions about our lives (and have some say over who those people are and what they do) then we are more likely to trust them and they likewise will be more likely to trust us. When Mary Smith goes to the village hall to vote it would be much better if she were voting for somebody she knows and who knows her. And doing so in a polling centre where the clerks also know she is Mary Smith who lives on The Beeches and don’t require she proves this fact.

The development of technology and the chasing of efficiencies leads to institutions like your council, your bank and your energy supplier getting more distant and less personal. We are expected to deal with anonymous call handlers, often in another country, with websites and with screen-based apps of one sort or another simply to do straightforward, everyday tasks. And, even where we are comfortable and confident in using this 21st century technology, there is little basis for trust to develop. Plus, when something goes wrong, we feel alone and unhelped because we literally don’t know anyone with the capacity to unlock our problems with the bureaucracies we encounter.

We should be considering how we redesign institutions on a scale that promotes trust as well as efficiency. And, in doing this, we have to examine the ways in which our increasingly urban and work-oriented culture militates against the development of any idea of “we”, the building of communities based on place as well as on interest or activity. All this needs us to think differently about government and to shift back towards the idea that the services of our state should be controlled and directed as close to the people as possible. This requires the central government to let go of power and for us to give real autonomy - accompanied by local accountability - to the people providing services like schools, health, social care, and welfare. It also demands that we begin trusting people again by scrapping onerous and often unnecessary demands for identification, by granting people - good and bad - agency, and by reconnecting the process of electing people with the operation of government.