September 2026 · Data Notes
Interpersonal Trust Across the Arab World
These are personal reflections, not institutional statements. The views here are mine alone and do not represent any organization I am affiliated with.
A while ago I wrote about trust using the World Values Survey, which covers Turkey and only a few countries from this region directly. A fair question after reading that piece is what the picture looks like across more of the Arab world at once, rather than just Turkey and a handful of comparison countries. Arab Barometer asks a very similar question in eleven Arab countries, so I pulled that file to see how the numbers sit next to each other, not only next to Turkey.
The question is the same kind of blunt, generalized trust question used in the earlier post: do you think most people can be trusted, or do you think you need to be very careful in dealing with people? There is no middle option offered. That bluntness is exactly what makes the question easy to ask the same way in eleven different countries and compare the answers directly.
A five times gap inside one region
Across the eleven countries, the share answering that most people can be trusted ranges from 4.3 percent in Lebanon to 22.4 percent in Morocco, roughly five times higher at the top than at the bottom. That is a wide spread for a region that outsiders often talk about as if it were a single block. Morocco, Sudan, and Libya sit well above the eleven country average of 13.0 percent. Lebanon, Tunisia, Jordan, and Iraq sit well below it. Egypt lands almost exactly on the average, at 12.9 percent.
Caution is the default almost everywhere
The more striking number, honestly, is not the top of the ranking but how consistently small it is across the board. Even in Morocco, the highest scoring country, more than three in four people still chose the cautious answer, that you need to be very careful in dealing with people. Very few respondents said they did not know, so this is not a case of people dodging the question, people really are answering that they lean toward caution. The table below gives the full breakdown, country by country.
| Country | Most can be trusted | Must be careful | Don’t know | Sample size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Morocco | 22.4% | 76.7% | 1.0% | 1,237 |
| Sudan | 21.7% | 77.7% | 0.6% | 1,185 |
| Libya | 18.8% | 79.5% | 1.7% | 1,285 |
| Algeria | 15.4% | 84.3% | 0.2% | 1,123 |
| Kuwait | 15.1% | 84.2% | 0.8% | 602 |
| Egypt | 12.9% | 86.8% | 0.3% | 1,066 |
| Palestine | 9.5% | 89.9% | 0.6% | 860 |
| Iraq | 8.0% | 91.9% | 0.1% | 1,303 |
| Jordan | 8.0% | 92.0% | – | 1,154 |
| Tunisia | 6.7% | 92.7% | 0.6% | 1,151 |
| Lebanon | 4.3% | 95.6% | 0.1% | 1,184 |
| Total (11 countries) | 13.0% | 86.4% | 0.5% | 12,151 |
Where Egypt sits, and what one number cannot tell you
In my earlier post, I looked at a different World Values Survey question, trusting someone you have just met, where Egypt scored 19 percent against a smaller comparison group of eleven countries from around the world. That is not the same question as the one asked here, so I would not stack the two numbers directly on top of each other and call it a trend. What I can say is that both surveys, asked a few years apart with different wording and a different set of comparison countries, land Egypt in a similar low range relative to its peers, not an outlier on either end.
What a single percentage cannot show is where the trust that does exist actually lives. I wrote before, from my own experience moving between Cairo and Istanbul, that people in both cities lean heavily on family, neighbors, and known community rather than on strangers. A country can score low on this kind of generalized question and still run on a dense web of trust that simply is not visible to a survey asking about people in the abstract. Seeing Egypt sit almost exactly on the regional average here does not change that reading, it just confirms that caution toward strangers is close to the regional norm rather than something specific to any one country.
Source: Arab Barometer, interpersonal trust question, “Generally speaking, would you say that ‘most people can be trusted’ or ‘you must be very careful in dealing with people’?”, eleven countries (Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan, and Tunisia). Figures are the weighted percentages reported in the Arab Barometer data file; the exact survey wave is not stated in that file.