Between 1972 and 2012, Americans became significantly less trusting of each other and less confident in large institutions, such as the news media, business, religious organizations, the medical establishment, Congress, and the presidency. Levels of trust and confidence, key indicators of social capital, reached all-time or near-all-time lows in 2012 in the nationally representative General Social Survey of adults (1972–2012; N = 37,493) and the nationally representative Monitoring the Future survey of 12th graders (1976–2012; N = 101,633). Hierarchical modeling analyses separating the effects of time period, generation, and age show that this decline in social capital is primarily a time-period effect. Confidence in institutions is also influenced by generation, with Baby Boomers lowest. Trust was lowest when income inequality was high, and confidence in institutions was lowest when poverty rates were high. The prediction of a sustained revival in social capital after 2001 seems to have been premature.
BallietD.Van LangeP. A. M. (2013). Trust, conflict, and cooperation: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 139, 1090–1112.
2.
BarefootJ. C.MaynardK. E.BeckhamJ. C.BrummettB. H.HookerK.SieglerE. C. (1998). Trust, health, and longevity. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 21, 517–526.
3.
BeckerG. S. (1964). Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with special reference to education. New York, NY: National Bureau of Economic Research.
4.
BourdieuP. (1983). Forms of capital. In RichardsonJ. G. (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York, NY: Greenwood Press.
5.
BrehmJ.RahnW. (1997). Individual-level evidence for the causes and consequences of social capital. American Journal of Political Science, 41, 999–1023.
6.
ChernyshenkoO. S.StarkS.ChanK.-Y.DrasgowF.WilliamsB. (2001). Fitting item response theory models to two personality inventories: Issues and insights. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 36, 523–562.
7.
ColemanJ. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, S95–S120.
8.
DinesenP. T. (2012). Does generalized (dis)trust travel? Examining the impact of cultural heritage and destination-country environment on trust of immigrants. Political Psychology, 33, 495–511.
9.
DrasgowF.LevineM. V.TsienS.WilliamsB. A.MeadA. D. (1995). Fitting polytomous item response theory models to multiple-choice tests. Applied Psychological Measurement, 19, 143–165.
10.
FukuyamaF. (1995). Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
11.
GentileB.TwengeJ. M.CampbellW. K. (2010). Birth cohort differences in self-esteem, 1988–2008: A cross-temporal meta-analysis. Review of General Psychology, 14, 261–268.
12.
GheorghiuM. A.VignolesV. L.SmithP. B. (2009). Beyond the United States and Japan: Testing Yomagishi’s emancipation theory of trust across 31 nations. Social Psychology Quarterly, 72, 365–383.
13.
GreenfieldP. M. (2009). Linking social change and developmental change: Shifting pathways of human development. Developmental Psychology, 45, 401–408.
14.
GreenfieldP. M. (2013). The changing psychology of culture from 1800 to 2000. Psychological Science, 24, 1722–1731.
LaddE. C. (1996). The data just don’t show erosion of America’s social capital. Public Perspective, 7, 1–30.
17.
O’NeillM. (2009). Public confidence in charitable nonprofits. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 38, 237–269.
18.
PaxtonP. (1999). Is social capital declining in the United States? A multiple indicators analysis. American Journal of Sociology, 105, 88–127.
19.
PharrS. J.PutnamR. D.DaltonR. J. (2000). A quarter-century of declining confidence. Journal of Democracy, 11, 5–25.
20.
PickettK.WilkinsonR. (2010). The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press.
21.
PutnamR. D. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6, 65–78.
22.
PutnamR. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
23.
PutnamR. D. (2007). E pluribus unum: Diversity and community in the twenty-first century. Scandinavian Political Studies, 30, 137–174.
24.
RahnW. M.TransueJ. E. (1998). Social trust and value change: The decline of social capital in American youth, 1976–1995. Political Psychology, 19, 545–565.
25.
RobinsonR. V.JacksonE. F. (2001). Is trust in others declining in America? An age-period-cohort analysis. Social Science Research, 30, 117–145.
26.
RosenbergM. (1956). Misanthropy and political ideology. American Sociological Review, 21, 690–695.
27.
RothsteinB.UslanerE. (2005). All for all: Equality, corruption, and social trust. World Politics, 58, 41–72.
28.
RotterJ. B. (1967). A new scale for the measurement of interpersonal trust. Journal of Personality, 35, 651–665.
SanderT. H.PutnamR. D. (2010). Still bowling alone? The post-9/11 split. Journal of Democracy, 21, 9–16.
31.
SchaieK. W. (1965). A general model for the study of developmental problems. Psychological Bulletin, 64, 92–107.
32.
SchwadelP.StoutM. (2012). Age, period, and cohort effects on social capital. Social Forces, 91, 233–252.
33.
SmithT. W. (1981). Can we have confidence in confidence? Revisited. In JohnstonD. F. (Ed.), Measurement of subjective phenomena (pp. 119–189). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce.
TwengeJ. M.CampbellW. K.FreemanE. C. (2012). Generational differences in young adults’ life goals, concern for others, and civic orientation, 1966–2009. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102, 1045–1062.
36.
TwengeJ. M.CampbellW. K.GentileB. (2012). Generational increases in agentic self-evaluations among American college students, 1966–2009. Self and Identity, 11, 409–427.
37.
UslanerE. M. (2002). The moral foundations of trust. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
38.
Van LangeP. A. M.De BruinE. M. N.OttenW.JoiremanJ. A. (1997). Development of prosocial, individualistic, and competitive orientations: Theory and preliminary evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 733–746.
39.
WilkinsonR. G.PickettK. E. (2006). Income inequality and population health: A review and explanation of the evidence. Social Science & Medicine, 62, 1768–1784.
40.
YangY. (2008). Social inequalities in happiness in the United States, 1972 to 2004: An age-period-cohort analysis. American Sociological Review, 73, 204–226.
41.
YangY.LandK. C. (2006). A mixed models approach to the age-period-cohort analysis of repeated cross-section surveys, with an application to data on trends in verbal test scores. Sociological Methodology, 36, 75–97.
42.
ZickarM. J. (1998). Modeling item-level data with item response theory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 104–109.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
