Don't Trust Anyone Over ... 3?

A recent survey got a lot of attention. It found that, quite simply, we're a lot less trusting than we used to be. Not less trusting of government or the media. That's a given. No, we're a lot less trusting -- of each other.

Here's one version of the story and a bit of it below:

These days, only one-third of Americans say most people can be trusted. Half felt that way in 1972, when the General Social Survey first asked the question.

Forty years later, a record high of nearly two-thirds say "you can't be too careful" in dealing with people. These days, only one-third of Americans say most people can be trusted. Half felt that way in 1972, when the General Social Survey first asked the question. 

So what? So, a lot.

Interpersonal trust (or lack thereof) has consequences. One that comes immediately to my mind, because I'm in the middle of doing research on it, is that people who are less trusting of others are more likely to believe in wacky conspiracy theories -- either from the left or the right. Basically, less trust means you're more likely to believe in complex, insane explanations of major events that involve vast conspiracies.

Such trust has been found to be related to better health, better self control, less depression, and makes you more likely to engage in collective actions to solve problems. Read that last one again. Sound important? Like something we could use today? Sound remarkably unlike our present Congress?

So, less trust can lead to less collective action, which can easily be extended to resulting in a less functional democracy.

Trusting Health Information

We get our health information from lots of sources: family and friends, of course, and the ever-present Internet, but also the news, those annoying pharmaceutical TV ads, maybe even from an actual doctor. 

An experiment published last month in Communication Research takes an interesting approach and a huge N (555) to find people "were more likely to take action based on the information sourced from a Web site than from a blog or a personal home page." 

I'd hope so. 

But in mass comm, we often dare to research the obvious.  I'm being a bit snarky because what seems obvious still requires verifying and validating.  Plus, from the abstract, there's more to the study; unfortunately I can view only the abstract.  There's a 3-way interaction but trying to understand one is hard enough without relying on a single sentence from an abstract, so I won't even try.

The authors do write, in discussing the main effect above: "The effect was mediated by perceived level of gatekeeping and perceived information completeness."  This suggests to me somehow perceptions of gatekeeping and completeness may reduce the differences found between a web site and blog/personal pages.  I suspect it has a great deal to do with increasing the perception of source credibility, which often plays a role in persuasion.

Trust: Social Network Sites vs. Local Newspapers

You don't often find survey questions like the one below:

How would you compare news on social-networking sites to news on Web sites operated by your local newspaper – do you trust news on social-networking sites more, less or about the same?

It's an interesting question (entire questionnaire here), an apples and oranges comparison.  A foregone conclusion, you'd think; one is about trivia or people's lives, a bit about news but often about what they had for lunch, the other full of serious news but also horoscopes and sports and stuff like that.  The results?

Trust Social Networking Sites

• More:  4 percent
• Less:   38 percent
• Same:  36 percent
• Dunno: 22 percent

So I take some solace in the notion that only 4 percent trust social networking sites more.  I wonder about the 36 percent who see them as equal (and I pray they don't actually vote).  And I love the 22 percent who either don't know, don't care, or who find the comparison so deeply flawed as not worthy of their valuable time to answer.

Source of survey: First Amendment Center

What People . . . Trust

It's well established that trust in various institutions, including the news media, has seen a steady decline. No news there.

But you might think the wacky, wild west world of the Internet would boast higher credibility ratings than the evil mainstream news media.

Nope.

In the Pew Center's latest big report on media consumption, there's an interesting table on page 60 (of 129 pages!) with the title: Most Online Outlets Not Considered Credible. The highest online ratings go to aggregators like Yahoo or Google, which basically repurpose content from mainstream news media (a fancy way of saying they use other people's stuff rather than do their own news gathering).

The other four online "news" sites don't score quite so well. Asked how often you "believe" these sites, the responses were:

Drudge Report 7%
Salon 7%
Huffington 6%
Slate 4%

Ouch! For comparison, Google got only 13% believability, Yahoo 11%. Most newspapers doubled this, with the Wall Street Journal the highest at 25%.

The Drudge/Salon/Huffington/Slate group does about as well as People Magazine and a little bit better than the National Enquirer.

Says a lot, I think.