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| big_D wrote: It is certainly the case that Germany seems to be much more trusting than modern Britain.
As I've said elsewhere, here in Germany it is still relatively common for people not to worry about locking the house if they pop out to the shops. Bikes stand outside in the garden unlocked, people don't lock their garages - heck, I have one friend who leaves his garage unlocked and the keys in his motorbikes and his friends can turn up and go for a spin, if they want to.
Where I lived in the UK, it was like that before I left at the end of the 90s. If I forgot to close the car windows when I got home, a neighbour would ring on the doorbell the next day and let me know. Now, if the car is left on the road over night, then they have to expect that the aerial is broken off or tyres slashed, if nothing worse, before they get up in the morning.
My old neighbours have had their garden and the garden furniture destroyed on several occasions now. They are thinking of moving to South Africa to be near a cousin. | |
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I think fear of crime has its own indexes. Interpersonal trust is more a measure of how much you trust you have for your friends, neighbours and strangers you meet in the course of everyday transactions. It's used as a proxy by economists to estimate the hidden costs of the little things that we do all the time to prevent people ripping us off. Part of that is shopkeepers we don't trust to sell us what we pay for, and who in turn don't trust us not to pilfer. But it's also the contractual obligations we impose on friends to whom we lend DVDs - or don't if they seem like wrong-uns. I
think Sociologists like it for similar reasons - less trusting societies put more emphasis on reciprocation and collateral, more trusting ones take a more what-goes-around-comes-around attitude in general.
The Nordics are less likely to view people who they know, or think they could well know, with peering suspicion. This supposedly extends as far as politicians (again, check with a sociologist for the full details on how that works). That said, you can still get quite a high degree of xenophobia in a country with a high trust index, because that involves peering with suspicion at people who don't remind us of ourselves. So the extent to which politicians can gain by this effect is related to how relatable they are, which I imagine explains a lot in itself.
