Do you think most people can be trusted? Your answer may depend on when you were born.
A recent Marquette Law School Poll asked people across the country about who they trust and how they communicate. The poll found a relationship between what decade someone was born in and whether they think most people can be trusted.
Though the poll did suggest a relationship between social media use and age, with younger generations using social media more, the poll did not find a relationship between social media use and trust, meaning that social media use alone does not explain differing levels of trust across generations.
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, says this poll has been conducted since 2021, with similar relationships between age and trust maintaining through time. He sits down with Lake Effect’s Sam Woods to discuss the findings.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sam Woods: The headline here is about a possible relationship between how trusting you are of others and your age. Can you explain what the poll found?
Charles Franklin: Yeah, we've been asking for several years now in each poll that we do a question that's generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or most people can't be trusted? And what is really striking is that the older you are, the more trusting you are, and the younger you are, the less trusting you are. So when we look at people in our samples who were born before 1960, 77% of them say most people can be trusted. But of those people born after 2000, it's only 35%, less than half as many who say that most people can be trusted. And when we go through people born in different decades going back to the 50s and earlier, trust declines every decade that we come to closer to the people born recently in the 2000s. So this is a striking finding, and it's not a fluke of this one poll. It's something that we've seen in all of our polling that we've done since 2021 when we first started asking this question.
What did this poll say about a relationship – or lack of a relationship - between social media use and differing levels in trust between the youngest generations and the oldest generations?
It's certainly came to my mind right away, that maybe it is social media because there is no doubt that younger people use social media more, and more intensely, than older people do. But we asked about 7 or 8 different social media platforms that people could use and counted how many people use them and how often. If you look at people born in the 2000s, there's just no relationship between how much social media they say they use and their level of trust in other people. If we back up to people born in the 90s, there's no relationship. In the 80s, there's no relationship. That goes all the way back to those folks born before 1960. No matter which decade you were born in, how much social media you use has no relationship to how trusting you are in other people. So there may be something else going on there, but it doesn't seem like simply using social media a lot or a little makes any difference in this. The young remain less trusting even if they hardly use social media at all.
Another nuance that stood out to me was that, even among people who said they were generally distrustful, they still report that they say ‘hello’ or try to strike up a conversation with strangers regularly. It seems like that's contradictory, but is this surprising to you?
Yeah, I was a little surprised by it. I thought people might be more standoffish, but we did find a very high percentage of people, no matter what their age group, who said they pretty often just say hello to people in passing. You know, you pass someone on the street and you nod and say ‘how are you doing’ or ‘good morning’ or something like that. That seems really common, about 80% of respondents who say they at least fairly often do those sorts of things. And another pretty surprising percentage, I think it's in the 40s or above, say they strike up conversations with strangers, like when they're standing in line somewhere. So there is that level of casual social contact that people say they still engage in, even as they say they're not so trusting of other people.
And when we ask, how much do you trust someone who strikes up a conversation with you, people are relatively cautious about trusting that person. Even at the same time as they're saying they themselves do that at least fairly often. So I guess if we think about our own motives, we're speaking to someone because we're friendly. If we're thinking about that person who suddenly approaches us and says something to us, maybe we're a little more cautious about what their motives are.
