“Honesty and trust lubricate the inevitable frictions of social life”.
Rubert Putnam, 2002 in ‘Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community’
Trust underpins almost every kind of social interaction: we rely on it when we share personal information, cooperate at work, or engage with institutions and public services. Building trust usually takes time and repeated positive experiences, whereas losing it can happen very quickly. Against the backdrop of declining trust in institutions and in one another reported in recent reports and surveys (e.g., UN DESA Policy Brief No. 184: The erosion of trust: A threat to social progress), it becomes crucial to understand how trust develops from adolescence into adulthood and which social experiences shape this trajectory.
When we started looking into this, we were surprised by how few long‑term studies follow young people’s trust over time, even though many psychologists and trust researchers argue that our early family and childhood experiences lay the groundwork for how much we trust others later on in life. As we screened the literature, we were further impressed by how many disciplines and subdisciplines study trust, for example social and clinical psychology, sociology, criminology, political science, behavioral economics, philosophy and theology. This breadth was at times overwhelming, and the terminology could be genuinely confusing: on the one hand, many different labels described partly overlapping constructs, on the other hand quite different phenomena were all described as social trust, interpersonal trust, or propensity to trust. In our work, we focus specifically on how generalized trust develops, that is, the basic belief that “most people can be trusted,” even when we do not know them personally.
Our paper, “Family background and peer victimization are associated with generalized trust from adolescence to adulthood”, is the result of a three‑year professional journey and became a central part of my postdoctoral work. It marked a shift for me from a clinically oriented focus in child and adolescent mental health toward developmental psychology, both conceptually and methodologically. The project was also shaped by a more personal journey, with over two years of work threaded between two parental leaves and a level of sleeplessness I could never have anticipated. In many ways, it became an exercise in trust itself: trusting that repeatedly returning to the code, the data, and the drafts would eventually yield a meaningful contribution to this broad literature.
Why study generalized trust in young people?
Generalized trust is not about trusting specific individuals, like a parent or a best friend. It is about a broader expectation that “most people” are generally honest, fair, and helpful. This kind of trust is linked to better mental health and wellbeing, and to everyday behaviors such as greater cooperation with others or more civic engagement. Through these individual behaviors, generalized trust is also thought to support how communities and societies function, for example by making it easier to solve shared problems or to uphold social norms. Yet most of what we know about generalized trust comes from adults and is typically based on measurements at only a single point in time.
Developmental researchers, by contrast, think in processes and longitudinal change: How do beliefs and expectations change as children become adolescents, and adolescents become adults? How stable are people’s trust trajectories within and between individuals? And do our ways of measuring trust actually work the same way over time? These were the questions that kept me returning to this dataset. Good thing, my sleep was already fragmented before I started worrying about longitudinal measurement models.
A rare 11‑year window into generalized trust development
Our study draws on the Zurich Project on the Social Development of Children and Youths (z-proso), a large longitudinal study that has followed a cohort of young people in Switzerland from childhood into adulthood. For this paper, we focused on generalized trust from age 13 through 24, spanning early adolescence, late adolescence, and young adulthood. This long-time frame is crucial. Trust is not something that switches on or off at a single age; it unfolds against a backdrop of family dynamics, school experiences, and shifting social environments.
We were especially interested in three aspects of family contexts and peer experiences that might shape generalized trust:
- Structural family context: Families’ socioeconomic resources and migration background, which can influence young people’s everyday experiences of security, opportunity, and fairness.
- Relational family context: How warm, supportive, and structured the family climate felt, and how parents typically responded to conflicts or misbehavior; harshly, inconsistently, or with clear rules and explanations.
- Peer victimization: The extent to which young people were exposed to bullying, exclusion, or other forms of victimization by their peers.
Both families and peers are powerful relational micro systems. Supportive family climates may offer many experiences in which others prove to be reliable and responsive. Peer victimization, by contrast, may convey the message that others are dangerous, unfair, or humiliating.
What we found
Our findings suggest that generalized trust in this cohort was not fixed in early adolescence. As these young people moved into adulthood, average trust first declined and then rose again, rather than changing in a straight line. Over the same period, differences between individuals became more stable, meaning that people’s trust levels settled into more enduring patterns as they approached adulthood. In other words, adolescence seems to be a phase in which generalized trust is actively recalibrated, before it gradually becomes more stable.
Differences by family background were not yet visible at age 13, but emerged and grew over the course of adolescence. Over time, young people from families with fewer socioeconomic resources and those with a migration background tended to report lower generalized trust than their peers. Young people who grew up in warmer, more supportive and trusting family climates generally reported higher generalized trust from adolescence into adulthood, whereas harsher or rejecting parental behavior was linked to lower trust. This suggests that predictable, fair treatment at home may provide an important foundation for the social trust lenses through which one looks upon the world.
Peer experiences mattered as well. Adolescents who were more often bullied, excluded, or humiliated by peers tended to report lower generalized trust, even when we took family context and other factors into account. Repeatedly being hurt or left out by others seems to undermine the belief that “most people” can be relied on.
Why this matters
Our findings add to growing evidence that trust has developmental roots and is shaped by everyday relationships. Adolescence seems to be a crucial period when differences in generalized trust linked to family resources, migration background, and experiences of bullying begin to emerge, but also a time when trust can still be fostered and recalibrated. Protecting children and adolescents from peer victimization and supporting warm, fair family climates may not only reduce immediate harm, but also help build the kind of generalized trust that supports wellbeing and social cohesion later in life. If you are curious about the methods, statistical models, or detailed results, you can find the full article in Communications Psychology, where we describe our efforts to understand how young people learn whether the world, and the people in it, can be trusted.