How Stable is Generalized Trust? Internal Migration and the Stability of Trust Among Canadians
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How Stable is Generalized Trust? Internal Migration and the Stability of Trust Among Canadians Cary Wu1 Accepted: 28 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract More trust in unfamiliar others often indicates higher quality of life for individuals and societies. Current litertaure has thus far provided two distintive theories to explain why some people are more trusting than others. A culture theory views trust as a persistent human trait that people learned from socialization early in life. An experiential theory suggests that people constantly update their trust according to changing life experiences in different contexts. To test how stable trust can be, in this article I consider whether the experience of growing up in a low trust place and then migrating to a high trust place would change migrants’ trust and vice versa. In Canada, trust is lower in Quebec. My analyses of data from Statistics Canada’s General Social Surveys show that Quebecers who emigrated to live in other regions of the country continue to show a lower level of trust, and that English Canadians who migrated to live in Quebec remain more trusting than local natives. This is especially true among migrants who migrated as an adult. My additional analysis also shows that Quebec migrants residing in the Atlantic region, closer to Quebec, seem to have more trust than Quebecers residing in the Prairie regions and British Columbia that are overwhelmingly English-speaking and far away from Quebec geographically, which yields some support for the experiential theory of trust. Nonetheless, the overall pattern lends stronger support for the cultural theory that an individual’ trust in others is stabilized early in life. Keywords Generalized trust · Socialization · Migration · Quebec · Canada
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1120 5-020-02484-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Cary Wu [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, York University, 2060 Vari Hall, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
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1 Introduction In dealing with strangers, some think most can be trusted, while others believe that we cannot be too careful. When people trust in strangers, they have an expectation of “goodwill and benign intent” from general others (Yamagishi and Yamagishi 1994:131; Uslaner 2002). This generalized trust, or trust in “a wider circle of unfamiliar others” (Delhey et al. 2011:786), indicates the quality of life of individuals and societies. Indeed, trusting individuals are often better off financially, stand at a higher socioeconomic status, are generally happier, have better health, are more satisfied with their life, and even tend to live longer (e.g., Coleman 1988; Lin 2002; Kawachi and Berkman 2000; Helliwell and Aknin 2018; Miething et al. 2020). Societies with more trust function better, are richer, are safer, are more cohesive, and are more democratic (e.g., Fukuyama 1995; Warren and (Ed.) 1999; A
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