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How Durable are Social Norms? Immigrant Trust and Generosity in 132 Countries

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Abstract

This paper estimates the global prevalence of social trust and generosity among immigrants. We combine individual and national level data from immigrants and nativeborn respondents in more than 130 countries, using seven waves of the Gallup World Poll (2005–2012). We find that migrants tend to make social trust assessments that mainly reflect conditions in the country where they now live, but they also reveal a significant influence from their countries of origin. The latter effect is one-third as important as the effect of local conditions. We also find that the altruistic behavior of migrants, as measured by the frequency of their donations in their new countries, is strongly determined by social norms in their new countries, while also retaining some effect of the levels of generosity found in their birth countries. To show that the durability of social norms is not simply due to a failure to recognize new circumstances, we demonstrate that there are no footprint effects for immigrants’ confidence in political institutions. Taken together, these findings support the notion that social norms are deeply rooted in long-standing cultures, yet are nonetheless subject to adaptation when there are major changes in the surrounding circumstances and environment.

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Notes

  1. What we refer to in this paper as social trust is sometimes alternatively described as general trust, generalized trust, or interpersonal trust.

  2. All of these analyses are based on the binary immigration status (either an immigrant or non-immigrant). Unfortunately, years of migration are not known from the Gallup data. Therefore we are estimating an average effect for all the migrants (among them some may arrive many years ago while others may just come within the last year).

  3. They also find that social trust does not converge: East Germans have a persistent level of low social trust even after 20 years of reunification. The pattern of contrasting social trust versus institutional trust is similar to ours, but they attribute the persistence of low trust in East Germany to negative economic conditions experienced by many East Germans in the post reunification period, rather than the cultural legacy.

  4. We also perform probit regressions to confirm that they produce essentially the same results. For simplicity and ease of interpretation, we show here only the OLS results.

  5. Immigrants are included in our calculations of national averages of social trust, generosity and institutional trust in current and origin countries. For a robustness check, we did regressions using national averages excluding immigrant respondents and found very similar results.

  6. This calculation uses the estimated coefficients in the Table, in order to show the relative sizes of the effects. Because of our use of a symmetric global sample, the distributions of imported and current-country trust are very similar, so that a comparison of standardized betas for imported (0.068) and current-country (0.235) gives essentially the same answer. But note that immigrants are a selected (but not randomly) sample of the population in their country of origin, we should be cautious to generalize the estimated correlations.

  7. Dinesen (Dinesen 2011a) shows that general trust refers to the same phenomenon for both natives and immigrants and thus we can safely compare levels, causes and consequences of trust for the two groups.

  8. That social trust among immigrants is no lower than among the native born reflects successful adaptation, since immigrants, especially recent ones, are presumably less likely to know their neighbours, which other research (e.g. Sturgis et al. 2011) has shown to be a strong predictor of social trust.

  9. The positive linkage between higher education and social trust seems to be quite general and robust, although the precise reasons remain speculative. See Helliwell and Putnam (2007).

  10. As can be seen by comparing columns (1) and (2) in Table 4.

  11. This is different from Ljunge (2014) who find that, among immigrants to Europe, very high trust might be persistent even in low trusting environments through cultural transmission in the family, however the low trusting environments in Europe may not be very low, compared to many less developed countries included in our sample.

  12. We also tested to see if there was an asymmetry for the generosity footprint analogous to that shown in Table 5 for social trust. The generosity footprint is higher (but insignificantly so) for those moving from more generous to less generous countries. In this case, the slight asymmetry favours the idea that prosocial habits may be contagious, and hence easier to establish and maintain than social trust.

  13. The first estimate uses the whole global sample of respondents, allowing only for wave effects. The second includes fixed effects for each country, so that immigrant trust is being compared to that of native-born in the same country. The remaining significant coefficients are +0.037 (se = 0.008) for trust in the judicial system and +0.046 (se = 0.010) for trust in the national government.

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Acknowledgments

Helliwell and Xu’s research is supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Wang gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Korea Development Institute (KDI) School of Public Policy and Management. We thank the Gallup Organization for access to data from the Gallup World Poll, and we are also grateful for advice and comments from Christian Bjørnskov, Gale Muller, and Robert Putnam. Stata code used to transform the Gallup data and estimate the equations is available from the authors on request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia, 997-1873, East Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    John F. Helliwell

  2. Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), 180 Dundas W, Toronto, ON, Canada

    John F. Helliwell

  3. Korea Development Institute (KDI) School of Public Policy and Management, 263 Nansejong-ro, Sejong, Korea

    Shun Wang

  4. Department of Economics, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, H 1155, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Jinwen Xu

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  1. John F. Helliwell
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Correspondence to Shun Wang.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 8 and 9.

Table 8 Variable definitions
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Table 9 Social trust in the 132 Countries
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Helliwell, J.F., Wang, S. & Xu, J. How Durable are Social Norms? Immigrant Trust and Generosity in 132 Countries. Soc Indic Res 128, 201–219 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1026-2

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