Coleman’s study shows us that trust eases cooperation and the achievement of outcomes. Without it, the diamond merchants would not cooperate with each other.48 By extension, distrust can thus be a barrier to both cooperation and action and might block business opportunity for the merchants.49 Francis Fukuyama captures these ideas when he describes trust as a “lubricant.”50
Such lubrication is particularly valuable when taking action entails risk in the face of uncertainty.51 Whenever Coleman’s diamond merchants were correct in their assessments of others’ trustworthiness, the risks they took by allowing others to take home stones paid off by making their work lives more efficient. If, however, they were ever wrong in their assessments and misplaced trust in the untrustworthy, trust would not have paid off. They would begin to practice distrust instead. Trust eases action, distrust blocks action, and trust may pay off—but only if one’s partners in the interaction are trustworthy.
Surprisingly, when policy makers discuss the actions of low-income women, they consider a host of factors about the women such as their skills, their access to child care, and their work ethic, but they do not consider the role of trust. Yet trust operates for low-income mothers like Bethany and Susan in the same way that it does for diamond merchants. Unlike the diamond merchants, however, who know that the buyers have an interest in behaving in a trustworthy way (since they would be shunned by the community if they did not), the low-income mothers rarely feel that their interaction partners have an incentive to behave in a trustworthy way. As a result, the mothers are more distrustful than the diamond merchants. When they are right, their distrust protects them. When they are wrong, their distrust may cost them opportunity.
Uncertainty is ever present, and thus almost all action entails risk of some kind. It is the near-constant presence of risk that creates the need for trust in order for action to smoothly take place. One might argue that low-income parents face a particularly risky and uncertain world. This is especially true for low-income parents who live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, as many of the women I interviewed do. For one thing, the neighborhoods where they live and raise their children pose certain dangers. In Chicago (and cities as different from Chicago as Stockholm), rates of violence go up as the level of concentrated poverty in the neighborhood goes up.52 Gang activity and drug dealing may lead to acts of violence that affect bystanders. Children may be pressured to join gangs or to get involved in other potentially unsafe activities.53 As we saw in the Introduction, local gang members’ grip on her son led Susan to quit her job. Another mother, Dolores Rios, pointed to recent shootings on the main street around the corner from her apartment as one of the primary reasons she did not want a job that would interfere with her ability to walk her children home from school.
The mothers I interviewed talked a great deal about their concerns over the safety of their children. Many other aspects of their lives were riddled with risk. When one lives in tight financial circumstances, any false move that results in a loss of income or similar setback is devastating. While the same uncertain behavior in a middle-class family may cost savings, upward mobility, or the ability to pursue opportunities for children, it can cost low-income families shelter, having enough to eat, or the ability to pay for heat. As we saw, Bethany lost her heat in the middle of a Chicago winter and almost became homeless after she risked taking a low-wage job and her caseworker “messed up” her case.
The sheer magnitude of the potential ill effects inhibits low-income mothers’ risk taking.54 The existence of trust thus is particularly crucial for low-income families to take risks. Low-income families are also especially in need of the potential benefits that accrue to risk takers. However, the above discussion suggests that low-income families are less likely to trust those in their environment.55
The assertion that trust and distrust are related to social advantage and disadvantage is supported by the research literature. Investigators have shown that those who have low levels of income and education, who live in communities that have high levels of income inequality, who are members of racial minority groups, who are women, or who have experienced trauma in recent years are less likely to trust.56
In addition, trust is greater between partners who are on an equal footing.57 Familiarity breeds trust.58 Even if one is not personally familiar with an interaction partner, one may trust that partner if he or she is an agent of a trusted institution.59 But government institutions are less trusted by the disadvantaged—especially if they are deemed unresponsive.60
Clearly, then, low-income mothers are less likely to find themselves under the circumstances that promote trust. Most notably, given their disadvantaged position, many of their interactions, especially those in the welfare office and the workplace, are with people with whom they do not enjoy equality. In fact, they are with people who hold substantial power over them. Even if they are familiar with their interaction partners, they appear less likely to trust the institutions that their partners represent, especially if these are associated with the government.61
Their distrust in the government probably reflects in part the fact that low-income people have less power and ability to get the state to be responsive to their needs. It probably also reflects the more dire consequences of not getting the government to respond. Middle- and upper-class citizens also experience great frustration with an unresponsive state, but those interactions tend to result in high tax bills, minor unsuccessful battles with bureaucracy, and other such annoyances. When low-income people are unable to successfully interact with government agencies, they may lose the resources needed for their very subsistence, lose custody of their children, or face other extreme outcomes. Again we see that the precarious nature of their lives leads low-income people to become more distrustful and less willing to take the risk of trusting in the face of uncertainty.
In the women’s interviews, trust and respect were closely intertwined. When the women were asked why they did not trust various others, perceived disrespect was one of the major answers they gave. The importance of respect cut across almost all of the five social settings studied. Rude caseworkers, rude bosses, unfaithful boyfriends, and gossiping friends and family members were all deemed disrespectful. The child care market was the only setting in which respect did not appear salient for the women.
One might think of respect as an outcome one wants delivered from an interaction partner. If one has reason to suspect that respect will not be delivered, perhaps from past experience, one will not trust that interaction partner. Alternatively, if a low-income mother’s growing up as a member of a marginalized group has taught her to see the world as a place that treats her with suspicion and that is best approached skeptically, she may be quick to interpret actions as disrespectful and to distrust that disrespectful interaction partners will deliver on any kind of promises. Thus respect, though not the same as trust, is closely tied to it either as an outcome that one trusts will be delivered or as a trait of interaction partners that suggests whether they can be trusted to deliver other outcomes.62 Other researchers have similarly argued that for low-income and marginalized groups who are shut out of mainstream material success, respect takes on heightened meaning.63
THE KEY ROLE OF STRUCTURE
Many of the women I interviewed encountered interaction partners with an open mind, sometimes even a trusting mind, and learned through direct experience to distrust that partner. It was their direct encounter within a particular structure (such as a welfare bureaucracy, a low-wage workplace, or a child care market) that taught them their distrust.64 In Tally’s Corner, discussed in the Introduction, Elliot Liebow writes,
Each man comes to the job with a long job history characterized by his not being able to support himself and his family. Each man carries this knowledge, born of his experience, . . . It is the experience of the individual and the group; of their fathers and probably their sons. Convinced