Chapter 8Trust
For a society to be happy most of its citizens must behave in
a trustworthy fashion. It is impossible to measure whether
they do so directly. But, indirectly, we can ask the popula-
tion if they think that other citizens can be trusted. The
standard question that has been asked in many surveys over
many years in many countries is “In general, do you think
that most people can be trusted, or, alternatively that you
can’t be too careful in dealing with people?”
The proportion of people saying Yes to this question var-
ies astonishingly across countries— from 64% in Norway to
5% in Brazil.^6 One might ask, Do answers to these questions
correspond to real differences between countries? Their
validity is confirmed by the “lost wallet” experiment, first
conducted by the Reader’s Digest Europe in 1996. This exper-
iment involved dropping 10 cash- bearing wallets (including
name and address) in each of 20 cities in 14 western Euro-
pean countries, and in each of a dozen US cities. Research-
ers later used these data to validate the question on trust.^7
It turned out that, indeed, the actual frequency of return of
wallets was highly correlated with national average social
trust, as measured in international surveys. In fact in Oslo
all 10 wallets were returned, as they were in Copenhagen.
But, encouragingly, in the whole experiment two thirds of
all the wallets were returned.
The effect of trust revealed in Table 8.1 is truly striking.
A move from zero trust to universal trust raises citizen’s
life- satisfaction by over 1 point (out of 11)— greater than
the effect of finding a job.^8 Trust is important for economic
growth— as countless studies have shown.^9 But here we are
concerned with its direct impact on life- satisfaction, through