Intergenerational Transmission of Trust: A Dyadic Approach

• In Event: How the Past Shapes Our Future: Memories and Intergenerational Socialization

Abstract

Many political values can be passed down from parents to children. Among them is the willingness to trust in unfamiliar others or generalized social trust. This form of trust denotes a belief in the benevolence of other people (Uslaner 2002; Yamagishi 2013). There is enough evidence that parents’ trust is highly correlated to the trust of their children (e.g., Katz and Rotter 1969; Rotenberg 1995; Uslaner 2008; Stolle and Nishikawa 2011; Dinesen 2012; Dohmen et al. 2012; Ljunge 2014; Moschion and Tabasso 2014; Giulietti et al. 2016). Less clear however are the social processes underpinning the intergenerational transmission of trust. Mutual trust that people have in each other is essential for economic and social development and the smooth functioning of society (Luhmann 1979; Coleman 1988; Putnam 1993; Fukuyama 1995; Zak and Knack 2001) as well as for individual health and well-being outcomes (Kawachi and Berkman 2000; Helliwell et al. 2018; Giordano et al. 2018). Hence, exploring the channels through which parents pass on their trust view to their offspring can shed light on how trust is distributed unequally, and how trust inequality further exacerbates other inequalities within and across societies.

Current literature has provided three distinctive explanations for the strong and positive correlation between parents’ trust and the trust of their children. A socialization model suggests that trusting parents bear trusting children is primarily due to parental socialization (Erikson 1950; Rotenberg 1995; Uslaner 2000; Dohmen et al. 2012). An experiential theory suggests that intergenerational transmission could come from the confounding experiences and shared contexts that influence the trust of both parents and their offspring (Dinesen 2009; Giulietti et al. 2016). A genetic inheritance perspective points to the genetic makeup shared by parents and children (Harris 1995; Sturgis et al. 2010; Krueger et al. 2012). Currently, these three theories have yet to be compared against each other and so there is no complete explanation for the intergenerational correlation between parent-child trust.

In this article, I argue that a dyadic approach that differentiates both same-sex (mother-daughter and father-son) and cross-sex (mother-son and father-daughter) dyads and compare the strength of intergenerational correlation may help disentangle between these mechanisms. Classic literature on the intergenerational transmission that highlights the essential role of parental socialization in the process has suggested that it is important to differentiate the four parent-child dyads: father-daughter, father-son, mother-daughter, and mother-son. These four dyadic relationships are distinctive, and they often produce differential impacts on child development, especially in the formation of values and behaviors (Acock and Bengtson 1978; Collins and Russell1991; Russell and Saebel 1997; Chaplin et al. 2005; Horstman et al. 2016). Accordingly, if parental socialization is one key mechanism underlying the transmission process, we expect that transmission success should vary according to the strength of cue giving and reinforcement on the part of the socializer across dyads. If the intergenerational transmission of trust is simply due to genetic make-up or environmental influences shared by both parents and children, we are less likely to see the parent-child associations of trust would differ depending on the gender of both the parent and the child (for similar arguments, please see also e.g., Dohmen et al. 2012; Modin et al. 2013; Sepahvand and Shabbazian 2017; Donnelly and Marteleto 2018). Instead, we are more likely to see that mothers and fathers exert similar effects or at least that the influence from each parent is consistent across sexes of children (Oskarsson et al. 2012).

Drawing on data from the CFPS, I obtained a sample of 3,871 adolescent children including 2,097 sons and 1,774 daughters across 2,584 households. My analysis of the data confirms the strong intergenerational correlation of trust between parents and children. It also reveals several specific transmission patterns that provide further evidence that trust is more a matter of cultural influences from socialization early in life, rather than a product of genetic inheritance or adult life experiences (Van Lange 2015; Wu 2021).

Author

• Cary Wu, York University