Trust
Along with researchers in China and Canada (led by Cary Wu from York University in Toronto), I am part of a project on “The dynamics of trust before, during, and after the COVID-19 outbreak”. This is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
In collaboration with researchers in Sweden and Canada, since 2017 I have also been working on a project entitled Three Worlds of Trust: A Longitudinal Study of Welfare States, Life-Course Risks, and Social Trust (PI: Jan Mewes), funded by Sweden's Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. We are seeking to understand how major life events may undermine or foster social trust, and how they may do so differently in different social contexts.
In previous research, I've found mixed evidence for the influential thesis that the foundation of trust is equality. Within the U.S., for example, Isaac Martin and I found that trust is higher in states with more equal distributions of income, but trust has declined no faster in states where income inequality has grown more than average. The jury's still out on this relationship.