BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  30. Author’s analysis from Roper Social and Political Trends surveys and Yankelovich Monitor results generously made available by Yankelovich Partners, Inc. In the Roper surveys respondents are asked which of a wide variety of activities “you personally have done in the last month,” ranging from “been to a dentist” to “rented a pre-recorded video,” as well as “made a contribution to a charity.” To avoid seasonal variation this question is always posed in October. In the Yankelovich surveys respondents are asked which of a range of religious activities “you do at least occasionally,” including attending a house of worship, reading a Holy Book, volunteering, praying, and so on. These data are broadly consistent with comparable results reported in Giving and Volunteering in the United States, 1999 (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 2000), although this series of surveys began only in 1987.

  31. Religious estimate from John and Sylvia Ronsvalle, The State of Church Giving through 1995, 48–49; estimates for United Way and total giving are author’s calculations from data supplied by United Way and Giving USA.

  32. Wuthnow, The Crisis in the Churches.

  33. Greeley and McManus, Catholic Contributions, 63.

  34. Robert Wuthnow, “The Changing Character of Social Capital in the United States,” in Putnam, Dynamics of Social Capital in Comparative Perspective; and Diane Colasanto, “Voluntarism: Americans Show Commitment to Helping Those in Need,” Gallup Report (November 1989): 19. By contrast, several other sources of evidence do not confirm any growth in average volunteering. Giving and Volunteering in the United States, 1999, based on the biennial surveys by the Independent Sector, reports a modest, continuing slump in average hours of volunteering per week from 2.1 in 1987 to 1.9 hours in 1999, mainly because regular volunteering is being replaced by irregular or sporadic volunteering. Over the last three decades social psychologists have carried out many studies of “spontaneous help-ing”—returning lost property, assisting strangers, and so on. Nancy Mehrkens Steblay, in “Helping Behavior in Rural and Urban Environments,” examined sixty-five such studies and found that helping had declined over time in urban settings, with no compensating rise outside cities.

  35. “Regular” attendance means attending church at least weekly and attending at least one club meeting a month. Regular community involvement in this sense fell from 22 percent in 1975 to 9 percent in 1999, whereas those who never attend either church or club meetings rose from 11 percent to 20 percent. Volunteering among regular church- and clubgoers rose from fifteen to twenty-four times per year, whereas the rate among those who never attend either church or clubs rose from .8 to 2.8 times per year.

  36. Wilson and Musick, “Attachment to Volunteering.” Giving and Volunteering in the United States, 1999: 1, reports that fully 41 percent of all self-declared volunteers in 1999 “contributed time only sporadically and considered it a one-time activity.”

  37. Figure 35 and figure 36 are based on the author’s analysis of the DDB Needham Life Style archive. Entries are calculated by regressing frequency of volunteering or community projects on year within each age category, multiplying by twenty-three years and dividing by the initial score. However, change in mean scores between 1975–76 and 1997–98—or even simply change in the fraction of volunteers—for each age category yields essentially the same result. Each figure combines data for single and married adults, but the same pattern appears in each category considered separately. Among people over sixty, singles volunteer more than married people, whereas in the middle-aged bracket, singles volunteer less. Presumably, seniors volunteer to help overcome social isolation, whereas middle-aged people do so as a by-product of family ties. Data from the Independent Sector Giving and Volunteering biennial surveys between 1987 and 1999, though more volatile and less robust than the DDB Needham data, also show increasing volunteerism among respondents over forty-five (especially among those over seventy-five), coupled with little or no growth among those under forty-five.

  38. According to the National Fire Protection Association, volunteer fire personnel nationwide dropped from 884,600 in 1983 to 803,350 in 1997, while professionals rose from 226,600 to 275,700. Most communities under 50,000 are protected by volunteer fire departments. According to the Comprehensive Report on Blood Collection and Transfusion in the United States in 1997 (Bethesda, Md.: National Blood Data Resource Center, May 1999), 29, nationwide blood donations per capita (excluding self-directed donations) fell by roughly 20 percent between 1987 and 1997. The fraction of the public who said that giving blood was one way to get AIDS fell from 48 percent in August 1989 to 24 percent in June 1995, according to Public Opinion Online (Roper Center at University of Connecticut, Storrs), accession numbers 0126019 and 0197588. Data from 1979 to 1987, though not directly comparable to the later data, suggests a rising rate of blood donation, but the post-1987 decline is already greater than the earlier rise. Surveys over the last quarter century have consistently found that blood donation drops sharply after age fifty, so the decline began just as people born in 1937 (the last of what chapter 14 terms “the long civic generation”) left the donor pool. On generational factors in the decline of blood donation, see also Eric Nagourney, “Blood Shortage: Answers Scarce, Too,” New York Times, October 5, 1999, D8.

  39. Kristin A. Goss, “Volunteering and the Long Civic Generation,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 28 (1999): 378–415. See also Susan Chambré, “Volunteerism by Elders: Past Trends and Future Prospects,” Gerontologist 33 (April 1993): 221–228.

  40. Robinson and Godbey, Time for Life; John P. Robinson, Perla Werner, and Geoffrey Godbey, “Freeing Up the Golden Years,” American Demographics, October 1997, 20–24.

  41. Controlling for age, education, year, gender, income, church attendance, club attendance, and marital and parental status, volunteering is positively correlated with interest in politics and negatively correlated with agreement that “honest men cannot get elected.” Among frequent volunteers, 58 percent say they are interested in politics, compared to 41 percent of nonvolunteers. Only 42 percent of frequent volunteers agree that “honest men cannot get elected,” as opposed to 49 percent of nonvolunteers. This correlation between volunteering and political engagement was steadily positive over the last quarter century.

  CHAPTER 8: RECIPROCITY, HONESTY, AND TRUST

  1. David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature, book 3, part 2, section 5 [1740]), as quoted in Robert Sugden, The Economics of Rights, Co-operation and Welfare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 106.

  2. Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy, and Liberty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 28–29. See also Alvin W. Gouldner, “The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement,” American Sociological Review 25 (April 1960): 161–178.

  3. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 525–528.

  4. Francis Fukuyama, Trust (New York: Free Press, 1995); Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert W. Vishny, “Trust in Large Organizations,” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 87 (May 1997): 333–338; Stephen Knack and Philip Keefer, “Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff? A Cross-country Investigation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (1997): 1251–1288; and Kenneth J. Arrow, “Gifts and Exchanges,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (summer 1972): 343–362.

  5. Ichiro Kawachi, Bruce P. Kennedy, and Kimberly Lochner, “Long Live Community: Social Capital as Public Health,” The American Prospect, November/December 1997, 56–59.

  6. For evidence that generalized social trust (trust in the absence of evidence to the contrary) is unrelated to gullibility (trust in the presence of evidence to the contrary), see Julian B. Rotter, “Interpersonal Trust, Trustworthiness, and Gullibility,” American Psychologist 35 (January 1980): 1–7.

  7. I am grateful to Russell Hardin for clarifying this important distinction for me. See his “Street Level Epistemology of Trust,” Politics & Society 21 (December 1993): 505–529.

  8. Diego Gambetta, “Can We Trust Trust?” in Trust: Making and
Breaking Cooperative Relations, ed. Diego Gambetta (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 221.

  9. Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91 (November 1985): 481–510; Coleman, Foundations, 300–321; Putnam, Making Democracy Work, ch. 6; Margaret Levy, “Social and Unsocial Capital: A Review Essay of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work,” Politics & Society 24 (March 1996): 45–55; Edward Glaeser, David Laibson, Jose Scheinkman, and Christine Soutter, “What Is Social Capital? The Determinants of Trust and Trustworthiness,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 7216 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, July 1999).

  10. Bernard Williams, “Formal Structures and Social Reality,” in Gambetta, Trust, 3–13; Ronald S. Burt and Marc Knez, “Trust and Third-Party Gossip,” in Trust in Organizations, ed. Roderick M. Kramer and Tom R. Tyler (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996), 68–89. This distinction between thin and thick trust is close (but not identical) to the distinction that Toshio Yamagishi and Midori Yamagishi, “Trust and Commitment in the United States and Japan,” Motivation and Emotion 18 (June 1994): 129–66, draw between “trust” and “commitment.”

  11. Rotter (“Interpersonal Trust, Trustworthiness, and Gullibility,” 2) defines “the generalized other” as “a person or group with whom one has not had a great deal of personal experience.” Across forty-three states for which data are available, organizational density (based on the Roper Social and Political Trends surveys) and social trust (based on the General Social Survey and the DDB Needham Life Style surveys) are correlated R = .52.

  12. “Thick trust” and “thin trust” represent the ends of a continuum, for “thick trust” refers to trust with a short radius, encompassing only others who are close to the truster, sociologically speaking, and “thin trust” refers to trust with a long radius, encompassing people at a greater social distance from the truster.

  13. Wendy M. Rahn and John E. Transue, “Social Trust and Value Change: The Decline of Social Capital in American Youth, 1976–1995,” Political Psychology 19 (September 1998): 545–565, quotation at 545.

  14. For evidence of the generalizations in this paragraph, see John Brehm and Wendy Rahn, “Individual-Level Evidence for the Causes and Consequences of Social Capital,” American Journal of Political Science 41 (July 1997): 999–1023; Eric Uslaner, “Faith, Hope, and Charity: Trust and Collective Action” (College Park: University of Maryland, 1995); John T. Scholz, “Trust, Taxes, and Compliance,” in Trust and Governance, Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust, vol. 1, ed. Valerie A. Braithwaite and Margaret Levi (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998), 135–166; Young-dahl Song and Tinsley E. Yarbrough, “Tax Ethics and Taxpayer Attitudes: A Survey,” Public Administration Review 38 (September/October 1978): 442–452; Steven M. Sheffrin and Robert K. Triest, “Can Brute Deterrence Backfire? Perceptions and Attitudes in Taxpayer Compliance,” in Why People Pay Taxes: Tax Compliance and Enforcement, ed. Joel Slemrod (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 193–218; John T. Scholz and Mark Lubell, “Trust and Taxpaying: Testing the Heuristic Approach to Collective Action,” American Journal of Political Science 42 (April 1998): 398–417; Stephen Knack, “Civic Norms, Social Sanctions, and Voter Turnout,” 145; Rotter, “Interpersonal Trust, Trustworthiness, and Gullibility”; and unpublished analysis of a 1991 Roper survey by Robert B. Smith (Cambridge, Mass., June 1998); I am grateful to Dr. Smith for sharing this analysis. For details about the survey, see Public Attitude Monitor 1991 (Wheaton, III.: Insurance Research Council, 1991). According to the DDB Needham Life Style data, controlling for various demographic factors, social trust is associated with frequent attendance at club meetings and church services, as well as with more frequent blood donation.

  15. A lively debate is under way about the direction of the causal arrows among these factors. The debate is important and yet complicated both theoretically and empirically. However, it is only tangential to my concern here. For an important first step in the experimental exploration of these issues, see Glaeser, Laibson, Scheinkman, and Soutter, “What Is Social Capital?”

  16. Across individuals, across countries, and across time, social and political trust are, in fact, correlated, but social scientists are very far from agreement about why. Some believe that a native disposition to credulity explains both. Some believe that both are influenced by the same thing—prosperity, government performance, or whatever. Some believe that one leads to the other through a complicated chain of causation; for example, perhaps low social trust leads to political conflict which lowers government performance which reduces trust in government. For a range of views, see Levi and Braithwaite, Trust and Governance; Susan Pharr and Robert D. Putnam, eds., What’s Troubling the Trilateral Democracies? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Robert Wuthnow, “The Changing Character of Social Capital in the United States”; Brehm and Rahn, “Individual-Level Evidence”; Tom W. Smith, “Factors Relating to Misanthropy in Contemporary American Society,” Social Science Research 26 (June 1997): 170–196; and Ken Newton, “Social and Political Trust,” in Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government, ed. Pippa Norris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  17. For empirical evidence that this question taps trust in strangers, see Eric Uslaner, Moral Foundations of Trust (forthcoming).

  18. Kenneth Newton, “Social Capital and Democracy,” American Behavioral Scientist 40 (March/April 1997): 575–586.

  19. Author’s analysis of GSS and DDB Needham Life Style survey archives, using comprehensive controls for other demographic characteristics. Independent analysis of the GSS confirms these patterns; see Smith, “Factors Relating to Misanthropy.”

  20. For evidence supporting the generalizations of this paragraph, see Uniform Crime Rates for the United States 1997 (Washington, D.C.: Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1998), available at www.fbi.gov/ucr/Cius_97/97crime/97crime.pdf; Brehm and Rahn, “Individual-Level Evidence”; Alfred DeMaris and Renxin Yang, “Race, Alienation, and Interpersonal Mistrust,” Sociological Spectrum 14 (October/December 1994): 327–349; Tom W. Smith, “Factors Relating to Misanthropy”; Korte and Kerr, “Response to Altruistic Opportunities in Urban and Nonurban Settings,” 183–84; Stanley Milgram, “The Experience of Living in Cities,” Science 167 (March 1970): 1461–1468; unpublished analysis by Robert B. Smith, as cited in note 14; and Paul Blumberg, The Predatory Society: Deception in the American Marketplace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 163.

  21. Intriguing international evidence on the accuracy of reports about generalized reciprocity come from a study sponsored by Reader’s Digest. Four hundred wallets with $50 in cash and the names and addresses of their putative owners were left on city streets in fourteen different European countries. The rate at which the wallets were returned intact closely corresponded (r = .67) to the national score on the standard social trust question. In other words, where citizens report that “most people can be trusted,” they’re generally right, and where citizens report that “you can’t be too careful in dealing with people,” they’re right, too. This fascinating result is reported in Knack and Keefer, “Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff?,” 1257.

  22. Social psychologists have found evidence that social trust is both a more or less stable feature of an individual’s psyche and a cognitive response to changing circumstance and context. See, for example, Sharon G. Goto, “To Trust or Not to Trust: Situational and Dispositional Determinants,” Social Behavior and Personality 24 (1996): 119–132. Eric Uslaner in his forthcoming The Moral Foundations of Trust argues that generalized or thin trust derives from personal optimism, which in turn derives from childhood experience.

  23. Robert Wuthnow, “The Role of Trust in Civic Renewal,” The National Commission on Civic Renewal, working paper no. 1 (College Park: University of Maryland, 1997). Glaeser, Laibson, Scheinkman, and Soutter, “What Is Social Capital?” argue that the standard question predicts
behavioral trustworthiness, not trust.

  24. In The Cynical Americans: Living and Working in an Age of Discontent and Disillusion (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989), Donald L. Kanter and Philip H. Mirvis report that 72 percent of the workers surveyed agreed that “there is a growing loss of basic trust and faith in other people.”

  25. Lane, “Politics of Consensus,” 879; and Niemi, Mueller, and Smith, Trends in Public Opinion, 303, report that agreement that “most people can be trusted” climbed from 66 percent in 1942–48 to 77 percent in 1963–64 and thereafter fell to 71 percent in 1966 and to 56 percent by 1983. These data cannot be compared with responses to the standard trust question used elsewhere in this book, for the surveys cited in this note posed only the single phrase “most people can be trusted,” whereas the standard question offers a choice between “most people can be trusted” and “you can’t be too careful.” Adding the distrustful alternative lowers measured trust by about twenty percentage points.

  26. The surveys summarized in figure 38 are these:

  Survey Archive

  Period

  Trust in Earliest Year

  Trust in Latest Year

  Relative Change Per Decade

  NORC-General Social Survey

  1972–1998

  –48%

  –39%