Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on November 26, 2008
Public Opinion Quarterly 2008 72(4):725-740; doi:10.1093/poq/nfn058
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Where You Stand Depends Upon Where Your Grandparents Sat
The Inheritability of Generalized Trust
Address correspondence to Eric M. Uslaner; e-mail: euslaner{at}gvpt.umd.edu.
Generalized trust is a stable value that is transmitted from parents to children. Do its roots go back further in time? Using a person's ethnic heritage (where their grandparents came from) and the proportion of people of different ethnic backgrounds in a state, I ask whether your own ethnic background matters more than whom you live among. People whose grandparents came to the United States from countries that have high levels of trust (Nordics, and the British) tend to have higher levels of generalized trust (using the General Social Survey from 1972 to 1996). People living in states with high German or British populations (but not Nordic populations) are also more trusting (using state-level census data). Italians, Latinos, and African Americans tend to have lower levels of trust, but it is not clear that country of origin can account for these negative results. Overall, there are effects for both culture (where your grandparents came from) and experience (which groups you live among), but the impact of ethnic heritage seems stronger.
ERIC M. USLANER is with the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. This research was supported by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation under the Social Dimensions of Inequality Project. I am also grateful to the General Research Board, University of Maryland, for support on related projects, to M. Mitchell Brown for research assistance, and to Karen Kaufmann, Geoff Layman, Bo Rothstein, Dietlind Stolle, and the editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Some of the data come from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, which is not responsible for any of our interpretations.