The Leap: The Science Of Trust And Why It Matters Part 6

To my first readers, thank you again for the careful read, and my deepest grat.i.tude goes to Josh Christianson, Justin Ewers, Wray Herbert, Caitlin Kelly, David Madland, and Rich Shea. I couldn't have completed this project without the support of an excellent team of research a.s.sistants, transcribers, and stringers, including Jeric Aspillaga, Muhire Enock, Nicholas Forster, Max McClure, Gary Sarli, Chelsea Shover, and Emma Zaballos. A shout-out to Derek Shaffer for the continued nonlegal legal advice. This time, I'll get your name spelled right.

I owe a significant debt to Austin Frerick. Is there an obscure academic study that you can't find? Thank you to Eva Dasher for her excellent research skills. She triple-checked some facts, including the spelling of her own name. There's a long list of people who were interviewed but never made it into the pages of the book, and I also wanted to thank Elissar Andari, Rick Baker, John Bradshaw, Seth Goldman, Donald Green, Rich Hephner, Marc Hoogsteyns, Bert Ingelaere, Margaret Levi, Daniel Olguin, Denis Regan, Jacob Resneck, Lisa Hare Ridgley, Erin Kaplan Rupolo, Mich.e.l.le Self, Jason Shaw, Robert Southerland, William Spaniel, Robb Webb, George Zisiadis, and the many people who sat down with me in Rwanda. Also, my thanks to the many others who provided research and reporting help, including Edward Kaplas, Payal Sampat, Giti Zahedzadeh, and the wonderful folks at Skydive Elsinore.

A special thanks to the folks who made the data a.n.a.lysis possible: Chris Callahan at DDB Worldwide for being so patient with all my requests, and Stephen Goggin for actually wrestling the data down to something manageable.

One of the first articles that I read after I began researching this book was Jeremy Adam Smith and Pamela Paxton's "America's Trust Fall," in The Compa.s.sionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness, and the essay went a long way to shape my thinking. And finally my deepest grat.i.tude to the writers who came before me, including Yochai Benkler, Steven Johnson, Bruce Schneier, James Surowiecki, Michael McCullough, Paul Seabright, Frans de Waal, Patricia Churchland, Michael Tomasello, Tom Tyler, and Martin Nowak. I gleefully had a chance to interview some of you. In other cases, I only managed to read your books seven or eight times. Thank you for paving the way.

The State of Trust How much trust is there in your state? I calculated state-by-state numbers using data from the advertising firm DDB Worldwide Communications Group. I list some of the main findings below. For the full results, please visit my website: ulrichboser.com. The data are the most recent available.

Hall of Honor In some areas, people are far more trusting of others, and in Maine, almost 90 percent of people said that they have some sort of faith in strangers. The most trusting states include New Hamps.h.i.+re, Maine, Utah, Iowa, and Nebraska.

Hall of Shame In some states, almost no one reported completely trusting strangers. The least trusting states include Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Nevada.

Do You Trust People of Another Race?

Some states, like New Mexico, show relatively high rates of trust across races. But that isn't the case everywhere, and the states with the least amount of trust for people of another race include Alabama, Nebraska, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

Trust in Others: The Gender Gap Trust across the male-female divide is low, and nationally just 5 percent of people said that they completely trust people of the opposite gender. The laggard states include Indiana, Alabama, Nevada, and Kansas.

Trusting the Tax Man Trust in government is highest in the states that surround Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and Virginia and Maryland top out the list of states with the most trust in government. In other states, trust in government is much lower, and in Alabama, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming, more than 30 percent of people said that they have no trust at all in government.

Is Walmart a Trusted Brand?

Large companies don't always inspire large amounts of trust. This appears to be particularly true in the West, and Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico have the lowest levels of trust in big business.

Source: DDB Worldwide Communications Group 2008, 2009 Tool Kit for Policymakers There is one audience that may need a special tool kit on how to improve our trust in others: policymakers. Below are some proposals to help the nation rebuild its faith in others-and reinvest in its sagging social capital.

Build up a gra.s.sroots sense of community. Economically, politically, and socially, we've become far too isolated, and today only a minority of elementary schools even teach civics education.

Support housing initiatives that rebuild cities and town in ways that emphasize socially and economically diverse communities.

Invest in community policing, drug courts, and other forms of procedural justice that provide citizens with a greater voice in the legal system.

Expand successful community-building programs and double the number of AmeriCorps partic.i.p.ants.

Resolve the status of the nation's undoc.u.mented immigrants.

Create a more fair and just economy. Economic mobility is low. Inequality is on the rise. We need to do more to build the nation's middle cla.s.s-and hold corporations accountable for their actions. In short, we need to create a trustworthy economic system. I adapted the following recommendations from a recent report by my colleagues at the Center for American Progress: "300 Million Engines of Growth: A Middle-Out Plan for Jobs, Business, and a Growing Economy."1 Pa.s.s comprehensive personal income tax reform.

Raise the minimum wage and index it to half the average wage.

Enact corporate income tax reform.

Stop the worst effects of high-frequency trading through a transactions tax.

Empower individuals through education. When it comes to reforming the nation's school systems, there are some straightforward solutions: Support schools that lengthen the school day.

Reform school funding so that it's both more equitable and effective, and have school dollars follow children instead of programs.

Make college more affordable through Pell Grants.

Allow college students to gain credit for learning outside the cla.s.sroom.2 Improve government performance. It's not enough to build the policies that support our trust in others. We also need to improve the trustworthiness of our governmental inst.i.tutions. This includes: Requiring agencies to create performance and other return-on-investment indicators that allow the public to measure success.

Supporting new technologies that engage the public, improve decision-making, and make government more open and transparent.3 Encouraging the development of Social Impact Bonds, which allow agencies to invest in new approaches to social programs.4

Notes.

Introduction.

1. Piers Paul Read, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (New York: Avon Books, 1974), 14.

2. Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 12.

3. Read, Alive, 24.

4. Parrado, Miracle in the Andes, 53.

5. "Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains," Independent Lens, PBS, May 19, 2009, www.pbs.org/independentlens/stranded/film.html and www.zeitgeistfilms.com/films/stranded/stranded.presskit.pdf. The PBS website contains thoughtful descriptions of the film, including an interview with the filmmaker Gonzalo Arijon, that were particularly helpful to my thinking. I first came across this idea in Stephen Holden's review of the film (Stephen Holden, "When Survival Hinged on Team Spirit," New York Times, October 21, 2008), which also helped shape my thinking.

6. Parrado, Miracle in the Andes, 177.

7. Ibid., 91.

8. "Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains."

9. "Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years: Trends in American Values, 19872012," Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, June 4, 2012, last modified October 18, 2013, www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/06-04-12%20Values%20Release.pdf.

10. "Hospitality Group 2011 Employee Engagement Poll," Maritz Research, accessed July 28, 2013, www.maritz.com/~/media/Files/MaritzDotCom/White%20Papers/ExecutiveSummary_Research.pdf.

11. Jeremy Adam Smith and Pamela Paxton, "America's Trust Fall," The Compa.s.sionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness, eds. Dacher Keltner, Jeremy Adam Smith, and Jason Marsh (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010). In this chapter, Paxton and Smith argue that our best hope for improving social trust is our innate sense of trust, a notion which influenced my thinking.

12. Joseph Henrich et al., "'Economic Man' in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28, no. 6 (December 2005): 795815. I interviewed Henrich, Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Economics at the University of British Columbia, in December 2012.

13. David G. Rand, Joshua D. Greene, and Martin A. Nowak, "Spontaneous Giving and Calculated Greed," Nature 489 (September 2012): 42730. I interviewed Rand, a.s.sistant professor of psychology, economics, cognitive science, at the School of Management at Yale University, in February 2013.

14. See Eva c.o.x, as cited in "Review of the Social Capital Measurement Literature," February 2001, Community Service and Research Centre, University of Queensland, Ipswich, www.uq.edu.au/boilerhouse/goodna-sip/media/section8/soccap.pdf.

15. Yochai Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest (New York: Crown Business, 2011); Bruce Schneier, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive (Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons, 2012); Tom Tyler, Why People Cooperate: The Role of Social Motivations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Also see Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Nowak and Highfield, SuperCooperators (New York: Free Press, 2012); Patricia S. Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); and Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Also helpful and influential to my thinking, although less recent, are f.u.kuyama's Trust and Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), and James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: First Anchor Books, 2004).

16. Jeremy Adam Smith and Pamela Paxton, "America's Trust Fall."