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Within-Race Trust and the Trust Radius: Race Differences in Post-Apartheid South Africa

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Abstract

This study analyses unique national survey data for South Africa, on the extent to which adults trust others of their own, and of a different, race group. The country is particularly interesting partly because of its history of discrimination along racial lines and the continued salience of race as a socio-economic identifier in the post-apartheid period; and because there is considerable within-country cultural variation, spanning cultures that are more collectivist and more individualist. The data describe large race differences in the willingness to trust: Africans are significantly less trusting than others, both of their own race group and of others of a different race group, findings which are robust to controls for demographic, socio-economic and neighbourhood characteristics that are correlated with both race and trust. Although historical and contemporary experiences of discrimination and disadvantage typically are associated with lower levels of generalized trust, weak in-group trust is not expected, and particularly not in collectivist cultures. However, Africans also exhibit the smallest radius of trust, which is consistent with findings elsewhere, that racial prejudice and collectivism inhibit the extension of trust to others in society.

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Notes

  1. South Africa ranks quite highly on Hofstede’s (2001) individualism scale, with a score that is not much lower than Switzerland and Norway (Berigan & Irwin, 2011). However, overall statistics for South Africa also incorporate large cultural differences.

  2. The distinction has been tested by a number of South African studies in the social psychology literature. For example, Adams et al., (2012) found that self-descriptions among a stratified sample of 568 adults which made reference to ethnic (racial), religious, spiritual and ideological identifiers were stronger among Africans than whites, which would be consistent with a collectivist/individualist distinction (see also Eaton & Louw 2000; Van Zyl et al., 2018). But the authors note also that individualistic self-definitions were prevalent across all the race groups, and that “the variation across ethnic groups is much too complicated to be captured by the simple independence-interdependence dichotomy” (Adams et al., 2012: 386).

  3. Total household income in NIDS is calculated from questions asked about income from employment (formal and informal employment, including both wage and self-employment), income from social grants, unemployment insurance, private pensions, other forms of income (such as rental income, remittances, interest payments and dividends), income from subsistence agriculture (the value of own-consumption and any sales), and an implied rental value.

  4. The F-statistics for pair-wise comparisons of the coefficients for Africans and coloureds across the six regressions are: 54.83 (p < 0.001); 56.20 (p < 0.001); 100.61 (p < 0.001); 92.25 (p < 0.001); 12.98 (p < 0.001); and 10.12 (p = 0.002).

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  1. School of Economics and Finance, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Dorrit Posel

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Posel, D. Within-Race Trust and the Trust Radius: Race Differences in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Soc Indic Res 164, 649–664 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-022-02969-8

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