Religiosity and trust: evidence from the United States

Trust is one of the key driving forces behind human action and an important factor in shaping human interaction. The purpose of this article is to the effect of measure several indicators of religiosity, including an index for both social and individual religiosity, on trust. We use the US General Social Survey (GSS, 1972-2018, n > 10k) to investigate the relationship between religiosity and trust (interpersonal and generalized). The results demonstrate that while social religiosity or belonging (services attendance, church membership) predicts more trust, individual religiosity or believing (prayer, closeness and belief in God) predicts lower trust. Ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation theory explains our findings—connecting with God disrupts connection with humans. Indeed, respondents who claimed to believe in God display higher levels of misanthropy. We show that it is important to consider individual and social religiosity simultaneously because they correlate and have opposite effects.Peer reviewe