What Do Survey Measures of Trust Actually Measure?

Abstract

Nearly thirty years after Coleman’s seminal work on trust (1990), diverse scholarly disciplines still devote a lot of attention to the idea that trust, broadly construed, is an important concept to understand social interaction, political support, and even general wealth and prosperity.1 In Coleman’s discussion, two self-interested individuals, truster and trustee, each have something to gain or lose: the former by making herself vulnerable to the actions of another, the latter by finding herself unable to win the unguarded belief in mutually beneficial action. “Trust”, according to Coleman, is an instrumental interchange among the actors. But the far more common understanding of “trust” is not the instrumental interchange, but a more diffuse sense of “generalized trust”. This chapter supports the idea of generalized trust, but will also note that there are significant problems in the ways that we have typically assessed generalized trust in surveys due to response sets and mood. Fortunately, we see feasible, though perhaps costly, remedies to these biases. Quite a great deal of research would concur with Coleman that trust is fundamentally an instrumental interchange between actors who know one another. Some very strong evidence about instrumental trust comes from experimental contexts, especially in economics (Kreps 1990; McCabe, Rassenti, and Smith 1996); some from interview studies in anthropology (especially Ensminger and Henrich 2014); and some from very specialized studies of trust within specific social contexts including of Congress (Bianco 1994), within local bureaucracies (Brehm and Gates 2008), within Federal bureaucracy (Miller and Whitford 2016), and of the law (Tyler 2001). Perhaps the most prominent empirical work on trust comes from large scale surveys of populations. In these surveys, trust appears to be in a near catastrophic state of decline, where trust in government has fallen from high levels of support in the 1960s to bottom-scraping lows. In much of this work, the idea of “trust” is not explicitly the instrumental interchange between actors, but