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Ask an American born before 1960 whether most people can be trusted, and more than three in four will say yes. Ask someone born in the 2000s the same question, and fewer than four in ten will agree. That 42-point gap isn’t a rounding error or a one-off poll fluke — it’s the clearest picture yet of a decades-long collapse in the basic social glue that lets strangers cooperate, do business, and live near each other without fear.
The Generational Trust Gap
A new Marquette Law School Poll national survey, based on four polls of 4,500 respondents conducted in 2026, found trust declines in lockstep with age. Among adults born before 1960, 77% say most people can be trusted. That falls to 63% for the 1960s cohort, 55% for the 1970s, 45% for the 1980s, 43% for the 1990s, and just 35% for those born in the 2000s. Every single generation trusts less than the one before it. There is no plateau, no rebound, no exception — just a steady staircase down.
It’s Not Just Social Media
The obvious suspect is social media, and it’s true that heavy users trust less: 46% of people on five or more platforms say most people can be trusted, versus 59% of people on one platform or none. But Marquette’s researchers tested this directly by comparing trust levels within each birth cohort, controlling for social media use — and the effect mostly disappeared. The oldest cohort stayed the most trusting regardless of how much social media they used; the youngest stayed the least trusting regardless. Something deeper than app usage has been reshaping how Americans see each other for seven decades, dating back to a General Social Survey baseline of 46% trust in 1972, which had already fallen to 34% by 2018.
Trust Erodes Even Close to Home
The generational gap isn’t confined to strangers. It shows up in trust toward coworkers (88% among the oldest cohort versus 65% among the youngest), neighbors (86% versus 52%), financial advisers (87% versus 57%), and even fellow worshippers at the same church or synagogue (81% versus 53%). Trust in immediate family — the most trusted category by far — still slips 15 points from the oldest to the youngest cohort. When distrust reaches into families, congregations, and workplaces, it stops being an abstraction about “society” and starts describing daily life.
Everyone Agrees Something Is Wrong
Here’s the one point of consensus across every age group: 82% of all adults, young and old alike, say Americans’ trust in one another has been shrinking. Only 5% think it’s growing. That perception tracks a broader collapse in institutional confidence — Gallup’s most recent measure found just 27% of Americans express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the country’s 14 core institutions, the fifth consecutive year the figure has landed below 30%.
Every generation since the 1950s has trusted its neighbors less than the one before it — and every generation agrees that’s exactly what’s happening.
What This Means for the Index
Social trust is the quiet infrastructure underneath everything else this Index tracks — church attendance, marriage rates, civic participation, crime perception. It’s the assumption that lets people leave a door unlocked, hire a contractor on a handshake, or believe a neighbor who says they’ll help. When that assumption erodes by 42 points across three generations, the effects don’t show up as a single headline; they show up as fewer favors asked, fewer doors answered, fewer relationships risked. Marquette’s data rules out the easy explanation — this isn’t just a phone-and-app problem — which means it isn’t going to be solved by a phone-and-app fix either. The oldest Americans grew up trusting people until proven otherwise. The youngest are growing up doing the reverse. That reversal, more than any single scandal or news cycle, may be the most consequential social shift no one is measuring closely enough.
Tuesday August 11th 2026
— David, The Moral Decay Index