A Study On Interpersonal Trust

In recent years, the interpersonal trust crisis occurred frequently has caused the close attention by academic circles. What are the types of interpersonal trust for Chinese residents? What are current situations of different trust to different objects? And what factors they are affected by? These are all the hot topics of scholars,In this study, on the basis of previous achievements, we combined the micro and macro level to explore the influencing factors of interpersonal trust from three perspectives:social resources, moral foundation and social environment. And through studying the way these factors affected both perticular trust and universal trust, we aimed to analysis the difference and the similarity between these two types of interpersonal trust. We did a deep and comprehensive research about the factors that affect the interpersonal trust of domestic residents in nowadays.This study used the data from a nationwide sample survey which was carried out by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CSS2013). The data is authoritative and with high timeliness, so as to ensure the validity of the results. The main results are as follows:First, from the analysis of the different theory of trust, we found that social environment is an important factor in influencing the interpersonal trust. Our study found that the variables of social environment have stronger explanatory power than other theoretical perspectives, on both perticular trust and universal trust. Furthermore, compared with the perspective of social resources, the moral foundation perspective has stronger predictive force that is almost ignored by domestic scholars, which means such perspective should attract our attention. In addition, we found that, the social resources perspective is lack of interpretation power. In fact, more resources the individual have do not carry the higher the degree of interpersonal trust.Second, from the comparative analysis of factors that affect perticular trust and universal trust, we found that the two significant influencing factors to the perticular trust are life satisfaction and social security; and the most influencing factors for universal trust are higher education, government trust, social security and social equality. Therefore, the main influence factors between perticular trust and universal trust are different. Relatively speaking, universal trust is more influenced by the macro social environment.Third, in the model of perticular trust and universal trust, the standard coefficient of age is always much higher than other variables, shows that age has a great influence on interpersonal trust:the older of respondents, the higher the level of interpersonal trust. The intergenerational differences in interpersonal trust indicate that particular social background has a strong effect on interpersonal trust. At the same time, the social transformation and rapid change in special social background is a major cause of the decreasing in interpersonal trust.Fourth, whether the perticular trust and universal trust, it does not demonstrate that higher standard of economy will bring the higher the degree of trust. And the Northeast residents have the highest level of interpersonal trust among four areas, which means that trust and economy is not within a positive contact. The effect of income on interpersonal trust also showed that the trust level of middle- and high-income respondents are lower than low-income respondents, and the high-income group has the lowest level with the most significant effect. The geographical distribution of trust and low trust level of high-income group have shown that interpersonal trust was not positively correlated with the economy. Whether the micro individual income level or the macro regional economy will not promote the interpersonal trust, and in some measure even showed a negative correlation, which refuted the view of Fukuyama that trust and the national economy has a positive correlation.