3BI: Social Trust and Coordination
This week, we released the first in a series of interviews I conducted at the 2022 Norms and Behavioral Change Conference (NoBeC) at the University of Pennsylvania on the Action Design Radio podcast.
This episode is focused on the concept of social trust and how it relates to the ability of groups to coordinate their actions effectively. I dove into this topic with Salma Mousa, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, and Rachel Kranton, James B. Duke Professor of Economics at Duke University.
For this week’s newsletter, I’ll share some highlights from those conversations. You can check out the full episode below.
Social Trust
Social trust refers to the willingness of individuals to rely on others to fulfill their obligations and act in a trustworthy manner. It’s important for successful societal coordination because it reduces the need for costly monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. When people trust each other, they are more likely to follow through on their commitments without needing external incentives or punishments, making society more efficient, productive, and peaceful.
Building social trust is difficult because it typically requires a shared sense of identity and common goals among group members. This is especially hard to achieve in diverse or fragmented societies. It is also hard to maintain, as trust is fragile and easily undermined by actions that violate norms or expectations. For example, a number of studies have found that levels of social trust impacted compliance with public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, as trust in public health institutions and risk factors for the disease varied widely between demographic groups.
In the episode, Salma and Rachel discuss some of the latest research on social trust and coordination and share insights on how to design interventions that promote trust and effective coordination in different settings.
Identity and social trust
Rachel Kranton studies how institutions and social settings affect economic outcomes and some of her most well-known work has focused on the impact of identity to social trust. She argues that social trust is often built on a shared sense of identity, and that people are more likely to trust each other when they feel a sense of belonging to the same group.
Identities are not fixed, though, as individuals typically have many different ones. Our country, city, ethnicity, religion, politics, education, hobbies, and sports fandoms are all examples of identities we may have. We can maintain many identities, but, often, one is more important or salient at a particular time, and our actions and decisions may change accordingly.
For example, imagine attending a holiday gathering with family. You could be friendly with other family members as your shared family identity is initially the most salient, but then a divisive topic like politics or sports rivalries comes up in conversation. Suddenly, your identities in those domains are activated, the family affiliation shrinks, and you become more negative and hostile to family members who associate with different political parties or rival teams.
Levels of social trust are often driven by which identities are activated at the time. In times of international crisis or war, leaders typically benefit from a “rally around the flag effect” where they receive a surge in bipartisan support as national identity supersedes partisan ones. Such unity typically fades by election time, though, when partisan identification becomes more salient.
Check out Rachel’s work on Identity Economics for more.
Increasing social trust
The causes of distrust are well-documented, but there is less evidence for which mechanisms increase trust.
A common idea for improving trust and social cohesion is “social contact” theory, developed by psychologist Gordon Allport:
Allport hypothesized that if two different demographic groups interact in a setting where they have equal status, are given common goals, work together towards those goals, and have support from authorities, they will develop more positive feelings towards each other. He emphasized the importance of these conditions: After all, interacting in antagonistic circumstances could fuel stereotypical beliefs.
This theory has typically been difficult to test, though, because there are few spaces in society where such natural mixing of groups and coordination occurs.
Salma Mousa, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, devised a clever way to test theory. Salma studies social cohesion, especially after major conflicts like war, and led a well-known study to evaluate whether intergroup contact via soccer leagues could build social cohesion between religious groups in post-ISIS Iraq. In the study, Iraqi Christians displaced by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) were randomly assigned to either an all-Christian soccer team or to a team mixed with Muslims.
Why soccer teams? Sports are a rare setting where people of all types come together to collaborate on shared goals. Participants join leagues or attend open gyms with little control over their teammates and their enthusiasm to play the game generally overshadows any resistance to interacting with out-groups.
The study did find reduced prejudice and behaviors in the Christian players assigned to teams with Muslim teammates, but only to those who they came into direct contact with - not with strangers:
The intervention improved behaviors toward Muslim peers: Christians with Muslim teammates were more likely to vote for a Muslim (not on their team) to receive a sportsmanship award, register for a mixed team next season, and train with Muslims 6 months after the intervention. The intervention did not substantially affect behaviors in other social contexts, such as patronizing a restaurant in Muslim-dominated Mosul or attending a mixed social event, nor did it yield consistent effects on intergroup attitudes.
Although contact can build tolerant behaviors toward peers within an intervention, building broader social cohesion outside of it is more challenging.
This suggests that social contact can reduce biases on an individual level, but may not be enough to alter broad attitudes. It seems we find it easier to view people we know personally without bias, but that we may still hold judgements of their peers.
Access the full paper here and a summary at Quartz. In our podcast interview, we go into some new research Salma conducted to build on these findings, as well as a new study from Rachel on the topic.