So , the nations with high trust levels dont seem to map to your take. Chinas rated very highly , but from a western perspecrive its rather coercive socially right?
And what about small cohesive agricultural towns? , my...knee jerk take is that you should re-evaluate this model with a “maslows hierarchy” foundation.
Three weeks ago I went to a soccer match between Shanghai SIPG and FC Seoul. After the game the traffic around the area was quite heavy. I was waiting for a pedestrian light to turn green when a couple in their electric scooter went through a red light, an old lady hit them and the three of them fell to the ground. The couple got up, yelled something to the old lady and then just got on the scooter and left. The old lady stayed there for some minutes while people passing by didn’t even try to help her.
This may be a weird situation for a foreigner who hasn’t been in China before, but it’s a normal thing to see here. When an accident occurs, people would not try to help others and would try to avoid any contact with the people involved in it.
While individualism in China is a big thing, this situation is more related to the fear of being accused as the responsible of the accident, even when you just tried to help.
The most popular case happened in the city of Nanjing, a city located at the west of Shanghai. The year was 2006 when Xu Shoulan, an old lady trying to get out of a bus, fell and broke her femur. Peng Yu, was passing by and helped her taking her to the hospital and giving her ¥200 (~30 USD) to pay for her treatment. After the first diagnosis Xu needed a femur replacement surgery, but she refused to pay it by herself so she demanded Peng to pay for it, as he was the responsible of the accident according to her. She sued him and after six months she won and Peng needed to cover all the medical expenses of the old lady. The court stated that “no one would, in good conscience, help someone unless they felt guilty”.
While this incident wasn’t the first, it was very popular and it showed one of the non written rules of China. If you help someone it’s because you feel guilty of what happened, so in some way you were or are involved in the accident or incident.
After the incident more cases like this appeared, usually with old people involved and suing their helpers because “if you weren’t responsible, why would you stopped to help me”. So people just stopped helping each other.
The page that you linked also has this caveat:
Measures of trust from attitudinal survey questions remain the most common source of data on trust. Yet academic studies have shown that these measures of trust are generally weak predictors of actual trusting behaviour.
In general I think that cross-cultural surveys asking for things like “how much do you agree with the statement that most people can be trusted” convey very little information. While there are some commonalities, there are also significant differences in how “trust” is understood between different cultures (e.g. 1, 2), so it’s not clear to what extent people in different countries can be described as actually answering the same question.
That said… I think these results do show that while I think there’s something very real that Richard’s post is pointing at, “trust” might be too general of a term. Some of those links say that in more authoritarian cultures, people are considered to be trustworthy if they show respect to their superiors—which reads to me as saying that you’re trusted if you show that you will obey. Which I think fits the model in this post—in conditions of scarcity, everyone needs to do things in a very specific way rather than debating the decision forever or worse, rebelling against their leaders. And then the leaders will trust those underlings who have shown themselves willing to obey in that way.
But “believing that Kaj is trustworthy (in that he will obey orders to the letter and show proper respect)” is a different kind of trust than “believing that Kaj is trustworthy (in that he will do something sensible and won’t hurt you even if he is allowed to use his own initiative)”.
Maybe a more accurate alternative title would be something like “Coercion is an adaptation to scarcity; freedom is an adaptation to abundance”.
Some of those links say that in more authoritarian cultures, people are considered to be trustworthy if they show respect to their superiors—which reads to me as saying that you’re trusted if you show that you will obey.
Oh, that’s very interesting. Yeah, this seems like it might account for the discrepancy here. But my instinct is that I want to hang on to the “trust” terminology, and just hold that authoritarian cultures have an impoverished definition of trust (compared with the one I gave earlier: “letting another agent do as they wish, without trying to control their behavior, because you believe that they’ll take your interests into account”).
Maybe a more accurate alternative title would be something like “Coercion is an adaptation to scarcity; freedom is an adaptation to abundance”.
My guess is that this would be misleading in other ways—in particular, we don’t typically think of freedom as a property of relationships, but rather a property of individuals.
Mmm, I still prefer trust I think. Spaciousness gives me connotations of… well, distance, and separation. In some sense my relationship with almost everyone in the world is spacious. The thing that’s special about some relationships is that they have both spaciousness and intensity, which to me feels well-described by “trust”.
But my instinct is that I want to hang on to the “trust” terminology, and just hold that authoritarian cultures have an impoverished definition of trust (compared with the one I gave earlier: “letting another agent do as they wish, without trying to control their behavior, because you believe that they’ll take your interests into account”).
In that case all the major countries have ‘an impoverished definition of trust’ as they all operates huge amounts of classified programs where obedience to superiors is required and there’s no way of disobeying without incurring secret punishment.
I’m not sure the terms as you define them really hold.
https://ourworldindata.org/trust
So , the nations with high trust levels dont seem to map to your take. Chinas rated very highly , but from a western perspecrive its rather coercive socially right?
And what about small cohesive agricultural towns? , my...knee jerk take is that you should re-evaluate this model with a “maslows hierarchy” foundation.
That survey result feels hard to square with reports like this:
The page that you linked also has this caveat:
In general I think that cross-cultural surveys asking for things like “how much do you agree with the statement that most people can be trusted” convey very little information. While there are some commonalities, there are also significant differences in how “trust” is understood between different cultures (e.g. 1, 2), so it’s not clear to what extent people in different countries can be described as actually answering the same question.
That said… I think these results do show that while I think there’s something very real that Richard’s post is pointing at, “trust” might be too general of a term. Some of those links say that in more authoritarian cultures, people are considered to be trustworthy if they show respect to their superiors—which reads to me as saying that you’re trusted if you show that you will obey. Which I think fits the model in this post—in conditions of scarcity, everyone needs to do things in a very specific way rather than debating the decision forever or worse, rebelling against their leaders. And then the leaders will trust those underlings who have shown themselves willing to obey in that way.
But “believing that Kaj is trustworthy (in that he will obey orders to the letter and show proper respect)” is a different kind of trust than “believing that Kaj is trustworthy (in that he will do something sensible and won’t hurt you even if he is allowed to use his own initiative)”.
Maybe a more accurate alternative title would be something like “Coercion is an adaptation to scarcity; freedom is an adaptation to abundance”.
Oh, that’s very interesting. Yeah, this seems like it might account for the discrepancy here. But my instinct is that I want to hang on to the “trust” terminology, and just hold that authoritarian cultures have an impoverished definition of trust (compared with the one I gave earlier: “letting another agent do as they wish, without trying to control their behavior, because you believe that they’ll take your interests into account”).
My guess is that this would be misleading in other ways—in particular, we don’t typically think of freedom as a property of relationships, but rather a property of individuals.
How about “spaciousness” (as in the relationship giving both individuals the space to move/act as they prefer) instead of freedom/trust?
Mmm, I still prefer trust I think. Spaciousness gives me connotations of… well, distance, and separation. In some sense my relationship with almost everyone in the world is spacious. The thing that’s special about some relationships is that they have both spaciousness and intensity, which to me feels well-described by “trust”.
In that case all the major countries have ‘an impoverished definition of trust’ as they all operates huge amounts of classified programs where obedience to superiors is required and there’s no way of disobeying without incurring secret punishment.