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🤝 Why you should trust others more

Here we go *takes swig of crispy Sprite*:

🗞️ The headlines: political polarization is increasing! Look at all these conspiracies people believe in! What’s happening with our trust in each other?

🌱 The reality: yeah… so this is actually happening.

Particularly since around 1960 (the Vietnam War), Americans’ trust in institutions (armed forces, police, education, etc.) and in each other has been declining.

Why this is happening? Tbh, we don’t really know for sure, but we’ve got some good guesses —

• On institutional trust, it looks like the big drops happen after big moments where basically the national government lied to us. But not a cute little white lie — we’re talking Pretty Little Liars level.

  • For example, when President LBJ won the election in 1964, he said he wouldn’t send Americans to Vietnam, but then he sent hundreds of thousands of troops. Then after Nixon’s Watergate scandal, and then another drop after the Great Recession, where we were told things were going great.. until they didn’t. People just keep feeling more jaded, understandably! COVID really brought this out with people’s negative outlook on the economy, despite its stellar performance.
    

• On interpersonal trust (between Americans), we’ve seen a continuous decline. Why?
  

  • A cycle of loneliness: as author Robert D. Putnam writes in his book Bowling Alone, Americans are participating (collaborating) less and less in all levels of American society: social clubs, civic organizations, religious attendance, and even marriage rates. This is probably creating a cycle —> we feel more alone because we participate less, and we participate les because we’re feeling more lonely.
    

  • Negativity bias = we like negative news: our human instinct to search for problems where there may not be any was initially a great survival tactic. We used it against big predators and groups of strangers outside of our tribe, but this is REALLY not working out for us today. News networks exploit this, publishing more negative news, because we WANT to see bad news, like car crashes. And this is really making us see the world through an increasingly negative, inaccurate lens.
    

  • Tribal mindset: our animal brain wants us to find and make groups because (1) we’re social beings, so this makes us happy; and (2) we have a higher chance of surviving in a group. This is another human instinct that’s worked out GREAT for us… up until the modern era. Now, most Americans consider themselves addicted to their phones, ergo social media. And we all know how these algorithms want us to spend as much time as possible on these apps. A good way to make sure we keep eyes on the screen is to give us content we like, which is often negative and stuff that makes us feel like part of a group, hating the “other.’

So why should you care about this?

• Trust is happiness: our happiness is basically pre-programmed in our DNA — doesn’t take much to do the trick: get some good sleep, eat good food, exercise, go outside, do good work, AND, especially, form deep, fun connections with friends. This requires trusting others.
  

• Trust is $$ growth: “Researchers have found evidence of a causal relationship, suggesting that trust does indeed drive economic growth and not just correlate with it.” (Our World in Data)

  • This makes sense! Because how can we all get richer and grow the economy if we don’t trust the person on the other side of the transaction?

  • Market-oriented societies have higher levels of trust, a greater aversion to unethical behavior, and are not significantly associated with lower levels of morality.

So go make some friends and read some good news!

Still curious?

• Check out Tim Urban’s book What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies.

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Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.