Measuring Trust in Affectively Polarized Societies

Affective polarization is often defined as dislike and distrust of the “other” political (or politicised) camp. A good deal of effort has gone into assessing whether, and to what extent, the concept is empirically linked to various normatively negative impacts on society, including, but not limited to, the erosion of democratic norms. However, the emphasis of measurement, and reflection on measurement, has been on the “disliking” (and social distancing and trait measures, with important extensions in the area of discrete emotions) – far more than the “distrusting” part of its common definition. In one review of 78 published papers in the field (Rollicke 2023), the “trust game”, or any other empirical attempt to directly measure trust, was trialled in only one article (Westwood et al, 2018). Yet there are reasons to think that the absence of trust, or decay in certain varieties of trust, may be the more consequential part of the two-part definition of affective polarization, at least in some regards. These include, but go beyond the breakdown of democratic trust. At the most basic level, a degree of trust is necessary for willingness to cooperate with other individuals and group actors on any matter that requires the investment of time. More generally, one would expect barriers to collective action across political camps to be higher when there is a failure to trust trustworthy actors, as opposed to a failure to like, “like-worthy” actors. Associated consequences to erroneous or over-eager distrust in this sense may not be present as linear relationships, but as threshold effects. There may be important practical value in understanding these for many areas of social and political life. This paper attempts to bring together philosophical ideas of trust, dis- and mis-trust, with the literature on affective polarization. Its emphasis is on highlighting potential opportunities for scholars. For example, there are many lesser known ways to go about measuring trust other than the economists’ trust game, among them card sorts, wallet drops, repertory grids, and embedded methods such as vignettes (for example, to assess back-up plans). The paper proceeds as follows. First, it discusses the concept of affective polarization, and why the distrust part of the common two-part definition has value, though is often forgotten. Second, it summarises some of the different ways that philosophers consider the concepts of trust, dis- and mis-trust, and what it means to be “trustworthy”. The paper then reflects on existing varieties of measures of (dis-/mis-)trust, their relationship to philosophical ideas, as well as their potential practical usefulness to scholars of affective polarization.