Investigating Levels of Interpersonal Trust around the World: Relational and Ecocultural Contexts Matter

Past cross-cultural research has established that levels of stranger trust are higher in individualistic cultures than collectivistic cultures. We aim to examine whether this cross-cultural difference applies to trusting closer partners such as family members and acquaintances. Study 1 was a meta-analysis involving 5 Anglo countries and 6 Confucian Asian countries (N = 31,507); Study 2, an international survey involving Japan, China, and the US (N = 407); Study 3, an international survey involving 77 societies around the world (N = 158,120); and Study 4, a national survey across 28 provinces within China (N = 9,135). Across these four studies, we replicated past findings that people from individualistic cultures trusted unfamiliar others more than those from collectivistic cultures at both the individual level (Study 2) and the society level (Studies 1, 3, and 4). By contrast, we found that trust in family members was higher in more collectivistic countries across the globe (Study 3), but such differences in trusting close partners were not substantial in cross-cultural comparisons at a smaller scale (Study 1, 2, and 4). Additional societal-level, ecocultural analyses revealed that global or regional differences in individualistic vs. collectivistic ecocultural context more related to societal differences in stranger trust and acquaintance trust than differences in family trust and kin trust (Studies 3 and 4). Taken together, these results suggested that a) both relational and ecocultural contexts constrain interpersonal trust, and b) trusting close partners emerges more pan-culturally than trusting non-close partners.

Keywords: trust, social distance, cross-national differences, individualism-collectivism, ecocultural analysis