Most of us eat at restaurants, at least occasionally.
When we do, at a minimum, we trust that the food isn’t going to harm us and, on top of that, that it matches the description on the menu. We trust that when a restaurant tells us food is organic, or locally sourced, or premium – it is. More seriously, those of us with dietary requirements or allergies trust that the kitchen is preparing food with due care and everyone trusts that the chef washes their hands after going to the bathroom. Most of these things are hygiene issues (some literally) – we don’t really think about them; they’re part of our minimum expectations. But we trust that they take place.
It's a two-way street: the restaurant itself trusts that we behave ourselves in their premises. They trust (maybe hope?) that we can control our children at the table. When they bring out the food and pour the wine that trust they we aren’t going to run off before paying.
Interactions like those in a restaurant happen millions of times a day in the UK. The country runs on trust. Yet there’s a widespread perception that we live in a low trust environment.
That’s definitely partly true – trust in certain groups, as we’ll explore in this article, is very low. There’s also a sense that trust is in decline. There’s also some evidence of that.
But there are three challenges to conventional narratives about trust that we’ll make here:
Firstly, lower levels of trust aren’t anything new; we’ve been untrusting (particularly of some groups) for a very long time.
Secondly, trust isn’t declining everywhere. In some places, it is remarkably robust.
Thirdly, low trust – or at least, high cynicism – might be a good thing.
This is a longish edition of Slow Futures, but - trust me - it’s worth the read.
Untrusting Times
There’s no doubt that trust in businesses, leaders and media is low.
In our monthly Optimism Index survey, Trajectory gather data on the UK public’s levels of trust in leaders of businesses, politicians and the information they get from social media, newspapers and TV. We’ve done this every month since January 2018 and the data presents a consistent, and fairly bleak, picture.
The chart below presents these indicators as nets – those untrusting are subtracted from those trusting - for each source. Positive numbers (not many of those!) indicate that a plurality of the population are broadly trusting of that source; negative numbers indicator the opposite.
For most of these indicators, trust is negative. For the one that is positive (TV), it is in decline, hurtling towards negativity. For some it is both negative and in decline.
This confirms what we expect to see when we think about trust – these are untrusting times, right? It’s hard to have faith in the media – particularly as the lines between social and traditional sources blur, and we’ve got a particularly bad bunch of politicians and business leaders at the moment. Right?
Not really. It terms of trust, our present moment is pretty standard. When we widen our lens and look back to 2011 (as far back as Trajectory have been collecting social values data in the UK), the picture really isn’t very different.
There are some changes worth highlighting. There was a brief, ‘rally round the flag’ response to the pandemic which saw trust briefly rise. And there does appear to have been a drop in levels of trust in TV over the past few years, which might now be recovering.
Some aspects of our low-trust environment are baked in, unchanging, constant. We don’t trust politicians at the moment, that’s well understood. It’s tempting to think, at the end of one political cycle with the government facing inevitable defeat, and following several years of remarkable political volatility – much of it self-inflicted – that we have a particularly untrustworthy crop of politicians. But that just doesn’t stack up.
Here's another – phenomenally boring – chart, this time using a non-Trajectory source. Ipsos MORI have been asking the public how much they trust various professions and groups of people for forty years. Every year, when they ask about politicians, they get the same result.
We (unsurprisingly) didn’t trust politicians when Boris Johnson (no relation) was lying to parliament and we (unsurprisingly) didn’t trust politicians when Liz Truss was locked in combat with that lettuce.
But slightly more surprisingly, we also didn’t trust politicians when Thatcher was winning a second term in office or when Blair came to power with the largest parliamentary majority we’ve seen since the second world war. As we’ve explored in these pages before: we don’t trust politicians, and we’ve never trusted politicians. That’s not going to change.
Social Trust
There’s another area of trust that is fairly unchanging, and actually pretty positive: how much we trust each other. Since the early 1980s, the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey have asked an important question: generally, can most people be trusted, or should we not be so careful? It’s a useful starting point, because it’s relatively uncomplicated by institutional or organisational scandals, or by the popularity of politicians and parties.
The UK’s trajectory is one of recovering trust. Trust now (or at least, in 2022) is roughly where it was in the early 1980s: 47% to 43% - but there was a sharp dip in the late 1990s, from which it has recovered.
In many other countries, it doesn’t appear to be a variable that changes very much. In countries where social trust is low – like Brazil – it stays low. Brazilian social trust was 7% in 1990. It was also 7% in 2018, the last time the question was asked. In nations where it is high, it has generally stayed high. In China, for example, 60% said that most people could be trusted in the early 1990s, and 65% said the same in 2018.
It's actually quite difficult to find examples of social trust - our reliance on each other - declining over recent decades. Whatever the complications in our information ecosystem, whatever the calibre of our politicians, and whatever the malfeasance of corporations, our faith in each other is, at worst, unchanging.
Negative Good
Is it good to be untrusting? In the UK, the annual Edelman Trust Barometer (which measures trust in media, NGOs, government and business) is reported in grave terms and hushed voices, as if it reveals some terrible new depth to which we’ve plummeted.
To be fair, in the most recent edition, the UK is bottom of the rankings, which is dominated by emerging economies in Asia and the Middle East. China is top of the rankings, with a score that means trust in authorities and businesses is twice as high as in the UK. But… do we want to have the same regard for authorities as those in one-party states?
There’s a benefit to higher levels of trust in some contexts – it would be nice to have greater faith in authorities and leaders to deliver on our behalf. It’s also good to trust the information we receive from the media. But deference is bad, and a dose of cynicism is good. We shouldn’t take what authorities say at face value, we should scrutinise politicians and their promises and we should question power. Social trust is holding up, suggesting that whatever the state of our information ecosystem and post-truth politics, we retain a degree of faith in interpersonal relationships. Trust can probably improve a bit from its current nadir – but we shouldn’t expect, or necessarily want, it to do so too much.
What does this mean?
The low trust environment is here to stay. We can expect a gradual improvement as the UK hauls itself out of the cost of living crisis, but not so much that enduring, long term trends in lower deference and greater consumer scrutiny and expectations are reversed.
Partly this is because in the consumer mindset cynicism is intertwined with savviness. It’s good to compare prices, and shop around. It’s good to be part of loyalty schemes, but bad to be beholden to them.
Consumers ditch those behaviours (or wind them down) not because they suddenly become more trusting of the organisations they shop with, but because they judge that the effort involved is not worth their time. In a cost of living crisis, the effort is worth it. In better times, maybe not. The level of trust doesn’t change.
More than this
Trust is a foundational indicator, and one that Trajectory write about a lot. We collect and analyse data on trust in the UK on a monthly basis and several of our macrotrends concern trust, deference and faith in information. In March 2024 we published a detailed report on the present and future of trust.
All these data and insights are available on our trends platform, Now & Next. Subscribers to Now & Next get access to all of the trends content, as well as our vast and continually updated library of trend data, reports and presentations. More information can be found here.