• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, March 25, 2025

This will surprise no one, but a recent Gallup Poll showed trust in major professions in the U.S. at its lowest level since Gallup first started tracking the topic in 1999. In the index of 11 core professions, including nursers, bankers, business execs, members of Congress and 7 others, the average honesty and ethics rates have dropped to the point where just 30% of those professions have high or very high ratings.

Those professionals who received the higher trust marks were nurses, teachers, military officers, pharmacists and doctors. Those in the medical categories have slipped since the pandemic, but are still well in positive territory.

The least trusted professions? Car salesmen, advertising practitioners, TV reporters, members of Congress and lobbyists. The percentage of respondents rating these professions as highly or very highly trustworthy and ethical was in the single digits for all but one of them (TV reporters). 

Again, not all that surprising. But what does this say about our society? Societal trust is the glue that holds communities and nations together. If you’re a student of history, you’ll know that, without exception,  cultures and societies with high levels of trust prosper over the long term, and those that lack trust inexorably slip backwards.

Four years ago I wrote about this phenomenon, using northern and southern Italy as examples. Southern Italy -- partly because of geography that restricted widespread trade -- historically had low levels of trust. You trusted your family, you may trust your paesani (townspeople) and that was about it. Northern Italy, with a more open geography and proximity to the rest of Europe, developed a widespread trading network that allowed the economies of renaissance City-states like Venice, Florence and Milan prospered, along with arts and culture.

Essentially, you can choose one of two paths: to trust or to fear. If you choose the later -- as at least half of America has apparently done -- understand that you are essentially choosing the strategy of the schoolyard bully, competing through fear and intimidation.

Bullying is a viable evolutionary survival strategy that is common in nature. There are undeniably advantages to bullying. It gives you greater access to resources, such as food, shelter and sexual access. But it is dependent on the bully’s strength alone. It typically causes those being bullied to create new alliances, pushing them into a position where they must trust each other. And that creates a long-term advantage for the alliance, where they eventually gain strength from trusting each other, while the bully loses strength by isolating himself.

It's not just history where the advantage of trust has been proven. Game Theory looks at exactly these types of interactions. In one well-known scenario, the most successful strategy is called "Tit for Tat." It starts with a default position of mutual trust and only moves to the offensive if one of the parties tries to defect from cooperating. Then, it goes into a cycle of zero-sum back-and-forth retaliations. The benefits accrue during cooperation cycles, and the strategy continually tries to move back to cooperation. Cooperation always beats confrontation.

As I said a few columns ago, it is a lack of trust in institutions that makes us think that everything is fundamentally broken. This distrust extends to everything, but is particularly prevalent with trust in media and government.

The Gallup Poll is backed up by the annual Edelman Trust Barometer study, which looks at institutional trust in government, business, media and NGOs (non-governmental not-for-profit organizations)  around the world, using 28 countries as its index. The decline in media and especially governmental trust over the past decade has been stunning, prompting CEO Richard Edelman to note, “Starting in 2005, we noticed the decline of belief in establishment leaders.. Peer trust emerged, as friends and family depended on one another for advice and used social media as the connection point.”

This last point about peer trust is troubling. It essentially means a return to tribalism, this time mediated through social media. It really doesn’t sound all that different from the way society has operated in low trust and economically challenged regions such as southern Italy for centuries now.