The Cultural Trust Gap: Discrimination Across England’s North-South Divide

Trust, the belief in another individual or organisation’s intent to act in good faith, is a cornerstone of social prosperity. However, cultural norms significantly influence trust levels within and between groups, often leading to discriminatory behaviours that undermine cooperation. This paper investigates the impact of culture on trust using a novel experimental approach that isolates trust from confounding factors such as risk preferences and distributional concerns. The setting of the experiment is England, a culturally and economically divided nation. Focusing on self-identified Southerners and Northerners, I find evidence of a cultural trust gap. Specifically, while Southerners exhibit equal trust towards both groups, Northerners trust Southerners significantly less than their own group. By decomposing trust into its conditional and unconditional components, I show that this disparity is driven by unconditional trust: Northerners perceive Southerners as more selfish than their own culture.