This week’s reader question is whether the apparent increase in scams, con artists and general dishonesty is making us less trusting. Great question.
It’s hard to know what the impact of perceptions of increasing dishonesty is right now. Two reasons – it requires some pretty dynamic, large-scale longitudinal research, plus how do we disentangle potential scam effects from things that might also affect trust? For example, it’s possible that other events, such as the 2022 Parliament protests, could also affect how much people trust our government.
The OECD Trust Survey in 2021 canvassed trust indicators in New Zealand and another 21 OECD countries. It states “New Zealand is a high trust country”. It may not “feel” high trust that 55% of us trust public services, or that 47% trust Parliament, but we’re an average of about 5% more trusting than the OECD average for public service, and 8% more trusting for Parliament. We are consistently in the mid-top half of OECD nations.
This report also draws from other data sources, such as Stats NZ’s New Zealand General Social Survey and the World Values Survey.
According to the WVS, we generally trust our constabulary – from 80% in 1998, down to 72% in 2004, then consistently climbing to more than 85% in the most recent 2020 iteration. There’s a similar, but lower, pattern for general interpersonal trust in the people around us; rising from 50% in 1998 to just under 60% in 2020.
NZ General Social Survey figures are cited from between 2015 and 2021, and are a little more variable. Trust in police tracks the WVS, but shows a dip or plateau from 2020 to 2021. The NZGSS is about 10% more optimistic about interpersonal trust but, again, there’s a bit of a dip in 2021. The really interesting one is trust in Parliament – a big leap from 40% (in 2019) to 55% in 2021. Why?
The OECD report spends quite a few words on the governmental Covid response, stating, “New Zealand had one of the most effective responses to the Covid-19 pandemic of any nation.” High praise and, again, why? It emphasises that New Zealand was one of a handful of nations in which excess mortality dropped during 2020 to 2022. “Excess mortality” is where more deaths occur during a particular time or year than we usually find.
The United States saw an increase of more than 15% in excess mortality, meaning there were more than 15% more deaths in that country than in an average year. At the same time, our excess mortality was around minus 4%. Life expectancy increased in New Zealand during the Covid-19 peak.
It goes on to suggest that “some of the most stringent public health measures in the world” allowed us to return to something closer to normality earlier than other nations. From having some of the most stringent measures in 2020, we had less restrictive measures than other countries by the end of 2021. Norway, on the other hand, was more relaxed in 2020 but much more draconian into 2022.
Of course, many of these data sources don’t include 2022 or 2023, so it is possible we’re much more cynical now than in 2021.
A more interesting point, I think, is that for most of us, the default setting is to trust the intentions of those we deal with. Scamming is what evolutionary scholars might call a cheater-defector strategy – you cheat folks until you get a reputation as a cheater and then you “defect” – you move on to another place which doesn’t know you’re a cheater and you cheat there until you get caught, and so on.
It is something of an irony that if we didn’t tend to automatically trust folks, those dirty cheaters wouldn’t be able to con us.
