Do You Trust People in General?
Not the people you know - the strangers you have not met yet
General trust is your baseline assumption about people you have never met - whether a stranger returning your lost wallet is the likely outcome or a pleasant surprise. It has nothing to do with how much you trust your partner or your closest friends, which depend on years of specific evidence; this is the default setting you carry into every new interaction before any evidence exists at all, and researchers have found it varies enormously between individuals and between countries.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about people in general - strangers, not your specific friends, family or partner.
What it measures
The first bar is Yamagishi's General Trust Scale: your default assumption that people are basically honest and well-intentioned. The other two are related tendencies from the same research area: caution with strangers (staying alert until someone proves themselves) and belief in reciprocity (expecting kindness to be returned). This is about strangers in general, not the close-relationship trust measured by our trust-level test.
Based on: General Trust Scale (Yamagishi & Yamagishi, 1994)
Possible results
General trust
Your default assumption about the honesty of people you do not know.
Caution with strangers
How much you stay alert around people you do not know yet.
Belief in reciprocity
Whether you expect kindness toward strangers to be returned in some form.
Common questions
Is it naive to trust strangers?
Not according to the research - across countries, higher average general trust is linked to more economic cooperation and, in some comparisons, better outcomes for the group as a whole, not just for the trusting individual. It is a real risk for any one person, since trust can be exploited, but at the population level a trusting default is more often an asset than a liability.
Does general trust change with experience, like being scammed?
Yes - general trust is a belief formed from accumulated experience, not a fixed personality trait, and a serious betrayal by a stranger or a run of bad luck can lower it for a while. The research also finds it recovers with new positive experiences, though probably not symmetrically: one bad experience seems to weigh more than one good one.
How is this different from trusting people close to you?
They are largely separate systems. Trusting a close partner or friend, measured by our trust-level test, is built from years of specific evidence about that one person. General trust is the default you apply to someone you know nothing about yet. You can have deep trust in your closest relationships and a cautious default with strangers, or the reverse, and neither combination is unusual.
Sources
- Yamagishi, T., & Yamagishi, M. (1994). Trust and commitment in the United States and Japan. Motivation and Emotion. doi:10.1007/bf02249397
- Yamagishi, T., Cook, K. S., & Watabe, M. (1998). Uncertainty, Trust, and Commitment Formation in the United States and Japan. American Journal of Sociology. doi:10.1086/210005
An honest note The first bar, General Trust, corresponds to Yamagishi's published scale, written here in Quinthea's own wording - scores are not comparable to published norms. The other two bars, caution with strangers and belief in reciprocity, are related tendencies from the same research area, not validated factors of that scale. Average trust levels also differ a great deal between countries and communities for reasons that have little to do with individual character, so read your result against your own context rather than a fixed ideal.
Try one of these next
How Do You React to Good News?
What you say when someone you love comes home with something to celebrate
Are You an Individualist or a Collectivist?
Standing on your own or belonging to a group - and whether you see life as a ladder or a table
How Jealous Are You?
One of the three kinds is a sign of love. The other two are not.