🤝 Trust

We all know some people who have been hurt before, and who now have walls up.

Turns out how much this is the case depends quite a bit on where you live. When looking at a survey on trust from our friends over at Latinobarómetro, for example, we see that Mexicans appear to be roughly four times more trusting than their Brazilian counterparts.

Notably, no country in Latin America has a majority which agrees with this notion. To be fair to our beloved region though, only 10 nations in the world do have a majority, with Nordic countries and China on top, according to a different survey.

Let’s break it down and also look at this trust metric over time.

Mexico gets closest, with roughly 22% of local respondents agreeing. Given the country’s levels of violence and corruption, this may surprise you. Also surprising would be runner-up Argentina, whose decades of economic woes and political polarization apparently haven’t dented people’s faith in each other too too much.

On the flip side, nearly no Brazilians agree with this idea. The citizens of Latin America’s largest country apparently trust each other much less than their neighbors (even in Venezuela, believe it or not). If you’re ever in Brazil, consider asking a paulista about a carioca, a carioca about a gaucho, or a gaucho about literally anyone else in the country.

Now, obviously all of these numbers are quite low. Regionally, Latin Americans have not trusted people all that much for decades now, seeing a high of just about 24% in 1998.

But since the global financial crisis, there’s consistently been a steep drop in people’s trust. Economic recessions, the pandemic, untouched corruption, and security nightmares have all contributed to a region of people who today trust each other – and their governments – less than in the 2000s.

There’s been a post-pandemic spike in trust. How can we keep that momentum going in our personal lives and communities?