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Essays on Civic Renewal

National Commission on Civic Renewal First Plenary Session, continued
Panel Two: Social Trust and Civic Engagement

Contents

Panel One: Americans' Civic and Moral Beliefs
Panel Two: Social Trust and Civic Engagement
Panel Three: Race, Ethnicity, and Civic Cohesion
Panel Four: National Community and Civil Society
Comments from Senior Advisory Council

Panel Two: Social Trust & Civic Engagement

Wendy Rahn
University of Minnesota

Andrew Kohut
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

GALSTON: Now let's proceed directly to our work. It's my duty to inform the elected public officials (one of the co-chairs) and the moral philosophers (the other of the CO-chairs) that we're about to commit some more social science. But it's in a good cause. Having laid a general foundation in discussing the moral beliefs and sensibilities of the American people as we approach the end of the twentieth century in the first panel, we are now going to focus more precisely on issues of social trust and civic engagement. Our two witnesses for the second panel are Wendy Rahn, from the University of Minnesota, and Andrew Kohut, from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

WENDY RAHN: Well, I'm very pleased and honored to be with you today and appreciate the opportunity to share with you some of the things that I've learned in the past three or four years doing research on the origins of social trust and its implications for American life.

I'll begin with really an age-old question, which is, Why do some communities prosper, possess effective political institutions, have law-abiding and satisfied citizens, while other communities are at the other end of these dimensions? A number of answers have been provided to this question over the years. And one famous answer was provided by Alexis de Tocqueville, who's been mentioned this morning already a number of times and is my second favorite political thinker after James Madison.

Tocqueville's answer was, that it wasn't geography, it wasn't circumstance, it wasn't even good laws. Rather, Tocqueville's answer rested on what he called the mores of the American people—by which he meant the habits of thought, the patterns of behavior, that came as second nature to most American citizens.

Now more recently, social scientists have tried to reformulate Tocqueville's insight about the role of mores in sustaining political democracy in the form of a concept known as social capital. As discussed in the literature, social capital refers to networks of engagement with public life, although not necessarily political life, and widespread faith in the essential goodness of one's fellow citizens. And it turns out that across countries and within countries, these two pillars of social capital—networks of civic engagement and widespread social trust—are related to a variety of desirable collective outcomes. It has been with some alarm, then, that scholars and others have viewed recent evidence that one or both of these pillars of social capital are in decline in the United States.

Let me take civic engagement first. There is much scholarly debate about how much decline, if any, there has been in civic engagement. Leaving aside the incontrovertible declines in national voting turnout, it's still not clear yet to us whether we can point to real declines in people's engagement with public life. Various people are working on this question, and I think we will have an answer soon, and some consensus built around whether there has been decline and how much. But at this point, I think the jury is still out.

However, on the second pillar of the social capital concept, widespread social trust, the evidence is simply incontrovertible. We can think of social trust as willingness to give a stranger—a person one does not know—the benefit of the doubt. Will they treat you well? Can you trust them if you need help, for example, or do you have to be really cautious when dealing with people that you have no direct personal experience with?

The decline in social trust has been, as I said, incontrovertible. In 1960, about 55 percent of the American public expressed the sentiment that, "Yeah, I think I can trust most people." But by 1995, in a December poll by the Washington Post, the level of social trust had declined to about 35 percent of the American public. So, a 20 percentage-point decline in 35 years.

Now why is this decline important? Well, for one thing, widespread social trust is an indicator of social cohesion and solidarity. Another reason is that social trust is related to prosperity, as Francis Fukuyama has taught us, because widespread social trust is necessary for beneficial economic transactions between strangers. Another reason that we should be concerned about the decline of social trust is that people who can trust others are themselves more trustworthy. That is, they are less likely to cheat, steal, and lie, and they are more likely to cooperate with others. And finally, there is some evidence, as I have suggested, that people who trust others are more likely to participate in their community's public life.

What do we know about social trust and its decline? Well, this is really two related questions. The first question is, Why at any given point are some people more likely to trust others, while other people are more distrustful? And then the second question is, Why has the average level of trust declined over time? I think it's fair to say that as scholars we know more about the first question than the second, and Andy [Kohut] may be providing some information about the first question. But let me run down some of the things that we know about who is more likely to trust other people.

Whites are likely to trust than blacks and other minorities. People who have experienced crime, or are afraid of crime, are more distrustful. Children who grow up in poverty are more distrustful. People who have experienced a divorce, or lived in a broken home, are more distrustful than people who have had intact, two-parent families. People who distrust their government are also more likely to distrust fellow citizens, and so on. So we've come up with a fair catalogue of indicators that explain why at any given point some people are trusting and others are not.

What about the second question, which is the real question that we're concerned about this morning? It turns out that part of the explanation for decline in general levels of social trust has to do with the rather unsexy demographic process of generational replacement. It turns out that the last two generations—late baby boomers, which is my generation, people born between 1955 and 1964; and the post-boomer generation, also known as Generation X, people born after 1965—come of age with much lower levels of social trust than did previous generations. It's also the case that trust levels among older generations have declined. But our youngest generations are coming of age in national surveys with very low levels of trust—less than 30 percent. And at least in my evidence, there is no appreciable increase over time in levels of trust among these two generations. That begs the question, Why are these younger generations less trustful?

Well, I've been doing work in recent weeks with a data set that has been collected on American high school seniors since the mid-1970s. It's known as the Monitoring the Future project. Its primary purpose is to collect data on drug use, but it also contains a number of interesting questions, including questions about social trust. So what I've done is try to look at levels of social trust among American high school seniors, whether it's declined, and what may explain the decline.

And, interestingly enough, the decline in social trust among high school seniors mirrors the decline in the general population. In 1976 only 37 percent of American high school seniors said that you can't trust other people. By 1994, the last year of the data set I have, 57 percent gave the distrusting response—a 20 percentage-point increase in less than 20 years.

What explains this deterioration in levels of social trust among American high school seniors? Here I'm actually going to disagree to some extent with the two previous panelists. It turns out that of the decline that I'm able to account for, fully half of it is due to a rapid increase in what I'll call materialistic values among American high school seniors. So it may be the case, as Professor Wolfe said, that American middle-class people generally are anti-materialistic. But for one reason or another, they're raising very materialistic children.

Let me give you an indication of how widespread this materialism is. In 1980, 51 percent—a bare majority of high school seniors—rated having lots of money as being personally important to them. By 1990, in one decade, this percentage had increased to 70 percent of high school seniors rated having lots of money as very important to them. Now I just saw the movie "Jerry McGuire," and so every time I talk about these trends I think of the Cuba Gooding character who goes, "Give me the money!" For one reason or the other, we are turning out very materialistic young people.

Now there's a hopeful sign in the data because the materialism level has abated somewhat, but it's still very high—in the mid-60 percentage range.

About a quarter of the decline that I can explain is related to what I'll call decline in enthusiasm for the American project. There's a question in the data set that asks these high school seniors, "Despite its faults, our system of doing things is still the best in the world." Now this attitude has declined quite remarkably among American high school seniors in a very short amount of time. In 1986, 67 percent of high school seniors agreed with this statement. In 1994, 8 years later, the percentage agreement level has fallen to 44 percent. This is more than a 20 percentage-point decline in a very short amount of time. It accounts for about a quarter of the decline I can explain.

Finally, a third important factor that's related to declines in social trust among American high school seniors turns out to be mother's participation in the workforce. To give you an extent of how rapid the increase in women's participation in the paid labor force has been, about a third of the high school seniors in 1976 reported that their mother worked all or most of the time they were growing up. By 1994, that percentage had increased to 60 percent of American high school seniors who reported that their mothers worked outside the home all or most of the time they were growing up. It turns out that this can explain about a fifth of the decline in general social trust among American high school seniors.

There are other factors that account for some of the decline. There's also some hopeful signs in the data, so that I don't leave you with a completely pessimistic view of what's up with America's young people. We've seen in the last few years an increase in what I'll call sociotropic values—young people's interest in contributing to society and correcting social and economic inequalities. So there does seem to be a turning away from this materialism, the decade of greed, and in the 1990s, we actually see young people becoming more socially oriented in their values. That's a hopeful sign, because students who are more interested in helping their community are also likely to be more trusting. It's also the case that increasing education levels militate against some of the increasing distrust that we've seen.

So there are some hopeful signs. But still, it's the case that American high school seniors are more distrusting than previous generations of high school seniors. And they come of age, they participate in our surveys, they participate in public life, with much lower levels of social trust.

What's to be done? I'm not really sure. It's not clear to me that simply increasing networks of engagement, increasing local civic vigor, is enough to stem what I think are real failures in what we might call social socialization and political socialization. This represents, I think, a wholesale failure of most of the major institutions of American life. Whatever is explaining rampant materialism, decline of enthusiasm for the American project, is related to families, it's related to schools, it's related to churches, it's certainly related to the mass media, and it's certainly related to failures of political leadership. I say that the task is very daunting. But I think it's absolutely essential, because as I've mentioned, social trust is related to a number of desirable collective things. And if this younger generation does not come of age with higher levels of social trust, in about 20 years we're going to be faced with a population that is incredibly misanthropic. And we're looking at something like Edward Banfield described in his book about the southern Italian village: the war of all against all. Thank you.

ANDREW KOHUT: Thanks to a special Pew grant, we've been testing some of the ideas that Bob Putnam has advanced. We've conducted an in-depth survey of 2,500 people in Philadelphia to explore further and in considerable depth the principal concepts in this social trust/civic engagement debate.

The decline in trust that Wendy has been talking about has been gauged by responses to a few simple questions in academic surveys over time. There's also been an issue about the fullness of the measures of engagement in these same surveys that have pointed to a decline in people's secondary association participation. Do these items reflect the way that people spend time these days?

Our survey was aimed at learning more about these things, to determine a) Is there a citizen engagement problem? b) If so, is it related to declining social trust, and c) What does social trust really mean? And then finally, do people feel a lack of empowerment, or a lack of ability to solve problems in their own communities?

I have some preliminary findings today from our Philadelphia survey—a first cut, if you will. I don't know everything about what our survey found, because this is still a work in process. We will be doing a follow-up nationwide survey to see how these findings hold up across the country.

Let me start first with this question of trust. The growing interpersonal distrust that has been measured in these surveys isn't just a matter of fear of crime. In the open-ended follow-up questions to the general questions that scholars have been asking, we find people saying that they don't trust other Americans because of dishonesty, because of human nature being what it is, and because of bad experiences with other people, as well as crime. These days people fear manipulation and exploitation from other Americans, as well as a knock on the head or having their wallet stolen. While almost all people say they have a lot of trust in their family members, only half or fewer have a lot of trust in their neighbors, fellow club members, coworkers, or employers, at least in Philadelphia. Very few people, indeed, have trust in people who wait on them in stores, or trust strangers that they meet on the street in downtown Philadelphia.

Now I don't want to exaggerate this. For most of the categories of interpersonal relationships that we've been talking about, it's less distrust and more accurate to say that people are cautious. The most common view that we have in our survey is, You can't be too careful in dealing with other people, but most other Americans try to be fair and try to do the right thing.

But I want to point out a caveat to this: first, distrust in a big city like Philadelphia is more than people just being cautious. The vast majority of Philadelphia residents do not have a lot of trust in neighbors, coworkers, club members, etc. This is true for both blacks and whites in Philadelphia, in fact also true for blacks in the suburbs. Only majorities of suburban whites in the Philadelphia area trust their neighbors a lot, trust club members, trust the kinds of people they interact with on a day-to-day basis, a lot.

Race is far and away the most important determinant of interpersonal trust, followed by related socioeconomic factors, education, income, and so on and so forth. But we also found, as Wendy related too, a big age factor as well. Young blacks and poorly educated young whites are the least trusting in terms of interpersonal trust. Well-educated older whites are the most trusting. Age, especially when factored with race and income, may suggest an economic opportunity explanation for growing lack of social trust. But the generational pattern might also be explained by the way children are being taught and instructed by their parents to deal with strangers. Parents' warnings about strangers was the most important family background factor in how much people trust other people—it was more important than having had a divorce in the family of origin, it was more important than recollections of family members being victims of crime. It raises the question of whether Americans have scared a generation of Americans about their fellow people.

We did not find, by the way, that hours spent in front of a TV set made much of a difference in terms of how much people trust other people, once the differing audience educational profiles were accounted for. But we did find that where you live matters. People who live in bad neighborhoods, that have a lot of poverty, crime, low occupancy rates, are less trusting, regardless of race or education. And of course that makes good sense.

The good news, I think, in this survey is that social trust is not a major determinant of engagement. It bears only a limited relationship to volunteerism. For example, blacks who are low in interpersonal trust are as apt as whites to volunteer in their own communities. There's a stronger relationship between social trust and civic engagement—less trusting people vote less, they don't attend meetings, they don't reach out to public officials. But education, race, and age are much more crucial to citizen engagement than interpersonal trust.

On the matter of engagement, while we have no trend data in Philadelphia, citizen engagement is not a problem in the Philadelphia area, based upon the levels of activity and the related social interactions that were reported in our survey. Most Philadelphians engage in informal activities that promote social contacts and are the basis of interpersonal networks. Interestingly, the gymnasium and the church are the principal focuses of the informal social lives of modern Americans. Going to church and working out are the social activities that are most often reported by Philadelphians. Traditional activities—game playing, reading clubs, and organized sports leagues—also attract a lot of participation, but so do newer activities, such as self-help groups or e-mail. On the average, a typical Philadelphia area resident engaged in informal social activities 18 days a month. That's more than once every day in the month preceding the interview that we conducted.

These activities—and this is the important part in terms of what we're trying to talk about here—these activities result in interpersonal connections that potentially expand citizen support networks. Most respondents, whether they're playing softball or are in a self-help group, say they develop friendships and meet people who they can rely on to help them with personal problems. It's clearly not a case of people withdrawing into their own shells, watching television, not getting out, not establishing networks that provide a form of social capital.

Residents of the Greater Philadelphia area were much more civically active than I expected. More than half had joined or contributed money to an organization or in support of a cause in the past year. Almost as many had joined with coworkers to solve a problem. Three in ten attended civic meetings and as many as that had contacted elected officials in the past year. Ninety-two percent engaged in some civic activity, and 83 percent were involved in two or more activities in the year prior to the interview. The typical Philadelphia area resident engaged in one or more of these activities 10 times in the past year.

Volunteering is less common than civic activities and informal social activities. But still, most Philadelphia area residents report some volunteer activity in the past year. Fully 49 percent spent one or more days in the month prior to the interview volunteering some time during one of these days.

Three areas of volunteering stand out: church-related, youth-focused, and secular efforts to help poor people and disadvantaged people. One in four did church-related volunteer activities, one in five did volunteer work with non-church-related organizations to help the disadvantaged, and one in five worked with kids, either in sports programs or in developmental programs.

While education and age are the factors that most influence volunteering, the survey finds that the real determinant at the community level is what we called rootedness: home ownership, having school-aged children, and church membership turn out to be the factors that distinguish the involved from the uninvolved. Of note, whites and blacks don't differ much in volunteerism, and older retired people don't volunteer much more than people in the work force.

Finally, as to community action, again, we have no trend data, but there is no indication of a social capital shortage in Philadelphia. Most people think they can have at least a moderate impact on making their communities a better place. That's the view of 83 percent of suburbanites; it's the view of 73 percent of city residents. Most Philadelphia citizens think they know how to get things done, to improve their neighborhoods, their local communities, and their schools. These attitudes are reinforced by reports our respondents made about their experiences in community action. Four in ten helped organize neighbors to help solve community problems, four in ten made local governments aware of community concerns, and comparable percentages have attempted to make changes in schools. By and large, people tell us they've been successful in doing these things with regard to schools, with regard to neighborhoods, less so with regard to their local communities. There are substantial differences with regard to Philadelphia and with regard to the suburbs.

Finally, I don't have any conclusions, I just have findings. We're not at the conclusion phase. But clearly this declining social trust is not a matter of a fear of crime, but a basic change in human relationships. But I want to put this in perspective. In the early 1990s, I did surveys all across western Europe and eastern Europe and measured how much trust people in these countries have for their fellow citizens. People in the south of Europe—Italy, Spain, France, all the countries that are touched by the Mediterranean, plus Hungary—have very low levels of trust in their fellow countrymen. The American measures are much closer at this point to north Europeans, to the British, to the Germans, than to the Mediterraneans. I don't think we're anywhere near close to a situation of misanthropy. This is not a good sign for our country; I'm sure that if I had asked these questions in 1991 in the United States, they would have been higher, as Wendy was suggesting. But we're nowhere near like the situation in southern Italy or even France.

As to the engagement issue—maybe a tempest in a teapot. People do things differently these days. One of the other panelists talked about, let's look at the qualitative differences, not only the quantitative differences. I would suggest that if we look more fully at the quantitative differences, we may not have much of a problem.

Finally, with regard to social capital, I think the people that we talked to, when we talked about their communities, when we talked about their neighborhoods, felt pretty empowered and pretty connected. There are big differences, however, between the city and the suburbs. Much of the previous discussion about how people feel about the country versus the city and the local community, I would certainly reinforce with our findings as well. I think I'll leave it at that.

BENNETT: Two excellent presentations. Let me ask you the same thing as last time, try to work this out. I guess I'd like Professor Rahn to respond to Professor Kohut's comments, but could you do it by way of a specific? One, you talked about social trust and young people and the relationship or correlation with working mothers. How do you know that—I guess this is just a layman's question—that it's working mothers rather than missing fathers? Why are they mad at their mothers rather than their fathers who aren't there at all? I realize I'm extrapolating, but why does it correlate with that rather than divorce or separation? How do you know that? And then a general response to Mr. Kohut.

Could we nail something down, because I think Putnam's taking something of a beating here today. Maybe it's well deserved. But television—he makes a lot out of television, as you know, in his sort of causal account of how did we get to where we are. He tells this detective story, and he says television's a big thing. You both were fairly dismissive of that. That's fine, if you could just comment on that. Thank you.

RAHN: Okay well, I'll take the TV question first. At least our results suggest that TV is more important as an opportunity cost than the content of TV. So the more time you have in front of the tube, the less time you have to do anything, whether it's spend time with your kids or volunteer in your communities. Professor Robinson at Maryland has done a lot of things with time-use diaries, and he's shown that TV really displaces time spent with kids and time spent in your communities. And we find that amount of TV hours is strongly related to the amount of participation one does, but it isn't related to social trust. So Putnam, I think, got the story half-right about TV. Maybe Andy has a different response about TV.

BENNETT: Is there a reliable number now for hours of TV per week, the average American family, or any way to cut it? Does anybody know? I've seen so many different numbers—I've seen numbers from 15 to 30 hours a week.

RAHN: I know for children, I think it's about 27 hours a week they spend in front of the TV. I'm not sure what the latest General Social Survey would show for American adults. I think it's around four or five hours a day for adults, too, on average, that they report watching TV or having the TV on.

The second question, How do I know that it's mothers and not fathers? Well, actually, I don't know. I actually wanted to look at the role of missing fathers in levels of social trust, and unfortunately the data set with which I'm working, the Monitoring the Future Project, only asked about current family situation and includes stepfathers as fathers. So I wasn't really able to get a good sense of how much missing fathers contribute to this. They don't ask a question about fathers working. But my guess is that the amount of hours that fathers have spent in the workplace probably hasn't increased nearly to the degree that the amount of hours that mothers have worked.

Now, let me say that at any given point, the contribution that mothers working makes to levels of social trust is small, but because the overtime change has been huge, its contribution to explaining decline is fairly large, even though it has a relatively small impact at any given point. So small impact but big change overtime means it can explain a moderate amount of the decline overtime. This is a model in which I have lots of different things. So I know at least to some extent that it's not because I'm missing some other explanations in my model. People may quarrel with that; that's the nature of social science. But that's how I would respond to that question.

And finally, Andy's comments about looking at this crossnationally. Well, it's true that we're better off than southern Italy. It used to be the case that we were up there with Sweden. Sweden and the U.S. had the highest levels of social trust in the early 1960s, and while Sweden's levels of social trust have remained fairly high, we've fallen to the middle of the pack. And I don't think anyone would regard that as good, even though we're still much better off than southern Italy.

KOHUT: I have a response about Sweden. I didn't conduct a survey in Sweden, because it was too expensive in 1990 to work in Sweden. So they may have been more trusting. But the situation in Sweden is so difficult in other ways that I grant them their social trust.

I think that the whole social trust question is—it's really hard to figure out what it means. I'm a polltaker, not a social scientist, and I believe in attitude research, obviously in attitudes. But I think the important thing is behavior. The behavior that we see in these surveys, when they're conducted fully, and what we see not only in surveys but in other statistics, suggest that Americans are not disconnected from another at the local level, in a real significant way. I think you have take into account, you have to not ignore this decline in social trust. But it's so amorphous and it's so difficult to see what it really relates to. I don't want to be dismissive of it, but I want to put big quotes around it. And I don't want to spend a lot of time worrying about something that is hard to understand what the consequences are, essentially.

RAHN: Can I just piggyback on that one second? Surveys may not be the best mechanism for measuring the impact of this view of human nature on individual behavior. More controlled laboratory and psychological experiments do demonstrate that people who have more trust in other people are themselves more trustworthy. I think that that's pretty incontrovertible. And so, if levels of social trust are going down generally, it also means that the chances are that people are behaving immorally, from cheating on taxes to cheating on exams that I grade every semester at the University of Minnesota. While it may not be a huge drain on the economy or Americans' prosperity, it's something that makes it less pleasant to live here, if you're worrying about, Is the student sitting next to be going to cheat on this exam? And why shouldn't I, if they are? Even though it might not matter very much for participation, it matters in other ways.

NUNN: Do you have any correlation between the effect not of the amount of time involved in television, but the substance of television, and how that affects social trust? Just for instance, I don't watch it enough to be a real gauge, but it seems to me the first five minutes of every local newscast is just completely and totally dominated by murder and crime and rape. I don't recall that as the case 20 years ago. But crime rates have not gone up nearly as much as the coverage of crime has gone up. Did you do any of that kind of analysis and whether that correlated with social distrust?

KOHUT: We did some analysis of this, but again it's incomplete (and I hate to keep saying that). But what we found was that there was more of a relationship between watching the news and reading the newspaper with regard to the sheer number of hours a person spent in front of the television, but it went in the opposite direction. People who read newspapers were more trusting than people who did not, even holding constant the educational differences between readers and non-readers. A similar thing with watching the news on television: People who were engaged in some way with what's going on in the larger world through the media were more trusting, all things being equal, than people who were not so engaged.

RAHN: I've done a little bit of work on the origins of fear of crime, and trying to trace TV content to fear of crime. It turns out to be a fairly complicated question. There's a number of experimental studies that demonstrate that violence on TV results in greater violence and aggression among children; those studies are experimental, and so those have a lot of what we could call internal validity, in social science parlance. In some survey work that I've done, what I was able to find is that watching programs like "NYPD Blue," "Prime Time Live," and the amount of attention one paid to news about crime on TV, was in fact related to one's fear of crime, but only if one was not engaged in some way in your community. So rather than TV content having a direct effect, it depends on whether or not you're getting alternative sources of information. If you're engaged in your community, that gives you a source of direct personal experience that would probably make your reading of crime more accurate. And in some communities, people should be afraid of crime. But if you're socially isolated, if your information about the world is coming from TV, then, in fact, the kinds of programming you watch and the attention that you pay to certain types of news did seem to be related to fear of crime. And we know that fear of crime is related to social trust. So there would be an indirect link there with TV content.

LLOYD HACKLEY: Thank you both for your presentations. My question is rather pedestrian. You're dealing with a population of kids in your research that I'm concerned about—pre-kindergarten through the 12th grade. And I do watch them, or what happens to them, through the process of getting through the 12th grade.

When I was a kid, two million years ago it seems, we had a saying that went something like, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" to each other. We had connected education with a more decent material existence. So my question is, and just a couple of pieces after that, is this one: Is the change in materialism on the part of those high school seniors different as an end in itself—the money, the materialism—or are the means used to get it different? In other words, is money now a greater signal of success than education, a decent living, free time you can buy from your employer, decent food, when you have free time to be able to go and do some things?

And this final comment. The reason I'm posing it like that—we saw no contradiction between getting a good education and working really hard, and having a decent material life, because our role models represented the ends and our mentors represented the means. And they were more embodied in the same person. So that the people who were telling how to come about this better life were also involved in our lives. They were the successful people. And so I guess the summary question is, is now just having money the symbol of success, as opposed to what people will do to get it? So that people who believe money is everything will be willing to do anything to get it?

RAHN: That's a very interesting question. Let me just suggest one way of answering it. I'm not sure; I would be speculating for the most part here. One thing that suggests that the means are different, which may have implications for whether the end is different, is that there are some other value orientations in this data set, one of which is, being successful in my line of work. So one would think that if one viewed work as a means to increasing one's wealth, that that would also show the same kind of dramatic increase over time that the materialism question does. And it doesn't. There's been a slight uptick in the high school seniors' desire to be a success in their line of work. But at the beginning of the data set that's very high, and at the end of the data set that's very high—just a little bit higher, whereas materialism is dramatically higher. So that suggests that people are thinking about other things than work as a way to acquire wealth, which suggests that maybe the end is also different. That's what I can say in response to that.

KOHUT: May I make a comment about this? You know, in the 1970s, anti-materialism was "in." In the 1980s, we had the year of the Yuppie, somewhere along 1981 or 1982, and materialism became much more chic among young people. And I think you should take into account the changing styles in youth culture in judging how really materialistic—what the meaning of this change in materialistic response is. Those changing cultures also have something to do with the way people lead their lives; I don't want to understate that. But there are certainly different fashions in youth culture in 1980 than there were in 1970, and again different in 1990 as well.

BARBARA ROBERTS: I'd like to talk about young people, seniors in high school, again, with you. As you talked about their lack of trust, and we looked at the role of parents and grandparents saying "Don't trust strangers"—something we've done for a long time, it's not new to this generation, but we've probably done it more effectively in a sense, we've been more clear about our role as parents and how we teach our children to avoid strangers in a number of settings—I want to look at it in a gender-specific way, and to find out if you did.

If you think about what young people see on television and read in the newspaper, the stories that have received a great deal of attention in the last few years, in addition to just the fear of crime and maybe the fear of strangers, there's also been a lot of sexually oriented fears. Looking at Tailhook, looking at Bob Packwood, how many of the stories that have been on television in the last four years have been in terms of females' concerns about their safety and their protection? There's been a lot more emphasis there than I think there was a few years before—about spousal abuse, about a number of things. Did you see any difference in young people in terms of their level of trust when you looked at it across gender?

RAHN: I did, but it's opposite to your expectations: the young women are just ever so much slightly more trusting than the young men. And in adult samples, we were able to find no gender difference in levels of trust. It is true, on the other hand, that women evince more fear of crime than men, even controlling for, taking into account the fact that women are actually less likely to be crime victims than men are. The most victimized population is young men 18-24, and it's actually, contrary to probably conventional wisdom, the population that actually evinces the most rationally based fear of crime. Young people are more fearful of crime than older people.

ROBERTS: Let me at least add to that, the most reported victims of crime. There is a difference between crime and reported crime. With females and males, it's interesting that they don't feel more distrustful, because if you took non-reported crime, I think you would find a great deal of it had to do with females who did not report crimes and were victims. I think that's an important distinction when you use that terminology.

RAHN: It also may be the case that gender differences would show up in some of the other things that we're not taking into account, and that once you take them into account, the gender differences disappear. And we haven't done that more fine-grained analysis. So, a point well taken.

KOHUT: In our survey in Philadelphia, we asked men and women respondents whether they found it any more easy or difficult to trust men or women. And most people said no, human nature is human nature. But we did find that women said they trusted women more often than they trusted men, and the really depressing part of this response was that men also said that they trusted women more than their relationships with other men.

ROBERTS: Politically we know that was true a few years ago—I think it may be changing—but that many women were being elected to office because voters felt more comfortable about their trustworthiness. I don't know how long that stays in place—probably not very. But I wondered if there was a gender factor, so thank you.

ANNA FAITH JONES: It seems to me that you're trying to get at something here much more fundamental, that you're talking about manifestations of a basic understanding of shared values, obedience to the unenforceable here, and well-meaning people express that. I've been in a situation where a young mother talked about giving her 6-year-old son a lecture about not smacking somebody else and she said, "I knew that was right, but I had no idea where that came from. How could I explain that to him?"

The other thing I would like to cite is, going up to people on the street and quoting pieces of our fundamental democratic governance instruments and people not understanding what it's about, thinking these are terribly radical instruments. So that the understanding of the foundations of our society and the basis of our shared values doesn't seem to be there. The way you get at it is kind of looking at manifestations of life today as opposed to what it was 30 years ago. But in fact, are you asking people this?

For example, I have some sense that we don't teach civics anymore, the way it used to be required, so you understood what the fundamentals of this society were based on—and certainly you got these other kinds of values in the home. And I'm not necessarily saying we need to go back to that. But there is lacking some basic source of information and instruction that did provide what were these shared values. So if we are becoming, and we are, increasingly a community of strangers, then what is the basis on why we treat each other in some ways? And someone mentioned in the last session that we've got more and more laws and regulations because we really don't understand what it is that we need to obey, that is unenforceable in terms of laws. Are you trying to get at that at all, in terms of what people understand, that would make them more trusting? Where are they getting instruction about that?

KOHUT: I think that the greater heterogeneity and the lack of teaching of values is one element of this. But based on the preliminary analysis that we've made, you can't underestimate not only the scarcity of values but the scarcity of resources. The people who are the most distrustful of other people are the people who have the least opportunity. They're young blacks and young, poorly educated whites. And these people are very, very distrustful of other people like themselves, and other people generally. And I think that that's not only a question of values. That's a question of these people feeling very lost in this society. And no matter what you do, and no matter how you push the questions that we asked in the analysis, these people come to the top of the pack in being distrustful.

And I think that if you looked in the communities of southern Italy, for example, where there's a low degree of social trust but there's strong family structure, you would see the same thing. The young Italians after the Second World War in the 1950s had little economic opportunity, they still do, and there's a great deal of human distrust that comes of being so hopeless. And there's a lot of hopelessness on the part of certain elements of the population, and they are distrustful. So it's not only values and it's not only heterogeneity and regulation. It also is just the sheer opportunity gap is so much wider than it once was, in my view.

RAHN: I too share your concern about the decline of civics education. And I've been talking to Sheila Mann, who's at the American Political Science Association, who is looking into this issue, because she too senses that civics and civics education has declined as we have asked schools to do other forms of instruction. And the function given to public schools to train future citizens has been taken over by the fact that schools have to make up for so much of the things that we're not doing in other institutions. And so we may have more concrete information about that later.

One thing we know is that people who know more about politics, sort of the raw factual knowledge about politics—like, how many terms can a US Senator serve?—are actually more trusting than people who have lower levels of factual political knowledge. And this is taking into account race, income, education, other things that might be connected to having levels of political knowledge. And the one thing that we know about Generation X and late baby boomers, the two generations that I've been talking about, is that even though on average they're much better educated than previous generations, in fact they have lower levels of political knowledge. So somewhere along the way they're not picking up the knowledge about how the political system functions—basic facts that are necessary not only for civic engagement, but also apparently for trusting other people. That suggests a failure, too, of schools and other institutions in giving people this basic factual knowledge about how to operate in the political system.

NUNN: It seems like to me I've heard something that's inconsistent. On the one hand, I thought I'd heard that young blacks or people in poverty are more optimistic, and what I thought I just heard was that they are more distrustful. Am I hearing a contradiction here? How could those both be true?

KOHUT: I don't know if they are both true. I think they are much more distrustful. I don't think that they are more optimistic.

RAHN: Among middle-class blacks, they're equally as optimistic.

NUNN: Professor Hunter said that those who had the least were the most optimistic.

RAHN: Both in Andy's data and my data on high school seniors, African-Americans are much more distrustful of human nature than are whites and non-black minorities. Even taking into account social class factors, optimism for the future, and all kinds of other things, I still find that there is a racial difference in levels of trust. So this seems to be an attitude, that there is a gap between blacks and whites, but not necessarily on the other indicators that Professor Wolfe is talking about.

WOODSON: I don't think there's any contradiction between people being less trusting and optimistic. The low-income people that we deal with all the time, the level of optimism is very high and yet there is tremendous distrust. So I don't think that's a contradiction at all.

FERNANDEZ: I believe there's also some polling results in this last election that show that specifically, young African-American males outvoted any other group of young people, so—

BENNETT: I would find that hard to believe.

RAHN: That was reported in the Wall Street Journal.

WOODSON: This last election. They said it was related to the Million Man March, so it was an aberration. But it still was true.

FERNANDEZ: I don't know if I would call it an aberration—I understand why you did—so much as a fact that also seems to play into this optimism, because with the opportunity for optimism, a group seems to react very effectively politically, and potentially as a result of distrust, but still using the political system.

RAHN: I think the finding was not that they outvoted other age groups, but that they were the only group that showed an increase in turnout, whereas all other groups showed a decrease.

FERNANDEZ: Not other age groups, other male racial groups within the same age.

RAHN: They showed an increase while other groups showed a decrease. I don't think it was the highest absolute percentage. But in any case, it's a very important point. It is the case, too, that negative emotions can be a source for mobilization. And we know from studying participation that once you take into account different levels of education and social class factors, in fact African-Americans outparticipate whites in many instances. So they, in effect, participate more than they should, given their generally disadvantaged background.

WILLIAM SHORE: A question probably more for you, Andy. Did your research on engagement distinguish at all qualitatively in the sense that. . . . Like in my little subdivision of Silver Spring, most of my neighbors are involved in church, swim team, softball, stuff like that. But those who would probably consider themselves (or that I would consider) more purposely and conscientiously involved in actually working to make their community better— I would say those numbers would be very low. So the types of things you talked about, I think they would rank very high, but I'm curious as to whether either your work or your instincts address the other question.

KOHUT: We do make those distinctions, let's say the distinction between altruistic engagement and engagement for managing your kid's Little League team or being a soccer mom or whatever. And we found—I can't cite these figures off the top of my head; we will be publishing them soon—but we found a fair amount of volunteer activity for the sake of helping disadvantaged people. We found a lot of volunteer activity that's church-based. We found a good deal of volunteer activity among African-Americans, and it was correlated with good communities and strong neighborhoods. And I think you'll be surprised by the percentages that we ultimately publish in our Philadelphia study. It's not all just Little Leagues and things like that.

SHORE: One other question for both of you, a question about a different type of trust. The institutions that are available for people to volunteer or to serve in—does your work show anything about their level of trust in those institutions? Do they feel that there is a place to go that actually has the capacity, the professionalism, the resources to use their time and resources, their time and skills, appropriately?

KOHUT: We didn't cover that in our survey, but certainly that's a good subject. I don't know the answer to that.

RAHN: These data don't contain those questions either. Professor Hunter's research talked a little bit about that.

ELSHTAIN: Two related questions. The first I'm going to direct to Professor Rahn. You, I thought, did a very interesting job of trying to account for the levels of mistrust, what are the factors that seem to lead to this outcome, especially among young people. I wondered if your data would help us understand the difference between those (especially in that age group of young folks) those who are more trusting—how you would account for the higher level of trust, and whether perhaps that would perhaps take us back to some of the formative institutions we've been talking about.

And then, related to this, and this is directed more at Mr. Kohut. It would seem, on Bill Shore's question, common sense would seem to dictate that there's a qualitative difference between an engagement like playing squash once a week with some other able-bodied adults of your age cohort, and an activity like going to church, which usually involves whole families, insofar as the building of certain norms of civic and social and ethical life are concerned. So I think I quite agree with you—I mean, Americans are in a frenzy all the time; there's a tremendous amount of hustle and bustle. But I think the key issue for us and our consideration would be, what are the activities that help to build certain kinds of engagements and that help to, if you will, shore up the social and civic fabric? So perhaps just the fact of engagement doesn't tell us a tremendous amount. So if you could expand on that a little bit.

RAHN: Leaving aside this question of decline, how would you manufacture or bring into the world a young person who is trusting? Let me tell you what's most important. First, what you would want to do is make sure that they are basically satisfied with their own lives. That's the hugest factor that explains why, in general, someone is a truster or a distruster. If you're satisfied with your own life, it's much easier to trust other people. The second thing that you would want to do is make sure they feel secure both in their personal safety and the safety of their property. That's the second biggest factor. The third biggest factor is, you would want to make sure they are satisfied with how their national government is operating. Actually, I'm taking these a little bit out of order. You would want to make sure that they're optimistic about their own future, so are times ahead going to be good for me or not? And you would want to teach a person to have not materialistic goals but socially oriented goals. That's how you would turn out a trusting person, at least according to my analysis.

BENNETT: Quickly, just on the first part of that. It seems to a non-social scientist, that if kids have good relationships with their parents, cross back and forth, they're loved, taken care of, they're likely to have more trust, is that right?

RAHN: Yes.

BENNETT: A lot?

RAHN: It's one of the things that contributes to satisfaction with your life. There are a lot of different domains. One is satisfaction with your relationship with your parents, your educational experiences, the friends that you have and the amount of time that you have to do things. These are the factors that kind of comprise this life satisfaction, and each of them contributes.

BENNETT: Your perspective of whether someone's corrupt in the national government is almost as weighty as your relationship to your parents?

RAHN: No. It's about a third the size of this global life satisfaction thing—not the specific question about, do you like your parents, but sort of, are you generally satisfied with your life? That's the most important thing, by far.

BENNETT: I didn't ask if you like your parents. That's a different question.

ELSHTAIN: I would like a response to the issue about the qualitative distinction between playing squash and going to church.

KOHUT: One of the reasons why we asked so many questions about informal social activities such as playing squash or being a member of a reading group was to do some follow-up questions, to ask people in these activities, Do they provide a basis for networking and meeting people that become important to them in terms of their own support networks and their own interpersonal relationships? And we found that overwhelmingly people said whether they were playing in softball leagues or doing e-mail or in self-help groups that they were meeting people who became important to them. In another follow-up question, we asked, Do you meet people in these activities that you could turn to in time of help. And the answer was 70 percent yes in most cases. So we were trying to push this Putnam thesis that people are not engaged in activities and have become social isolates, and that's not the case.

I would say, though, the survey also pushed pretty fully how much activity which you would certainly describe as character-building Philadelphians engaged in, and it was pretty substantial: 27 percent in the past year had volunteered with a church or religious group, 16 percent had worked in a school or tutoring program, 18 percent had worked in a child development program. And when we publish this survey, I think you're going to be surprised about the number of people who were both doing good works and doing the kinds of things that are related to good citizenship and thinking well of other people. I don't want to create a Pollyannaish view of Philadelphians or Americans broadly, but it isn't as bad as some would portray it. That's the point.

RICHARD LAND: I wanted to take a point of departure off of what you had said, Professor Kohut, about the rootedness making a difference in trust and take it back to Professor Rahn, your comments about families and these rather startling statistics about the decline in the later generations, those from '76 to '95, this huge increase in cannot trust. You mentioned the thing about working mothers, that in 1976, a third of the mothers were reported to have worked all or part of the time they were growing up, and now it was 60 percent in either '95 or '96. And you said that that explained about 20 percent of the decline in social trust.

I'd like to know how you arrived at that figure of 20 percent, number one. And number two, did the survey data that you were working from make any distinction between children whose mothers worked most of the time outside the home and those who were single parents—they were working because they were the only income, i.e., the difference between working mothers who were married, working mothers who were divorced, working mothers who were never married—and of course, these twenty years also coincide with a rather staggering increase in illegitimacy—so the number of seniors whose mothers may not ever have been married, and if that has any impact upon it.

And then I'd like your comment, Professor Rahn particularly, and yours as well, Professor Kohut on . . . I saw a really interesting segment on ABC News the other night with Peggy Wehmeyer talking about a pilot program that's expanding in north Texas of a rather experimental day care in which they're taking children who are in day care from whatever family backgrounds and who are in full-time day care. And instead of having them age-grouped, and instead of having a lot of different caregivers, they're pairing children, and really it's almost a sibling family kind of situation, where they are guaranteed a caregiver for two years. And they have not just all three and a half year olds or all three year olds, but they have groupings and they go together. It's almost an attempt to manufacture a family setting for these children. And they've seen some dramatic results in terms of declines in aggressive behavior, in experimental measurements of security, etc. My own personal perspective is, if that kind of thing could make an enormous difference in getting back to this sense of rootedness in community and in family. But I'd like your response to those.

RAHN: Well, let me try to briefly describe this accounting method. I tried to be very clear in saying that I can't account for a lot of the decline. I can account for some decline. Of the decline I can account for, about 20 percent of it is due to mother's workforce participation. Well over half is due to this increase in materialistic values. There are still things that are going on that are unexplained. But there are things that I can explain. So it's very important to keep that distinction in mind.

LAND: How did you arrive, in semi-layman's terms, how did you arrive at this 20 percent factor?

RAHN: The way this works is, you try to explain trust with a set of factors, including many of the things that I've mentioned here, and each of those factors ends up getting a certain weight. It counts so much in accounting for why some people are trusting or distrusting. Then you look at, What was the level of those factors at the beginning of this time period in 1976, and what was the level of these factors at the end, in 1994? And you look at the differences, and you essentially multiply that difference by the weight each factor gets. And then you can add it up across all the factors, and some factors have actually—as I suggested—have changed in a positive direction. Other factors have changed in a negative direction. So the accounting exercise is based on the weight each of these factors carries in explaining, in general, why some people are trusting or distrusting. So the end result, the accounting exercise depends on how big that weight factor is, and how much change there's been. As I've said, mother's workforce participation has a small weight but has a big change. Other things have a big weight but not much change, so they don't help you account for a decline as much as the factors that actually show a big change over time. I hope that's been clear. It's mainly just an addition and multiplication exercise.

LAND: Did you have any data on making distinctions within that group of working mothers?

RAHN: Unfortunately, the data set only asks the high schoolers, Who's living with you now? It asks about fathers or stepfathers, and mothers or stepmothers. They don't ask, Did your parents divorce while you were growing up? Other data sets do ask that, and so there might be a way of looking at mothers who work who do not have a husband in the home, and seeing how much difference that would make. And you could certainly do that. But we didn't do that in this analysis.

KOHUT: Just quickly, I don't know a direct answer to your question. But what we did find was that divorce in the family of origin was less important to how trusting you are of other people than divorce in your own life. People who are divorced or who have had family problems in their own family are much less trusting than other people. And that makes common sense.

GLENDON: A short observation and a short question. The observation goes back to this discussion we were having about mistrust and optimism. It seems since we've been quoting political philosophers, that we ought to quote that great American political philosopher, Mr. Dooley, in whom a certain degree of healthy mistrust coexisted with a high degree of civic engagement in the back of his neighborhood in Chicago. Mr. Dooley said, "Trust everyone, Hennessey, but don't forget to cut the cards."

My question is about the relationship, that strong correlation you found, between materialism and mistrust. And I'm wondering if perhaps both of those characteristics in this young population might not be attributable to something else we've been talking about in this session, namely, the sense of insecurity that this generation in particular has about family relationships, owing to the fact that this is precisely the period when not only did divorce rates shoot up, but also the rates of birth outside marriage. So the layperson asks herself, If a kid feels that he or she can't count on family relationships, maybe he or she thinks, well, the only thing I can really find security in is material possessions. This must be something that is a great problem for social scientists: How do you tell what is really causing what? I wondered if either of you had any thoughts about that correlation.

RAHN: The analysis that I've done here does take into account young people's pessimism for the future, and even taking that into account, there's still a huge role for materialistic values. So you're accounting for some other things that might be related to the dynamics that you're talking about, and still we find a big role for materialism.

It is, of course, always the nut to crack in this kind of analysis—what causes what. I actually end up appealing to Tocqueville, because he has a couple of brilliant chapters in Democracy in America where he talks about the dangers of self-aggrandizement, the dangers that egoism poses to democracy, and he really puts that first. And so, appealing to Tocqueville, I would say that it precedes some of the other changes that we're talking about, and many other factors I've also taken into account. Of course, there may be things missing. There certainly may be a role for this general sense that the world is an insecure place. But that doesn't seem to have an impact on optimism for the future because I've taken that into account.

KOHUT: I have nothing to add to this relationship between materialism and distrust. I don't know anything more than Wendy's expressed here.

WOODSON: I'm not so sure my question is directed to the panel, but this discussion occasions this, and it's more directed, I guess, to the chair, but I'd love for the panelists to comment if they want. Vic [Lloyd Hackley] talked about the old adage that, "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" Well, I would extend that further, that we say, "If you're so smart, why ain't you more moral?" We do seem to make a correlation between a person's level of education and their level of character and moral behavior. And as a consequence, for instance, I remember when the president of American University was found guilty of making pornographic phone calls, in interviews with students and faculty members everyone was shocked. They said, "How could he have done that? He has a Ph.D. from Harvard!"

This thinking is pervasive and it has a dramatic impact on policy. Because I remember when we had this rash of sexual abuse in day care centers, and the response of policymakers and the Congress was, "We need higher levels of education and more regulation so we don't have this," even though most if not all of the abuse was in licensed day care centers by people with master's degrees. Even in the presence of this fact, the demand was for more licensing and more professional credentialing. We seem to look at upper-income people who engage in immoral actions as an aberration, but when it comes to low-income people, it's an expectation. And that influences the kinds of policies.

And also, how we look at people determines where we look. Therefore, we very seldom look for capacities and moral excellence among low-income populations. We talk about social fabric when we talk about upper-income and middle-income communities, but we seldom talk about social fabric when it comes to low-income communities. Instead, we talk about effective compassion being parachuted into these communities to save these poor devils from themselves, as if there are no institutions within those communities that constitute a social fabric. This is the complaint I have against social science and something, Bill, I will continue to raise in this Commission.

RAHN: We find a huge role for distrust of government on distrust of other people, I think for precisely the reasons that you're talking about. People in government are lawyers; the Senate is populated by millionaires. But still they're incompetent, they're immoral, they're dishonest. And if these, our betters, are behaving like that, what does that imply for ordinary people? So I think the huge role that we see for trust in political authorities is directly related to this sense that they should be better than that.

CHAO: I'll just insert one thing. As the spouse of a Senator, I can assure you, we are not millionaires.

RAHN: But there are quite a few millionaires in the Senate.

KOHUT: I think our survey will reveal a fair amount of social fabric in low-income neighborhoods. And, as I mentioned earlier, there's an extraordinary amount of volunteering, much more than we thought we would find. As to the relationship between education and morality, it's a clear relationship. It's not the sole determinant of morality, and that's obvious from the stories you've recounted. But that does not deny the relationship.

WOODSON: You think there is a correlation.

KOHUT: Yes.

WOODSON: I don't.

GAIL WARDEN: I enjoyed your presentations. One of the determinants that I at least see in terms of people's engagement and their view of the world is quite often, I think, shaped by just what exactly their employer does or does not do in terms of trying to understand the environment they're operating in. And whether it's the quality of the day care program or whether the employer encourages individuals to become involved as volunteers and recognizes them for that, or whether it's the employer that makes sure that everyone has an opportunity to vote by, if nothing else, seeing that there's access to an absentee ballot in the national election, there's all kinds of things that organizations do. I'd just be interested in knowing if this surfaces in your studies. Because I think it's one of the important parts of the solution to some of the problems we're talking about here.

KOHUT: Well, I think in a population where an increased percentage of adults, compared to 30 years ago, are in the workforce, workforce becomes an important way that shapes the way people lead their lives in every sphere of activity, from voting to taking care of kids and being able to volunteer and do the kinds of things that we've been talking about. I would just agree with you, and say there are probably manifestations of that in the survey that we've conducted. We'll have some interesting things to say about how people feel about their employers and how they feel about their coworkers in terms of basic trust and how that relates to institutional trust. And the two things are not the same.

GALSTON: As we adjourn, let me thank our witnesses on the second panel.

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