What really divides us?
Trust, diversity and well-being
I’ve been thinking a lot about “trust” these days. And I’m still reflecting on the recent presentation I gave on trust in institutions at the Victoria Forum and the discussions it sparked. Then, over the weekend, I read a headline claiming that “we don’t trust each other anymore.” The ensuing column was actually more about polarization than trust, but it kept me focused on the topic.
I’m skeptical of narratives about declining trust, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not concerned about “trust gaps” within our society. My argument is that we sometimes forget where these gaps are most likely to be found.
Here are two reasons why my starting point is more optimistic than pessimistic.
First, the proportion of Canadians who have low trust in the people they regularly interact with is very low. We tend to be wary of strangers and politicians. But, otherwise, large majorities of us are at least somewhat trusting of the people around us.
The second reason comes into focus if we zero in more on the question of whether we trust people whose ethnic backgrounds are different than ours. This is a key measure of social cohesion for a country as diverse as Canada.
Not only do most of us express medium or high trust in this case, but there’s hardly any difference in opinion either based on how long our families have lived in Canada (whether we are first-generation, second-generation or third-generation-plus Canadian) or on racial identity.
That’s the good news: we’re an ethnically diverse society, but when it comes to our views on the trustworthiness of people who differ from ourselves, we don’t divide along ethnic lines.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other divisions worth worrying about. Our surveys have started to make use of an index of well-being, which generates a composite score based on answers to seven different questions. These questions cover satisfaction with: standard of living, health, achievement in life, personal relationships, safety, feeling part of the community and future security. The index scores run from zero (lowest well-being) to 10 (highest) (the average score in the survey I’m using today is just above 6).
Guess what the relationship is between well-being and trust?
That’s a pretty steep slope: those will the highest well-being (scores between 8 and 10) are more than twice as likely as those with the lowest (scores of 4 or below) to express high trust in people from a different ethnic background. Clearly, the better off you feel you are in terms of your standard of living, health, relationships, community belonging and so on, the more trusting you are of people who are different from yourself – in this case, ethnically different.
Once people read this observation, few will express surprise; it seems pretty intuitive. And yet our commentaries about trust often end up talking about the impact of negative politicking or of the latest instance of government mismanagement, rather than the more enduring effects of economic and social exclusion. If we want to become a more trusting society, we can start by becoming a more inclusive one.
I’ll end by circling back to political divisions (or polarization). If this is what concerns you, the pattern is the same. Lower trust in political opponents goes hand-in-hand with poorer well-being.
For more about social trust and well-being in Canada, see the reports from the 2022 Toronto and Canada-wide Social Capital Studies.
The data presented here are from the Material Deprivation in Canada 2022-23 Phase 2 Survey, conducted from April 18 to May 17, 2023 with a sample of 4,624 adult Canadians. It was conducted by the Environics Institute for Food Banks Canada/Banques ailimentaires Canada. The author is solely responsible for any errors of presentation or interpretation.
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