266. Trust Me

Societies where people trust one another are healthier and wealthier. In the U. S. (and the U. K. and elsewhere), social trust has been falling for decades -- in part because our populations are more diverse. What can we do to fix it?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example? Well, PNC Bank did, since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-yolo type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. "Brilliantly boring since 1865" is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 0:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must-haves, like gym access or breakfast, just once, then get tailored results whenever you search for work-travel. Plus, with a free membership, you can save up to 20% on hotels and earn rewards on every stay for future travel. Book now at hotels.com. Visit hotels.com for details.

• 1:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Mint Mobile. With Mint Mobile's Summer Sale, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. Free yourself from big wireless and switch to Mint for high-speed data and coverage on the T-Mobile 5G network. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com/freak. That's mintmobile.com/freak. Upfront payment: $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required: $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 2:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work is a new way to work in ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work can pull info from across your apps and connect to your tools to help you create finished work. You can even automate work in ChatGPT with the Scheduled Tasks feature, and the whole time, you stay in control. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 2:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  You may have noticed that we recently held a presidential election. I think you'd agree, it was pretty wonderful. According to statisticians, it set all-time highs in civil discourse and social unity. How are we so fortunate? Because America, as we all know and appreciate, is a place where people really trust one another.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  No, I don't think most people can be trusted because I think everybody's always looking for an angle.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Generally speaking, I don't think most people can be trusted.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Society seems to have been changing and separating, and many, many people more than before, I think, are out just for themselves.

• 3:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, apparently I was wrong. Apparently, we don't trust one another so much?

• 3:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's that? Oh. And apparently, we didn't set all-time highs in social unity during this election? Sorry, my mistake. I guess I was thinking of Australia?

• 3:54Speaker 04

  Australia is the one which looks like it's bucking the trend and moving towards higher social trust in the last 20, 30 years.

• 4:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or maybe I was thinking of the Netherlands.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  They're now close to 70% in levels of those who think others can be trusted.

• 4:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  In America, meanwhile, if we're being honest, we're not much on trust these days. Just think of this past election. We mistrusted the candidates and their parties. We mistrusted the police and the FBI. We mistrusted the polls, and some people even mistrusted the election result. But wait, maybe there's a bright side. Maybe it's healthy for society to be untrusting, to be skeptical. Maybe it keeps us on our toes, always looking for ways to improve. What's that? Oh, I'm wrong about that too, Professor?

• 4:39Speaker 05

  We would be much better off if we were living in a more trustworthy society. Trustworthiness, in short, is a really big deal.

• 4:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, then. Today on Freakonomics Radio, a simple mission: to determine why social trust is such a big deal and how to get more of it. Wouldn't you like to know how to do that?

• 5:00Speaker 06

  Um, I think that might be a trick question.

• 5:17Speaker 07

  From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Social trust is what, exactly?

• 5:35Speaker 04

  It's just one of those things. It's sort of like the dark matter of the economy and society matters very greatly, and yet we don't seem to focus on it very much.

• 5:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is one of my favorite academic slash policy wonks in the world, David Halpern.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  I'm the head of the UK's Behavioral Insight Team, often known as the Nudge Unit.

• 5:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Nudge Unit applies the findings of behavioral science to do things like increase tax payments, decrease medical errors, and conserve energy. It also looks into broader ideas like social trust. As Halpern was saying...

• 6:08Speaker 04

  Social trust is an extraordinarily interesting variable and doesn't get anywhere near the attention it deserves. But the basic idea is trying to understand what is it, the kind of the fabric of society that makes economies and indeed just people get along in general? It's clearly so critical for a whole range of outcomes.

• 6:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Outcomes like economic growth?

• 6:28Speaker 04

  This is a more powerful predictor of future national growth rates than, for example, levels of human capital or skills in the population.

• 6:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Outcomes like individual health?

• 6:38Speaker 04

  Basically, having someone or feeling that other people can be trusted or people you can rely on in your life is worth a great deal. It's roughly the same positive effect as giving up smoking. You know, and smoking is really, really bad for you. So, you know, social isolation essentially is incredibly bad for your health.

• 6:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So can people like Halpern reliably measure the level of social trust in a given place?

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Yes, you can do it in a number of ways. You can ask people, how many names have they got in their file of faxes or in their phones? Which should give you some sense of their social networks. You can also measure more subtly with asking a question around social trust. Do you think other people can be trusted? Essentially, that's the question we've been asking, in fact, for decades.

• 7:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  And?

• 7:16Speaker 04

  There's very big national differences in this. Countries range from, you know, many countries like Brazil, where less than 10% of people would say most others can be trusted, to countries like Norway, where more than 70% of people would say most others can be trusted. Countries like the US and the UK are sort of halfway in between, typically in the range 30 to 40% of people say others can be trusted.

• 7:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Places with a lot of social trust also have a lot of what's known as social capital. So, most people are familiar with physical capital and financial capital, of course. Can you compare social capital to those in any meaningful way?

• 7:51Speaker 04

  The answer is, yeah, in fact, you can have a go at doing it. So you can literally work out, how much more do people tend to earn if they have more names in their networks and they know more people, or they trust more people in general? You can ask it both at the individual level, and you can also ask it, really importantly, at the community or even national level. So to what extent is it an advantage in terms of your economic growth or your health outcomes to live in a country or a place where people say most others can be trusted? And the answer is, it turns out, some really quite large numbers indeed.

• 8:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  If social trust and social capital are so important, why don't we talk about it all the time, or at least during political campaigns?

• 8:29Speaker 04

  So it's an issue which got long roots, but it doesn't mean that governments had done very much about it until very recently. I should explain, I myself wrote a book a number of years ago on social capital, specifically working with, at the time, with Bob Putnam at Harvard.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  My name is Bob Putnam. I teach public policy at Harvard University.

• 8:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Putnam is also the author of the landmark book Bowling Alone, which was published in 2000. But he started thinking about social capital decades earlier. It began with a question about Italian politics.

• 8:58Speaker 05

  Some parts of Italy are way more efficient than any state in America, and other parts of Italy are way more corrupt than any place in America. And the question is, why? Why are some places better governed than others?

• 9:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  The answer, Putnam concluded, didn't have to do with economic development, or education level, or politics.

• 9:20Speaker 05

  It was the degree to which there was a dense civic network in a community. If there was a dense civic network, so that people in those places behaved with respect to one another in a trustworthy way, their governments worked better. And I dubbed that concept "social capital."

• 9:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Meaning?

• 9:40Speaker 05

  The core idea of social capital is so simple that I'm almost embarrassed to say it. It is that social networks have value. Social networks have value, first of all, to the people who are in the networks. For example, there's a huge amount of work on how social networks help us find jobs.

• 10:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Social networks also exert other, more indirect leverage.

• 10:06Speaker 05

  They have effects on bystanders and not just effects on the people in them. Communities that have high levels of social capital benefit in many ways. Their kids do better in school, they have lower crime rates, they have, other things being equal, higher economic growth rates. Many, many benefits, both personally and collectively.

• 10:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Having made these observations about the power of social capital in Italy, Putnam returned to the US.

• 10:31Speaker 05

  And I was worried, just as a citizen, not as a scholar, I was worried that ever since I personally began to vote, which was way back in the 1960s, America seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket. And I said to myself, I wonder whether social capital might have something to do with this collapse of American civilization.

• 10:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  So he began looking for measures of connectivity in American civic life. Membership in parent teacher organizations, for instance.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  That is, what fraction of all parents in any given year belonged to the PTA? And I discovered, to my shock, that actually PTA membership had been declining a lot.

• 11:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  He looked at membership numbers among rotary clubs, among scout troops, among bowling leagues. Participation was falling in all these groups.

• 11:14Speaker 05

  We were becoming more and more isolated. Or, as a friend suggested to me once, you mean we're bowling alone?

• 11:26Speaker 04

  That's a really enormous effect.

• 11:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  David Halpern, again, from the British government's Behavioral Insights team. As obvious as the benefits of social capital might seem.

• 11:36Speaker 04

  We almost hardly seem to notice that it's there. So it's incredibly consequential, and we see it in lots of areas of policy that we touch on.

• 11:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you write this about low trust. Low trust implies a society where you have to keep an eye over your shoulder, where deals need lawyers instead of handshakes, where you don't see the point of paying your tax or recycling your rubbish since you doubt your neighbor will do so, and where you employ your cousin or your brother-in-law to work for you rather than a stranger who would probably be much better at the job. So that has all kinds of business and ultimately economic implications. However, when you talk about high trust being good for us on a personal level, whether it's health or individual income, do the two necessarily go in hand? In other words, can we have a society that has a business climate where there isn't a lot of trust, and therefore you do need all those lawyers instead of the handshakes,

• 12:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  but where you have good social trust among neighbors, family and friends, communities, and so on? Or are they really the same thing that you're talking about?

• 12:37Speaker 04

  Well, there is a key distinction, and Bob Putnam has often made this too, between what sometimes call bonding social capital and bridging social capital.

• 12:46Speaker 05

  Social capital is about social networks. But not all social networks are identical. And one important distinction is between ties that link us to other people like us. That's called bonding social capital.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Bonding social capital often refers to your closeness to your friends, your relatives, those immediately around you. It's particularly important, it turns out, for things such as health outcomes.

• 13:09Speaker 05

  Because empirically, if you get sick, the people who are likely to bring you chicken soup are likely to represent your bonding social capital.

• 13:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  So bonding social capital is plainly important, but it's primarily about our ties to people we're close with. When it comes to how our broader society gets along, that's where bridging social capital comes in.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  Do you trust not just your immediate neighbor, but those people in your community more generally, or indeed even relative strangers who you meet in everyday life in your country or your society?

• 13:36Speaker 05

  So my ties, my friendships to people of a different religion, or a different race, or a different economic class, or a different occupation, or a different age, that's bridging social capital.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  That tends to be really important.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  Especially in a modern, diverse democracy like ours. And therefore, what worries me most about trends in America is the decline in bridging social capital.

• 14:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's something we saw plenty of during the presidential election. So much distrust among so many separate constituencies, a constant splintering and resplintering, instead of the drawing together that America likes to be known for. So coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we look at an experiment designed to measure trust along racial and ethnic lines. The news is not good.

• 14:27Speaker 08

  A lot of the cheating was across racial and ethnic lines.

• 14:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  But there is some good news. For instance,

• 14:34Speaker 04

  People who go to university end up trusting much more than those who don't.

• 14:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  And when we went out to the streets of New York and asked people the standard survey question, generally speaking, would you say most people can be trusted? We got plenty of affirmatives.

• 14:48Speaker 09

  I think so, generally. There's more good people in the world than there are bad people. So that leads me to believe that you can trust people.

• 14:56Speaker 10

  Yeah, I would say they could. I think that's maybe like a naive assumption on my part, like to believe that there's good in everyone.

• 15:05Speaker 11

  I've had great experiences with strangers. I think in the majority of cases, people are good. I trust people, yeah.

• 15:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Granola. You know that moment when a meeting ends and someone says, let's circle back on this next week and everyone nods, but no one writes it down? Then next week rolls around and it's radio silence? That's why Granola exists. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. And the best part? Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. No setup, no awkward bots. It's just your normal meeting with superpowers. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer.

• 16:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  You can try it totally free, just head to granola.ai/freakonomics. That's granola.ai/freakonomics to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai/freakonomics.

• 16:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Quince. You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself wearing on repeat? The sweater that goes with everything? The perfect pair of pants? Or the tea you somehow always reach for first? Those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere or Organic cotton and merino wool. The styles are timeless, versatile, and designed to become the dependable pieces you reach for day after day. And it's not just clothing. Quince brings that same approach to everything they make, from hotel-quality bedding and bath to kitchen essentials and thoughtfully-designed furniture. Find your next fall favorites at Quince.

• 17:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com/freak. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com/freak.

• 17:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on the things you love, like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep sipping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 18:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what have we learned thus far?

• 18:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  We've learned that social trust seems to be quite powerful and desirable, but how do you get more of it? You can't just magically turn up social trust in a given place. You can't force everyone to join the PTA or the church group or whatever. So rather than solving for X, where X is how to increase social trust, let's first solve for Y, where Y is when social trust and social capital are low, why are they low?

• 18:34Speaker 05

  The short version is that in the short run, Increases in diversity seem to be correlated with decreases in social capital.

• 18:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Bob Putnam again. He and others have observed, over and over, that diversity, racial, ethnic, religious, and so on, make trust more elusive. Consider some research done by the Harvard economist Ed Glaser.

• 18:58Speaker 08

  Trust is everywhere in economic transactions. So we wanted to contribute to this literature. And one of the things that seemed very important to us was measuring trust, was measuring social capital.

• 19:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Rather than relying solely on survey data, Glaser and his colleagues set up an experiment. Not that experiments are perfect either.

• 19:18Speaker 08

  So we took a bunch of Harvard undergraduates, because what could possibly be more representative than that?

• 19:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  They tried to measure trust in a variety of ways, including a game where students were paired with each other, with one sending money to the other without being sure whether they'd get the money back.

• 19:35Speaker 08

  It's basically meant to mimic the idea of an investor giving money to a firm, and the firm then chooses whether or not to cheat the investor or not.

• 19:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some students treated their partners fairly. Others, however, essentially cheated, keeping most or all the money for themselves. When did that happen? It happened when the two players didn't look alike.

• 19:56Speaker 08

  A lot of the cheating was across racial and ethnic lines. And this was primarily white on Asian, meaning the whites were cheating the Asians. And I think there are lots of cases in the world in which we've seen racial fractionalization be related to less than perfectly functioning social relations.

• 20:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think that more ethnically homogeneous societies, you know, one argument behind Scandinavian economic and social successes is that they tend to produce better social outcomes? And do you think there's evidence for that?

• 20:29Speaker 08

  I do. It is true, for example, that the welfare states are both more generous in ethnically homogeneous places. And it's almost assuredly true that they're also more functional. They function better in more ethnically homogeneous places. It's just easier in lots of ways. There are downsides to that. I mean, I happen to love Stockholm. It's a great city. But certainly, one can argue that small homogeneous places are not necessarily as creative as they might be.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  So I think there are lots of benefits for being in an ethnically and culturally mixed society.

• 20:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  David Halpern again.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  Look, I'm speaking to you today from London, one of the most diverse cities in the world, and it has a deep vibrancy that follows from that. I mean, the real challenge for us is can we have our cake and eat it? What is it that drives and enables diverse and interesting sort of varied populations, cities, countries, to be able to live together well? That's the real challenge.

• 21:21Speaker 05

  Every place in the world, including us, and Canada, are all going to be more ethnically diverse 25 years from now.

• 21:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's Bob Putnam.

• 21:28Speaker 05

  Diversity, in the long run, is a big advantage.

• 21:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  But, he warns.

• 21:33Speaker 05

  It's not easy to do diversity. Diversity brings out the turtle in us, that in a more diverse setting, everybody kind of pulls in and disconnects from their neighbors.

• 21:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  But look, if the world is becoming more diverse, and if diversity tends to lower social trust, and if social trust is so important, shouldn't we be looking at ways to handle this problem?

• 21:58Speaker 04

  I think so, although, let's face it, there isn't that much work really doing intervention studies to figure it out.

• 22:04Speaker 05

  What strategies I would want to emphasize for moving in a positive direction would be more contexts in which people connect with one another across lines of race, or economics, or gender, or age.

• 22:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some classic examples of that? Sports teams, the military, and university.

• 22:26Speaker 04

  People who go to university end up trusting much more than those who don't, particularly when they go away residentially. It doesn't look like explained by income alone. So there's something about the experience of going off as a young person in an environment where you were lots of other young people from different backgrounds and so on, hopefully, and different ethnicities. You learn the habits of trust because you're in an environment where you can trust other people, they are trustworthy. And you internalize these habits and you take them with you the rest of your life. So we tend to not think of going away to university as being the reason why you're doing it is to build social capital and social trust. We think about learning skills and so on. But it may well be that it has as much or even more value in terms of culturing social trust going forward. The question is, do you have to do it in university? Can you do it in other ways?

• 23:11Speaker 04

  So in the UK, following partly an American lead, the government has championed a national citizen service. And what this means is for every young person, since she is 17-year-old increasingly, it starts off with a, not everyone does it at the moment, but it's more and more every single year, goes and does voluntary experience, community service. This deliberately includes a couple of weeks which are residential and deliberately includes mixing with people from all different walks of life. Look, it's only limited data, but in terms of before-after data, we see significant impacts in terms of higher levels of trust between groups and individuals, as well as instantly higher levels of life satisfaction and wellbeing too. So it looks like we can do something about it.

• 23:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's also helpful, David Halpern says, simply to look at the countries where social trust has been rising and see what they're up to. The Netherlands, for instance.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  In the most recent data, it looks like it's one of the biggest rises. So the Netherlands had pretty similar levels of social trust in the 1980s to America and the UK, but whereas we've now drifted down towards sort of 30-odd percent, they're now up close to 70% in levels of those you think others can be trusted.

• 24:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  What would you say it's caused by?

• 24:24Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, one of the characteristics of the Netherlands, and it's, you know, you have to be a bit careful when you pick off one country, is it has wrestled quite hard with the issues of not just inequality but social differences. They've really tried to do a lot in relation to making people essentially build cohesion. Particularly Amsterdam is a very famous area for its long been an extremely multicultural city. It's had issues over that, over time, but they've really, in a sort of succession of governments, have tried to quite actively. Make groups get along with each other in quite an active way. So that may, of course, itself root in the Netherlands, has quite a deep culture of a strong sense of the law being trustworthy and that contracts will be honoured and so on.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  It's what helped to power its economic success in previous centuries. So it does have that tradition also to draw on.

• 25:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what role does technology play in social capital? Especially the bridging social capital that people like Halpern and Putnam say is so important. In his book Bowling Alone, Putnam found that social capital was relatively low in the US in the early 1900s and rose fairly steadily through the 1960s. But that's when the decline began.

• 25:38Speaker 05

  I looked hard to find explanations and television, I argued, is really bad for social connectivity for many reasons.

• 25:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  More television watching, Putnam wrote, means less of virtually every form of civic participation and social involvement.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  As Bob sometimes put it, I think, rather elegantly, when we were looking forward in terms of technology or the internet and, of course, even pre-Facebook and so on, would it be, in his words, a fancy television? In other words, it will isolate us more and more. Or would it be a fancy telephone and would connect us more and more? Of course, technology has both those capabilities. So when I played video games when I was a kid, you basically did them mostly by yourself or with a friend. When I look at my teenage kids playing videos, they're actually talking to each other all the time. To some extent, it looks like to me that we get the technology that we want. And even this is true at a sort of societal level. So one of the arguments you can make, and in my view is true anyway, about explaining

• 26:38Speaker 04

  some of these differences in the trajectories across countries is in Anglo-Saxon countries, we've often used our wealth to buy technology and other experiences. That means we don't have to deal with other people. The inconveniences of having to go to a concert where I have to listen to music I really like, I can just stay at home and I just watch what I want and so on and choose it. And even on the level of, if I think about my kids versus me growing up, I mean, when I was growing up, we had one TV and there were Five kids in the household. You know, we really had to negotiate pretty hard about what we were going to watch. My kids don't have to do that, and probably not yours either. There are more screens in the house than there are people. They can all go off and do their own thing. To some extent, that's us using our wealth to escape from having to negotiate with other people. But that isn't necessarily the case.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  Some people and some countries seem to use their wealth more to find ways of connecting more with other people. And the technology has both these capabilities. And we can't just blame it. It's the choices we're making and how we use it and the technology which we're kind of asking and bringing forth.

• 27:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  It reminds me a bit of, we once looked into the kind of global decline of hitchhiking, for instance. One of the central reasons being that people no longer trusted strangers to not kill each other, really, is what it boiled down to. Even though there was apparently very little killing involved, but just the fear of one. And yet now Uber is a sixty-some-billion-dollar company that's basically all about using technology to lure a complete stranger into your car. Which I guess argues, if nothing else, the fact that technology can be harnessed very much in either direction.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  Indeed, so, I mean, as you say, there's actually two points here. And there's a really important behavioral one, which I think we've only figured out in recent years to bring together these different literatures. How does it relate to, you know, behavioral scientists versus those people studying social capital? We look like we have certain systematic biases about how we estimate whether we think other people can be trusted. And in essence, we overestimate, quite systematically, the prevalence of bad behavior. We overestimate the number of people who are cheating on their taxes, or take a sickie off work, or do other kinds of bad things. This doesn't seem to be just the media, although that may reinforce it. It seems to be a bit how we're wired as human beings. So why is that relevant? Why is this to do with technologies? Actually, technology can help you solve some of those issues.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  So when you're buying something on eBay, or you're trying to decide where to go using, you know, a trip advisor, it's actually you're getting some much better information from the experiences of other people, as opposed to your guesstimate, which is often systematically biased.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  In a way, we can sometimes use technology to solve some of these trust issues, not just in relation to specific products and shall I buy this thing from this person, but potentially more generally in relation to how do we trust other people? Because ultimately, the social trust question must rest on something. It must be a measure of actual trustworthiness.

• 29:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  The United States, for all the factionalism and bitterness we've seen during the presidential campaign, and let's be honest, for years and years preceding, is actually well-positioned to regenerate social trust, even as the country becomes more diverse. Why? Because, as Bob Putnam argues, we've done it before. A lot.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  If we were talking in America in the 1920s or 1930s, the difference between Irish people and Italian people would have been enormous. I have some friends who got married in the 1960s. He was from an Italian background, she was from an Irish background. And when they got married, everybody called it a mixed marriage. Parents on both sides all said, "Mixed marriages never work." And now that seems like a joke, because what's happened in the ensuing years is that the line, the sharp line between Italians and Irish has just disappeared in America. It's not that they don't know that they're from Irish or Italian backgrounds, but it no longer has that same salience. We've done this repeatedly over our own history. This current wave of immigration is not the first time

• 30:42Speaker 05

  that we have had a big wave of immigration that causes turbulence. And then when you come out the other side, we're all better off. I mean, look, it happens that my ancestors came to this country in 1640. So we've been here forever. And we were doing just fine, and then the Dutch arrived. Now, don't get me started on the Dutch. It was really hard for us to get along with the Dutch, but then eventually we got along with the Dutch, and then we forgot they were Dutch. And then there was just us. And then the Germans arrived, and they were really difficult. We had a lot of, a lot of trouble assimilating the Germans. And then, after a while, we got adjusted to them, and we sort of didn't even notice that the Germans were Germans. And then we had, we invented at that point a term called Anglo-Saxon to refer to the Dutch and the Germans and us. And then we had a lot of trouble when the Irish arrived. I hope you see that there's a smile on my face.

• 31:27Speaker 05

  We've done this a lot.

• 31:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up next week on Freakonomics Radio, have you ever heard of the gambler's fallacy? So the gambler's fallacy is expecting that if you've had a streak of a couple of outcomes in a row, that the next outcome is just much more likely to go the other way, and that's just simply not true. Well, it turns out that gamblers aren't the only people who get fooled by the gambler's fallacy. We look at Major League Baseball umpires. We look at loan officers, and we even look at federal court asylum judges. And what do the umpires think of this?

• 32:04Speaker 12

  One of the biggest things you have to do when you're an umpire is be honest with yourself.

• 32:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our staff also includes Shelley Lewis, Christopher Wirth, Jay Cowett, Merritt Jacob, Noah Kurnas, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, and Harry Huggins. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, and you should really come visit Freakonomics.com because there you will find our entire podcast archive, as well as a complete transcript of every episode we've ever made, along with the music credits and lots more. Thanks for listening.

• 33:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 and 9 milligrams, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic pill.

• 33:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. Southern Company's commitment to meeting this demand stays the same. That's because Southern Company believes energy is more than a utility. It's what powers possibilities. So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Southern Company, building the future of energy.

• 34:18Speaker 13

  Hey, listeners, I'm Ash.

• 34:20Speaker 14

  And I'm Alena.

• 34:21Speaker 13

  And we are so excited to have joined the SiriusXM family.

• 34:28Speaker 14

  And you know what? If you want to keep hearing new episodes of Morbid ad-free, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com/podcastsplus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. Let's go.

• 34:47Speaker 12

  This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Is there a right time to sell a stock? Are you taking the right risks with your portfolio? Financial decisions can be tricky, and often, your own cognitive and emotional biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Join host Mark Reapy as he offers practical solutions to help overcome the cognitive and emotional biases that may affect your investing decisions. Listen at schwab.com/financialdecoder.