Preface

This is an accidental book. In 2002 I published The Moral Foundations of Trust. I thought I was done with trust as the major focus of my research. I was asked to give talks on trust well after that, and my next book, Corruption, Inequality, and Trust (2008), was mostly about corruption, but trust reappeared as a “supporting actor” in the story of what makes for honest governance.

The idea for this book came when I received notification of a conference to be held in Milan, Italy, in January 2006. I wanted to go to the conference, but the conference topic was “Understanding Diversity.” I didn’t know too much about diversity, but I had read papers in which authors such as Alberto Alesina attributed many ills of modern society – including low trust – to the reluctance of people to engage with people unlike themselves. Since the sort of trust I believed (and still believe) to be important is faith in people unlike yourself, I proposed to see whether it was really true that diversity drives down trust. I proposed a paper for the conference, it was accepted (a paid trip to Milan and shortly afterward another to Norway), and I started my analyses. All sorts of negative things began to happen. It snowed in Milan; I slipped and almost hurt myself on the icy road on the way to a restaurant. It poured in Norway, so a boat trip to the fjords was literally a washout. And the correlations across countries and American states between trust and all sorts of measures of diversity were about as close to zero as one can imagine.