The Language of Trust
Individuals vary in how trustworthy they find other people. In social science we call this generalized trust, and we have devised ways to measure this trait.
In a research article titled Quantifying Generalized Trust in Individuals and Counties Using Language, my colleagues and I looked for connections between individuals' generalized trust and the language they used in their social media posts.
We found trust was associated with affiliative words (e.g. love
, we
, and friends
). Distrust was associated with angry words (hate
and stupid
) and terms for othering (they
and people
).
Then, we applied our language model of generalized trust to estimate levels of trust by US county (see above). We next connected our estimates of trust within counties to government and polling records for those counties. We found that trusting counties had better self-rated mental and physical health and lower levels of obesity and smoking. Counties with higher trust reported greater life satisfaction on average.
Decreasing trust is rightfully at the center of contemporary American social, economic, and political discourse. Persistent, consistent estimation would aid these discussions. We have taken a first step toward doing so unobtrusively and at scale with this new work.