A Question of Trust, Revisited

I wrote here five years ago on the question of trust, when I was terrified by what I saw in the US political primary season that year. Since then, there have been many changes, including Brexit. Unfortunately, data from UK is not available in the latest wave. However, data from U.S. is available, albeit already a bit dated. For some comparison to another Western country, I have chosen Germany.

The 2006-11 increase in levels of American mistrust of people with other religions and nationalities had begun to reverse course by 2017, but remains worse than it was 15 years ago, albeit not by very much (approximately 5% of respondents have moved from cautious trust of both groups of "other" to cautious mistrust when comparing 2017 to 2006). The U.S. remains more cautiously trusting than Germany, but the latter has been moving steadily in the direction of more cautious trust of "others."