But I'm 100% sure that if you asked the average American to assess their screen time over the last week, their responses would widely diverge from the actual number.
Just a speculation on trust in conservative, church-going Zoomers and in liberal older adults: As you note, trust and believing in collective goals run hand-in-hand. For older cohorts, collective goals like social security, unionization, and welfare are liberal policy goals. Zoomers have never lived in that world, though--their whole lives have been in a neoliberal corporatist world where regulation of industry for the common good, or taxes to pay for common services, were not seen as liberal policy goals. Instead, 21st century liberal policy goals are increasingly atomized, to very specific groups or identities. (It's hard to imagine a more individualist policy goal than getting someone's bespoke pronouns correct, for instance.)
On the other hand, conservatives--and especially religious conservatives--are offering collectivist policies: You should be part of a faith group, and a community, with codified roles in the community that may be separated by sex. You are being asked to subjugate your individual desires to the good of the community, just like liberals arguing for higher taxes to pay for social services were asking you to do in the past. If I'm a collectivist Zoomer, where I go is to a conservative church; there isn't a collectivist liberal place for me to go. This would explain the high trust in the conservative church-attending Gen Z folks.
Of all of the comments people have postulated, this one makes the most sense. Liberalism's goals 30 years ago were nothing like liberalism today. Gen Z. liberals are different from their parents in profound ways.
Yeah, I agree that probably the different generations are thinking of different things when they identify as "liberal" or "conservative." I wonder if that has some bearing on the opposite income effects as well. Like maybe a person in their 20s who's already making a high income is doing it through some kind of personal hustle -- crypto, becoming an influencer, whatever -- whereas older high-income people probably went through the more conventional route of working up through an organization.
"Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?"
You've gotta go with the question as posed, but this question doesn't measure social trust by itself. Instead, it asks the respondent which to prioritize, social trust or risk aversion?
Risk aversion is compatible with believing that most people *can* be trusted. That most people aren't out to get you, are likely just trying to do their jobs the best they know how, is not at all incompatible with believing that getting by yourself takes extra caution. Personal responsibility means prioritizing what you can control (the precautions *you* can take), not what you can't (others' trustworthiness). Not putting the onus on others to be trustworthy is arguably more responsible.
Studies suggest that predatory behavior more likely results from a few people being very predatory than from more people being moderately predatory. If so, that most people really *can* be trusted is a bad proxy for predatory risk. More often, predation isn't even the problem. As Ogden Nash said, "It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin, / That lays eggs under your skin."
The poem focuses on our own omissions, not others'. But not knowing where to turn upon others' "sins of omission", where no-one intended us grief but let it come our way, anyhow, seems on the rise:
"[S]o much of modern life now has this quality: everything works beautifully until it doesn’t, and then the failure is total, opaque, and somehow your fault. The system is designed to appear frictionless... But when something basic breaks, you realize that... The people you reach aren’t empowered to solve the problem. The people empowered to solve the problem can’t be reached. The interface is cheerful; the institution behind it is absent... / ...[E]very system is now optimized, somehow, to prevent responsibility from attaching to any human being."
My (hair-brained) theory is that this is late-stage capitalism coming to roost. The increased-margin-of-quarterly-profit motive is everywhere and undermines trust.
"Or maybe it’s because they report higher rates of depression and anxiety than the rest of the ideological spectrum?"
Can there be other factors such as the state of the American family? The bedrock of all culture and societies is the home; deficiencies there extrapolate to broader society.
Do young people with divorced parents have a higher rate of depression? Let's just assume that they do for this thought experiment.
Why, though?
Well intact homes tend to have all kinds of factors working in their favor. Parents with higher levels of education, higher income, almost certainly a lower rate of mental illness in the parents.
They likely got married a bit later in life. Had children after they were married, again, later in life.
And you also know what has an impact on things like age of first marriage, number of children, likelihood of marriage?
Political ideology and religious affiliation.
So if we say that kids who grew up in two parent households have lower rates of depression, is that factually true? Sure. It's more than likely the case.
The causal arrows go a dozen ways from each variable.
As a member of Gen X myself, my recollection was that it was cool for young adults to be cynical in the 1990s, so the change there might just reflect the loss of interest in being cool with age and perhaps a realization that too much cynicism is a problem for society?
Re: the different effects of education on the generations, might the difference be in the nature of the education received? The "tenured radicals" phenomenon isn't new, but it does seem like it's gotten more prevalent with time, and a lot of the deconstructionist stuff is basically paranoia (everything's really about power games and oppression, etc.)
There's a quip with a lot of truth attributed to Irving Kristol that a Conservative is a Liberal who has been mugged by reality. Experience matters quite a lot. Those altar boys who we read about in scandals are probably not weekly church goers. Among older generations, those of us who have gone to college probably have stable careers, marriages, and homes while those of lesser education have less stability. Experience generated trust is also selective. We hate doctors but will do what our doctor recommends with little challenge.
While trust has diminished over generations, so has the trustworthiness of many institutions, political, financial, media. Older folks and those committed to those institutions as church goers or employees who have not been laid off would judge trustworthiness differently than those who have taken their own hit. A survey which takes aggregate data but still correlates multiple responses with individuals to get patterns, which this one does, will miss the experience component.
"While trust has diminished over generations, so has the trustworthiness of many institutions, political, financial, media."
Including medical. The *people* working at my local BigHospCorp (which has gobbled up surrounding hospital systems) are, overall, helpful and kind. The system they work through is not. My recent, routine care includes
1) Lab ordered, blood drawn, lab somehow not run.
2) Lab positive, reported to me as negative, delaying basic time-sensitive treatment.
3) Lab run, result not recorded.
These were ordinary labs. For stuff like strep and blood sugar. The consequences of #2 seem a bit small to sue over, but may be lifelong. The other two are even less consequential, but still damage patient trust, reminding patients how little recourse they have when stuff falls through the cracks. As I quoted in my other comment:
"[S]o much of modern life now has this quality: everything works beautifully until it doesn’t, and then the failure is total, opaque, and somehow your fault. The system is designed to appear frictionless... But when something basic breaks, you realize that... The people you reach aren’t empowered to solve the problem. The people empowered to solve the problem can’t be reached. The interface is cheerful; the institution behind it is absent... / ...[E]very system is now optimized, somehow, to prevent responsibility from attaching to any human being."
Thanks for responding. As a retired doc, the snafus of medical care are very well known and taken quite seriously. While they still occur, there are systems put in place by the medical community, often with external carrots and sticks, to make the misadventures less frequent and devastating. That's why we are now asked for our birthdate to affirm our identity from others brought into exams rooms from a cluttered waiting room. We have patient portals where people can access their lab results on their own as a safety net to the dependence on physician review and timely callback. Resident duty hours have become limited from my day when we could work continuously for 36 hours. Major journals starting in 1996 required studies to report the harm that research participants experienced and what the studies do not show as a publication requirement. As Irving Kristol noted, perspective depends on personal experience. Policy depends on a mixture of aggregate experience and consensus.
Cars are safer, roads are safer. In Ryan's world of religion, when the SBC got scandalized, they commissioned an independent investigation and created safeguards. Financial systems could be better. And the people we elect often evade that accountability. And the free for all of social media remains buyer beware.
We can trust Ryan, though. He will tell us when a survey's design reveals what it intends.
Yes, including, as you mention, the patient portal, which does give me new powers as a patient to review my own lab results, notice when results are missing, and so on. Without this power, I likely wouldn't even have known about these recent errors, and might consequently have trusted the system more.
I can extrapolate backwards and infer that error rates as high or higher likely have happened all along in my medical care and – since I'm not special – likely many patients' care, with errors proportionately worse earlier in history when both medical science and record keeping were less developed. I can acknowledge my predicament is an improvement – but it's also the kind of improvement revealing that our earlier, more naive, trust may have been misplaced.
I'm well aware of many ways in which life is getting better, and that even good systems aren't perfect. So's Claire, whom I quoted. Neither of us has nostalgia for some imagined time when "things were better" – when we know, by and large, they weren't. But when we see information undermining our trust in the systems we depend on, we can't unsee it. We get *some* empowerment from that information, but often even greater disillusionment, especially when the information obligates us to new responsibilities while falling short of empowering us to fulfill them.
Collectivism? Nonsense. Liberalism is high-status and orthodox. All the media and corporations expound it and REQUIRE it. If you're in the high-status group you don't need to distrust people because you agree with everything they do and say.
This is part of my sort of grand theory of why the world is a mess right now. Western countries spent the 20th century going all in on individualism and consumerism, letting institutions like churches, traditional family and community structures, reliable jobs, etc, fade away. Now that the post-WWII boom and its wealth creation engine has petered out, it's a miserable all-against-all cutthroat world out there, one that often pits the wealth of Baby Boomers against the desire of Millennials and members of Gen Z to build their own lives and wealth. My theory comes down to the idea that when life got hard for our ancestors, they had things to fall back on: that church community, those communal traditions, that solid job, the support of a tightly knit circle of family and friends. All of those being in decline in the latter half of the 20th century and outright obliterated in the 21st, people have nowhere to turn, and *that* is a dangerous place for people to be: isolated, atomized, exploited, abandoned, cynical.
I listened to an interview with a member of Gen Z discussing politics a few years ago and was taken aback by the outright sociopathy with which they discussed destroying their political enemies. I think you see this from all sides of politics now, with young people leading the aggressive charge against political foes. This is just one symptom of people who feel like they've been thrown to the wolves with no opportunity for what we used to hold up as a good life; the other symptoms show up in all the charts you (and Lyman Stone) show about the immiseration of life outside of any social structure that still has a vestige of community support baked in. I'm sadly convinced that like Derek Thompson has said, this is going to be the "anti-social century".
The effect size (Pillal's Trace? Wilks' Lambda?) on the _difference_ in the response of Millenials (vs the other cohorts) on categorical variable weekly+ attendance has to be pretty big. *I* certainly have no explanation.
Gen Z keeps me up at night. They are so online, so conspiratorial in their thinking, so ignorant of America’s history and founding principles, and yes-untrusting. They will be the undoing of our country if they don’t snap out of their brain rot conspiracies and addiction to negativity and victimhood.
Would love to see screen time as a variable, too.
Me, too, TD.
But I'm 100% sure that if you asked the average American to assess their screen time over the last week, their responses would widely diverge from the actual number.
Not me! I have zero screen time this week!
Just a speculation on trust in conservative, church-going Zoomers and in liberal older adults: As you note, trust and believing in collective goals run hand-in-hand. For older cohorts, collective goals like social security, unionization, and welfare are liberal policy goals. Zoomers have never lived in that world, though--their whole lives have been in a neoliberal corporatist world where regulation of industry for the common good, or taxes to pay for common services, were not seen as liberal policy goals. Instead, 21st century liberal policy goals are increasingly atomized, to very specific groups or identities. (It's hard to imagine a more individualist policy goal than getting someone's bespoke pronouns correct, for instance.)
On the other hand, conservatives--and especially religious conservatives--are offering collectivist policies: You should be part of a faith group, and a community, with codified roles in the community that may be separated by sex. You are being asked to subjugate your individual desires to the good of the community, just like liberals arguing for higher taxes to pay for social services were asking you to do in the past. If I'm a collectivist Zoomer, where I go is to a conservative church; there isn't a collectivist liberal place for me to go. This would explain the high trust in the conservative church-attending Gen Z folks.
Of all of the comments people have postulated, this one makes the most sense. Liberalism's goals 30 years ago were nothing like liberalism today. Gen Z. liberals are different from their parents in profound ways.
I'll add that conversative goals 30 years ago are nothing like the conservatives today.
Yeah, I agree that probably the different generations are thinking of different things when they identify as "liberal" or "conservative." I wonder if that has some bearing on the opposite income effects as well. Like maybe a person in their 20s who's already making a high income is doing it through some kind of personal hustle -- crypto, becoming an influencer, whatever -- whereas older high-income people probably went through the more conventional route of working up through an organization.
"Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?"
You've gotta go with the question as posed, but this question doesn't measure social trust by itself. Instead, it asks the respondent which to prioritize, social trust or risk aversion?
Risk aversion is compatible with believing that most people *can* be trusted. That most people aren't out to get you, are likely just trying to do their jobs the best they know how, is not at all incompatible with believing that getting by yourself takes extra caution. Personal responsibility means prioritizing what you can control (the precautions *you* can take), not what you can't (others' trustworthiness). Not putting the onus on others to be trustworthy is arguably more responsible.
Studies suggest that predatory behavior more likely results from a few people being very predatory than from more people being moderately predatory. If so, that most people really *can* be trusted is a bad proxy for predatory risk. More often, predation isn't even the problem. As Ogden Nash said, "It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin, / That lays eggs under your skin."
https://allpoetry.com/Portrait-of-the-Artist-as-a-Prematurely-Old-Man
The poem focuses on our own omissions, not others'. But not knowing where to turn upon others' "sins of omission", where no-one intended us grief but let it come our way, anyhow, seems on the rise:
"[S]o much of modern life now has this quality: everything works beautifully until it doesn’t, and then the failure is total, opaque, and somehow your fault. The system is designed to appear frictionless... But when something basic breaks, you realize that... The people you reach aren’t empowered to solve the problem. The people empowered to solve the problem can’t be reached. The interface is cheerful; the institution behind it is absent... / ...[E]very system is now optimized, somehow, to prevent responsibility from attaching to any human being."
https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/the-router-and-the-abyss
If so, that you can't be too careful around others is increasingly not their fault – but would still mean you can't be too careful.
Look at who has dominated politics during their adult years and you don't have to wonder.
My (hair-brained) theory is that this is late-stage capitalism coming to roost. The increased-margin-of-quarterly-profit motive is everywhere and undermines trust.
"Or maybe it’s because they report higher rates of depression and anxiety than the rest of the ideological spectrum?"
Can there be other factors such as the state of the American family? The bedrock of all culture and societies is the home; deficiencies there extrapolate to broader society.
Causality is tough there.
Do young people with divorced parents have a higher rate of depression? Let's just assume that they do for this thought experiment.
Why, though?
Well intact homes tend to have all kinds of factors working in their favor. Parents with higher levels of education, higher income, almost certainly a lower rate of mental illness in the parents.
They likely got married a bit later in life. Had children after they were married, again, later in life.
And you also know what has an impact on things like age of first marriage, number of children, likelihood of marriage?
Political ideology and religious affiliation.
So if we say that kids who grew up in two parent households have lower rates of depression, is that factually true? Sure. It's more than likely the case.
The causal arrows go a dozen ways from each variable.
As a member of Gen X myself, my recollection was that it was cool for young adults to be cynical in the 1990s, so the change there might just reflect the loss of interest in being cool with age and perhaps a realization that too much cynicism is a problem for society?
Re: the different effects of education on the generations, might the difference be in the nature of the education received? The "tenured radicals" phenomenon isn't new, but it does seem like it's gotten more prevalent with time, and a lot of the deconstructionist stuff is basically paranoia (everything's really about power games and oppression, etc.)
There's a quip with a lot of truth attributed to Irving Kristol that a Conservative is a Liberal who has been mugged by reality. Experience matters quite a lot. Those altar boys who we read about in scandals are probably not weekly church goers. Among older generations, those of us who have gone to college probably have stable careers, marriages, and homes while those of lesser education have less stability. Experience generated trust is also selective. We hate doctors but will do what our doctor recommends with little challenge.
While trust has diminished over generations, so has the trustworthiness of many institutions, political, financial, media. Older folks and those committed to those institutions as church goers or employees who have not been laid off would judge trustworthiness differently than those who have taken their own hit. A survey which takes aggregate data but still correlates multiple responses with individuals to get patterns, which this one does, will miss the experience component.
"While trust has diminished over generations, so has the trustworthiness of many institutions, political, financial, media."
Including medical. The *people* working at my local BigHospCorp (which has gobbled up surrounding hospital systems) are, overall, helpful and kind. The system they work through is not. My recent, routine care includes
1) Lab ordered, blood drawn, lab somehow not run.
2) Lab positive, reported to me as negative, delaying basic time-sensitive treatment.
3) Lab run, result not recorded.
These were ordinary labs. For stuff like strep and blood sugar. The consequences of #2 seem a bit small to sue over, but may be lifelong. The other two are even less consequential, but still damage patient trust, reminding patients how little recourse they have when stuff falls through the cracks. As I quoted in my other comment:
"[S]o much of modern life now has this quality: everything works beautifully until it doesn’t, and then the failure is total, opaque, and somehow your fault. The system is designed to appear frictionless... But when something basic breaks, you realize that... The people you reach aren’t empowered to solve the problem. The people empowered to solve the problem can’t be reached. The interface is cheerful; the institution behind it is absent... / ...[E]very system is now optimized, somehow, to prevent responsibility from attaching to any human being."
https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/the-router-and-the-abyss
If so, that you can't be too careful around others is increasingly not their fault – but would still mean you can't be too careful.
Thanks for responding. As a retired doc, the snafus of medical care are very well known and taken quite seriously. While they still occur, there are systems put in place by the medical community, often with external carrots and sticks, to make the misadventures less frequent and devastating. That's why we are now asked for our birthdate to affirm our identity from others brought into exams rooms from a cluttered waiting room. We have patient portals where people can access their lab results on their own as a safety net to the dependence on physician review and timely callback. Resident duty hours have become limited from my day when we could work continuously for 36 hours. Major journals starting in 1996 required studies to report the harm that research participants experienced and what the studies do not show as a publication requirement. As Irving Kristol noted, perspective depends on personal experience. Policy depends on a mixture of aggregate experience and consensus.
Cars are safer, roads are safer. In Ryan's world of religion, when the SBC got scandalized, they commissioned an independent investigation and created safeguards. Financial systems could be better. And the people we elect often evade that accountability. And the free for all of social media remains buyer beware.
We can trust Ryan, though. He will tell us when a survey's design reveals what it intends.
"... there are systems put in place..."
Yes, including, as you mention, the patient portal, which does give me new powers as a patient to review my own lab results, notice when results are missing, and so on. Without this power, I likely wouldn't even have known about these recent errors, and might consequently have trusted the system more.
I can extrapolate backwards and infer that error rates as high or higher likely have happened all along in my medical care and – since I'm not special – likely many patients' care, with errors proportionately worse earlier in history when both medical science and record keeping were less developed. I can acknowledge my predicament is an improvement – but it's also the kind of improvement revealing that our earlier, more naive, trust may have been misplaced.
I'm well aware of many ways in which life is getting better, and that even good systems aren't perfect. So's Claire, whom I quoted. Neither of us has nostalgia for some imagined time when "things were better" – when we know, by and large, they weren't. But when we see information undermining our trust in the systems we depend on, we can't unsee it. We get *some* empowerment from that information, but often even greater disillusionment, especially when the information obligates us to new responsibilities while falling short of empowering us to fulfill them.
Collectivism? Nonsense. Liberalism is high-status and orthodox. All the media and corporations expound it and REQUIRE it. If you're in the high-status group you don't need to distrust people because you agree with everything they do and say.
This is fascinating.
Perhaps seeing the nation’s voters twice prefer an openly corrupt President is dispiriting?
This is part of my sort of grand theory of why the world is a mess right now. Western countries spent the 20th century going all in on individualism and consumerism, letting institutions like churches, traditional family and community structures, reliable jobs, etc, fade away. Now that the post-WWII boom and its wealth creation engine has petered out, it's a miserable all-against-all cutthroat world out there, one that often pits the wealth of Baby Boomers against the desire of Millennials and members of Gen Z to build their own lives and wealth. My theory comes down to the idea that when life got hard for our ancestors, they had things to fall back on: that church community, those communal traditions, that solid job, the support of a tightly knit circle of family and friends. All of those being in decline in the latter half of the 20th century and outright obliterated in the 21st, people have nowhere to turn, and *that* is a dangerous place for people to be: isolated, atomized, exploited, abandoned, cynical.
I listened to an interview with a member of Gen Z discussing politics a few years ago and was taken aback by the outright sociopathy with which they discussed destroying their political enemies. I think you see this from all sides of politics now, with young people leading the aggressive charge against political foes. This is just one symptom of people who feel like they've been thrown to the wolves with no opportunity for what we used to hold up as a good life; the other symptoms show up in all the charts you (and Lyman Stone) show about the immiseration of life outside of any social structure that still has a vestige of community support baked in. I'm sadly convinced that like Derek Thompson has said, this is going to be the "anti-social century".
The effect size (Pillal's Trace? Wilks' Lambda?) on the _difference_ in the response of Millenials (vs the other cohorts) on categorical variable weekly+ attendance has to be pretty big. *I* certainly have no explanation.
I find it a little hard to be trusting when likely a large percentage of their time is spent behind a screen and socially isolated.
Gen Z keeps me up at night. They are so online, so conspiratorial in their thinking, so ignorant of America’s history and founding principles, and yes-untrusting. They will be the undoing of our country if they don’t snap out of their brain rot conspiracies and addiction to negativity and victimhood.