Use More,Trust Less?Impact Of Media Use On Social Trust

Social trust refers to people’s belief towards other people.It argues that most people,including strangers,can be trusted.Such trust promotes cooperation between strangers and can help with some current collective action problems.The issue of social trust has long received attentions from policymakers and academia.According to Fukuyama,social trust influences and determines a country’s economic prosperity and social progress.Studies have shown that countries with high levels of trust are less corrupt,more prosperous and more democratic than countries with prevailing distrust.According to Lippmann’s pseudo environment theory,we live in an information environment formed by mass communication activities.It is not a real reproduction of the objective environment,but a re-structured environment suggested to people by the media through the selection and processing of information.In the Chinese context,the media,as the main propaganda tool of the government,has an overwhelming top-down communication advantage and communication effect.Traditional media,such as television,radio,and newspapers,can be regarded as a sort of acquaintance society,where people have direct and familiar relationships with each other,and have a higher level of social trust compared to the stranger society created by the Internet.Furthermore,there may be regional differences in the effect of media use on the level of social trust.Giddens has noted that the more resources a person has,the more open he or she is to others,which increases trust.In a way,though the Internet can deliver information throughout society,it provides only one possibility of equality.The household registration system in China makes the uneven distribution of resources between urban and rural areas,as well as the uneven economic development between the east and west of China.The Internet is therefore likely to widen the knowledge gap between members of different regions of society.Yet,only few empirical studies have addressed this issue.Moreover,most research studies about media use and social trust employ the traditional Ordinary Least Squares(OLS)model with many variables confounding the relationship between the independent and dependent variables that do not infer causation well.Using the data of 2015 China General Social Survey(CGSS2015),we examine the relationship between media use and the level of social trust from the perspective of media exposure among young and middle-aged groups in China.Specifically,we ensure the reliability of causal conclusions by using Propensity Score Matching(PSM)model to demonstrate that young and middle-aged people who use Internet as their main information source tend to have a lower level of social trust compared to those who use traditional media such as TV,radio or newspapers.Also,by performing a heterogeneity analysis,this research found that the variations in the relationship of media use and the level of social trust display regional differences.The findings illustrate that social trust declines are more pronounced among young and middle-aged people who use Internet as the main source in rural areas than those of urban areas.This difference is also significant in regions of Western China than those of Eastern China.