How Stable is Generalized Trust? Internal Migration and the Stability of Trust Among Canadians

More trust in unfamiliar others often indicates higher quality of life for individuals and societies. Current litertaure has thus far provided two distintive theories to explain why some people are more trusting than others. A culture theory views trust as a persistent human trait that people learned from socialization early in life. An experiential theory suggests that people constantly update their trust according to changing life experiences in different contexts. To test how stable trust can be, in this article I consider whether the experience of growing up in a low trust place and then migrating to a high trust place would change migrants’ trust and vice versa. In Canada, trust is lower in Quebec. My analyses of data from Statistics Canada’s General Social Surveys show that Quebecers who emigrated to live in other regions of the country continue to show a lower level of trust, and that English Canadians who migrated to live in Quebec remain more trusting than local natives. This is especially true among migrants who migrated as an adult. My additional analysis also shows that Quebec migrants residing in the Atlantic region, closer to Quebec, seem to have more trust than Quebecers residing in the Prairie regions and British Columbia that are overwhelmingly English-speaking and far away from Quebec geographically, which yields some support for the experiential theory of trust. Nonetheless, the overall pattern lends stronger support for the cultural theory that an individual’ trust in others is stabilized early in life.