Generalized trust

In most social surveys, the question “Do you think most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” is often used as an indicator of generalized trust (Nieminen et al. 2008). The World Values Surveys of 1990 and 1995–1997 (see Inglehart 1997) used this question alone as a measure of generalized trust. Several recent studies have continued to use this single question to examine social trust or trust in others (e.g., Jen et al. 2010; Helliwell et al. 2014; Sarracino and Mikucka 2016; Soukiazis and Ramos 2016; Hamamura et al. 2017).

Since 1972, the U.S. General Social Surveys, in addition to the World Values Survey’s single question to measure generalized trust, have used another question: “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” Subsequently, the European Social Surveys (Reeskens and Hooghe 2008) also added one more question to the scale used by the U.S. General Social Surveys to measure generalized trust: “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful or that they are mostly looking out for themselves?” Like the European Social Surveys in recent years, the ASEAN Barometer Survey 2009 (Tan and Tambyah 2013) also used three questions to measure generalized trust: “Generally, do you think most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” “Do you think that people generally try to be helpful or that they are mostly looking out for themselves?” The responses to the three questions were coded on a 2-point scale: “1 = most people can be trusted,” “2 = you can’t be too careful in dealing with people,” “1 = most people would try to be fair,” “2 = most people would try to take advantage of me,” “1 = people generally try to be helpful,” and “2 = people mostly look out for themselves.”

Recent studies examining the impact of social capital on subjective wellbeing have used these three questions to measure generalized trust with good scale reliability (e.g., Portela et al. 2013; Tan and Tambyah 2013; Bartolini et al. 2015). In the 2016 QOL Survey, generalized trust was thus measured via the three questions mentioned earlier in order to provide a more precise and symmetrical treatment on the trust concept and to facilitate comparative analyses.

How trusting are Singaporeans?

In response to the first generalized trust question of whether people can generally be trusted, Table 7.1a shows that more than half (53.9 percent) of Singaporeans thought that one really needs to be wary of others, with only about a third (37.4 percent) expressing a willingness to trust others. Some Singaporeans (8.7 percent) did not really have an answer to the issue. Using data from the 2009 ASEAN Barometer Survey, Tan and Tambyah (2013) also found that slightly less than a third (31.4 percent) of Singaporeans agreed that others could be trusted.

More than half (54.6 percent) of Singaporeans considered that most people would try to be fair, with about a quarter (27.5 percent) thinking that others would try to take advantage of them (see Table 7.1b). It is interesting to note that a high percentage (17.8 percent) of Singaporeans did not have an opinion on this issue. In the 2009 ASEAN Barometer Survey, a higher percentage of Singaporeans (70.4 percent) agreed that most people would try to be fair (Tan and Tambyah 2013).

Less than half (49.6 percent) of Singaporeans thought others could be helpful, and a third (39.1 percent) thought people would mostly look out for themselves (see Table 7.1c). One in ten (11.2 percent) Singaporeans had no answer to this question. This pattern of response was also consistent with the response in the 2009 ASEAN Barometer Survey which found less than half (47.9 percent) of Singaporeans agreeing that others could be helpful (Tan and Tambyah 2013).

Overall, Singaporeans’ responses to the three trust questions revealed that they were wary of others, did not really think others could be helpful but were willing to concede that most people would try to be fair. Comparing the results of the 2016 QOL Survey and those from the 2009 ASEAN Barometer Survey, Singaporeans’ trust instincts did not seem to have improved over the years. This implies that there is room for improvement in the climate for generalized trust in Singapore.

In Chapter 6, it was mentioned that Singaporeans’ orientation toward Materialism, Eco-orientation and Entrepreneurial Spirit would place Singapore on the Survival dimension of cross-cultural values. Researchers implied that countries having this orientation would most likely have low levels of trust. The aforementioned low level of generalized trust found among Singaporeans seemed to provide evidence for this implication.

We next consider the bivariate analyses of the three trust questions in pairs. As shown in Table 7.2a, the first two pairs of questions (“Generally, do you think people can be trusted, or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” and “Do you think that people generally try to be helpful, or that they mostly look out for themselves?”) were found to be significantly and strongly correlated (χ² = 240.41, df = 1 p<.000, phi coefficient = 0.436). Among Singaporeans who thought that people can be trusted (43 per cent), a large majority (81.6 percent) supported the idea that people generally try to be helpful, while the majority (62.1 percent) of those who thought that one cannot be too careful in dealing with people (57 percent) believed that people generally only look out for themselves. These findings almost mirrored the results in the analysis conducted by Tan and Tambyah (2011) using data on Singapore from the AsiaBarometer 2006 survey. In the 2006 survey, among Singaporeans who thought that people can be trusted (31.6 percent), only slightly more than half (63.8 percent) supported the idea that people generally try to be helpful, while a larger majority (75.3 percent) of those who thought that one cannot be too careful in dealing with people (68.4 percent) believed that people generally only look out for themselves (Tan and Tambyah 2011).

For the second pair of questions (“Generally, do you think people can be trusted, or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” and “Do you think that most people would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance, or would they try to be fair?”), Table 7.2b shows that these were also significantly and strongly correlated (χ² = 238.05, df = 1, p<.000, phi coefficient = 0.449). Among Singaporeans who thought that people can be trusted (44.5 percent), they showed overwhelming support (90.1 percent) for the idea that people generally try to be fair, while about half (52.5 percent) of those who thought that one cannot be too careful in dealing with people (55.5 percent) believed that people generally will try to take advantage of others.

For the third pair of questions (“Do you think that most people would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance, or would they try to be fair?” and “Do you think that people generally try to be helpful, or that they mostly look out for themselves?”), the correlations were the strongest (χ² = 315.39, df = 1 p<.000, phi coefficient = 0.519) as shown in Table 7.2c. About three-quarters (76 percent) of the Singaporeans who believed that most people would try to be fair (66.5 percent) also believed that people are generally helpful, while about three-quarters (78.3 percent) of those who believed that people generally will try to take advantage of others (33.5 percent) also believed that people tend to look out for themselves.

Hence, it seemed that there was a consistent pattern in terms of generalized trust among Singaporeans. Although they were not the majority, Singaporeans who believed that others could be trusted tended to support the idea that others could be helpful, whereas the majority who were wary of others tended to believe that people would take advantage of others. Meanwhile, the majority of Singaporeans who believed that people would try to be fair also believed others would try to be helpful, while the minority who thought others would try to take advantage of them overwhelmingly thought people only look out for themselves.

Who are the trusting Singaporeans?

We examined whether there were any demographic differences that could explain Singaporeans’ generalized trust, defined in terms of responses to the three questions in the generalized trust scale. The selected demographic variables are age, education, gender, monthly household income and marital status.

As can be seen from Table 7.3, male Singaporeans who were higher educated were the most willing to think that people can be trusted (question 1), while Singaporeans who were married, older (65 years and above) and more educated were the most likely to think others can be fair. Finally, Singaporeans who are married, older (65 years and above), higher educated and earning medium-high incomes were most likely to think that others can be helpful. Thus it appears that age, education (and, relatedly, income) and marriage do enhance Singaporeans’ sense of generalized trust. In a study based on the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey, Tan and Tambyah (2011) also found that Singaporeans who were more educated, married and with higher incomes were also more trusting. In the study based on the 2009 ASEAN Barometer Survey, Tan and Tambyah (2013) found that, in Singapore, “the higher the level of education and income, the higher the trusting propensity.” The positive association between education and generalized trust for Singaporeans was consistent with what other researchers have found (Knack and Keefer 1997; Newton and Norris 2000; Putnam 2000; Uslaner 2002; Marschall and Stolle 2004; Tokuda and Inoguchi 2010). On the other hand, others have found a negative association between income and trust (Stolle 1998; Delhey and Newton 2005), while Delhey and Newton (2002) found that education was not closely associated with social trust. Our finding on marital status was also consistent with what Nieminen et al. (2008) found in Finland that trust was greater among married people than those with other marital statuses. The nonsignificant association between age and the trust question of “Generally, do you think people can be trusted, or do you think that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” that we found for Singaporeans was consistent with studies that adopted this single item measure of social trust (e.g., Delhey and Newton 2002). The presence of a significant gender effect on only one out of three generalized trust questions was not surprising, given that other studies have produced mixed evidence for the role of gender (e.g., Stolle 1998; Patterson 1999; Delhey and Newton 2002; Nieminen et al. 2008; Schyns and Koop 2010).

Does generalized trust contribute toward Singaporeans’ subjective wellbeing?

A review of the literature on the impact of social trust on subjective wellbeing shows that happiness, self-reported health and life satisfaction were three common indicators of subjective wellbeing (e.g., Tokuda et al. 2010; Portela et al. 2013; Churchill and Mishra 2017; Hamamura et al. 2017; Jen et al. 2010; Growiec and Growiec 2014; Bartolini et al. 2015). Hence, we examined the impact of generalized trust on Singaporeans’ subjective wellbeing using the wellbeing indicators as follows:

• 1 Happiness via the question, “All things considered, would you say that you are happy these days?” with answers ranging from “1 = very unhappy” to “5 = very happy”
• 2 Health via the question “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your health?” with answers ranging from “1 = very dissatisfied” to “6 = very satisfied”
• 3 Life satisfaction via an average of responses to the five-item Satisfaction with Life Scale by Diener et al. (1985)
• 4 Satisfaction with overall quality of life via the question “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your overall quality of life in general?” with answers ranging from “1 = very dissatisfied” to “6 = very satisfied”
• 5 Satisfaction with overall quality of life in Singapore via the question “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your overall quality of life in Singapore?” with answers ranging from “1 = very dissatisfied” to “6 = very satisfied”

The average responses to the three trust questions representing generalized trust were used as the dependent variable in regression analyses, with age, education, gender, household income and marital status as control variables.

Table 7.4 shows that generalized trust had a significant and positive impact on happiness, health and all three measures of life satisfaction. These results were consistent with what other researchers have found. Studies have found that social trust was positively related to happiness (e.g., Tokuda et al. 2010; Portela et al. 2013; Growiec and Growiec 2014; Bartolini et al. 2015; Hamamura et al. 2017), health (e.g., Jen et al. 2010; Hamamura et al. 2017) and life satisfaction (e.g., Portela et al. 2013; Bartolini et al. 2015; Hamamura et al. 2017; Churchill and Mishra 2017).

Hence, generalized trust did contribute to Singaporeans’ subjective wellbeing in terms of their happiness, health and life satisfaction. Since generalized trust is an important component of social policies that encourage the development of social capital, trust thus plays an important role in enhancing Singaporeans’ happiness, health and life satisfaction.

Table 7.4 The impact of generalized trust on happiness, health and life satisfaction

Conclusion

It has been established that the existence and maintenance of interpersonal trust was correlated with lower crime, better health and happiness, enhanced economic development, increased success of schools and their pupils, strengthened political participation and more effective governments (see Freitag 2006). Despite the fact that generalized trust was not high among Singaporeans, some Singaporeans who believed that others could be trusted tended to support the idea that others could be helpful, and the majority of Singaporeans who believed that people would try to be fair also believed that others would try to be helpful. We found that age, education (and, relatedly, income) and marriage enhanced Singaporeans’ sense of generalized trust. Together with the finding that generalized trust played a significant and positive role in enhancing Singaporeans’ subjective wellbeing, this implies that policies aimed at encouraging the development of social capital through education and programs that encourage social interactions would be helpful. In examining the pre- and postcrisis experience of 30 European countries between the years 2002 and 2010, researchers have found that communities and nations with better social capital and trust are able to respond more effectively to crisis and transitions (Helliwell et al. 2014). This further underscores the importance of building up generalized trust and social capital in Singapore, which is an open economy and a small country vulnerable to events happening in other parts of the world.