Segregation and Mistrust: Diversity, Isolation, and Social Cohesion

Generalized trust – faith in people you don't know who are likely to be different from you – is a value that leads to many positive outcomes for a society. Yet some scholars now argue that trust is lower when we are surrounded by people who are different from us. Eric M. Uslaner challenges this view and argues that residential segregation, rather than diversity, leads to lower levels of trust. Integrated and diverse neighborhoods will lead to higher levels of trust, but only if people also have diverse social networks. Professor Uslaner examines the theoretical and measurement differences between segregation and diversity and summarizes results on how integrated neighborhoods with diverse social networks increase trust in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Australia and how they increase altruism toward people of different backgrounds in the United States and the United Kingdom. He also shows how different immigration and integration policies toward minorities shape both social ties and trust.

Eric M. Uslaner is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also Senior Research Fellow at the Center for American Law and Political Science, Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing, China and Honorary Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the founding editor of the Sage University Papers on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Politics, American Politics Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly and the Journal of Trust Research. Professor Uslaner is author or editor of twelve books, including Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and The Moral Foundations of Trust (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He received his PhD from Indiana University.