Bummer chart of the day….unless you’re in the military, or a devoted misanthrope. new data from the 2008 General Social Survey shows declining levels of trust for every institution in the United States except for the military and education.
What accounts for this mass scale institutional distrust? I think Robert Putnam has a book that talks about this stuff 🙂 One way of looking at all this is to weep for civil society and make the Putnam argument that this is evidence of a decline in social capital. If we all had each other over for dinner, we’d trust each other more and thus trust the public institutions in which we all have a stake.
I think there’s a lot to this, but I’d offer we also this of this cynicism as increased expectations. As society has become more inured to mass marketing appeals, we’ve become more desirous of more transparency and more effectiveness from our institutions. This increased demand that our institutions produce more can be damaging int that they may not be designed to produce at a high level (I’m looking at you California government). But they can also be the result of a sense of greater agency and efficacy amongst the public in general.
We’ve become a high standards people. That can redound to our benefit if people back up their high expectations with a sense of engagement. I fear that our “high expectations” culture is devolving into a flabby grousing about corrupt politicians without any real intention of addressing the problem.
HT: Social Capital Blog
Comments 2
rkatclu — June 9, 2009
Wasn't there a study where participants had high opinions of the DMV employees they interacted with but low opinion of the DMV as a whole?
Information flow, combined with naivety about how institutions work and an inability to contextualize probably contributes as well.
Information flow - it's harder to keep secrets in the 21st century. Combine that with bad news being more memorable at a basic psychological level (and receiving more media coverage).
Naivety - The world is becoming increasingly complex (informationally, scientifically, economically, administratively), and people are distrustful of the unfamiliar.
Inability to contextualize - More information + more naivety = more anecdotes, stereotypes, and other non-representative perceptions.
Re: Putnam - Trust, as well as suspicion, can be misplaced. I don't think the level of trust/distrust is as problematic as our tendency to trust/distrust for the wrong reasons.
Re: Mass-marketing & expectations - Good point. People expect House M.D. level medical care CSI level forensics, and [while we're at it] CPR and defibrillation almost always works!
Re: government efficiency - I think we need to reform our policymaking process into a three-tier system:
"Ground" - Base cost of x. Implementation takes decades.
"2-Day" - Base cost of 2x. Implementation is fast-tracked, takes several years.
"Overnight" - Base cost of 5x. CHANGE NOW! Massive societal re-engineering in 1 year, or your money back (except for the last part...)
ThickCulture » Cultural Capital & Is My Town Really That Stupid? — June 17, 2009
[...] is nothing new to ThickCulture, with quite a few posts on the topic, including this one by José, Trust is for Suckers. When I teach sociology, I draw heavily on Pierre Bourdieu and have the class get a sense of how [...]