Three Essays on Race and Trust in the United States

Abstract

Social science research has found that the benefits of social trust and related concepts like social capital and collective efficacy accrue to individuals, communities, and nations. Studies have linked social trust to economic growth, democratic governance, lower rates of community violence, positive health outcomes, and trustworthy behavior. Because social trust is thought to be beneficial to society, social scientists have expressed concern about two disconcerting patterns. First, Black Americans report relatively low levels of social trust. Second, social trust is on the decline in the United States, particularly among white Americans. These two patterns of distrust could exacerbate existing racial inequalities while making it more difficult to solve challenging collective action problems related to racial and economic inequality, police reform, and immigration. Across three empirical studies, I investigate how individual experience and social context have contributed to racial differences in trust and declining trust.

The first study focuses specifically on how discrimination in interpersonal interactions and institutional settings contributes to racial differences in trust. Findings reveal that personal experience with discrimination contributes modestly to racial differences in trust. In fact, the negative association between discrimination and generalized trust appears strongest for white adults. These findings suggest that understanding distrust requires a richer conceptual framework that moves beyond personal experience. I argue that the theory of systemic racism provides a framework for understanding distrust as a consequence of countervailing efforts to uphold and contest the racial hierarchy.

Using survey data for Chicago, the second study seeks to understand how three contextual factors—neighborhood disadvantage, income inequality, and racial diversity—relate to trust in other people, neighbors, and the police. These three social factors figure prominently in debates over declining trust in the United States. What is often left unsaid, particularly in the context of inequality and diversity, is that the real motivating interest is in understanding social change. For example, it is not diversity but rather the process of diversification, brought on by immigration and population dynamics, fueling concern over social cohesion. In this study, I show that past levels of and changes in neighborhood social context are in many cases stronger predictors of trust than are contemporaneous conditions emphasized in earlier work. However, the relationship between social context and trust is structured by race where disadvantage and inequality are more powerful predictors of distrust for Black and Hispanic adults, while outgroup share is more strongly associated with distrust for white adults.

The final study specifically focuses on the controversial claim that increasing national diversity has contributed to declining social trust. I study this relationship by linking repeated cross-sectional survey responses with three decades of data on county racial diversity. In this study, I seek to distinguish true diversity effects from out-group threat. I find evidence of a modest negative association with trust for both diversity and, in the case of white respondents, segregation. There is little support for group threat theory and even suggestive evidence that trust increases with a rising share of the Black population for white people reporting low levels of prejudice.

Collectively, these studies show that the problem of distrust defies straightforward explanations. Because distrust appears to run deeper than individual experience or commonly cited structural conditions, I argue that future work should consider explicit challenges to the racial hierarchy as a potential source of distrust in society.