July 2026 · Data Notes
Trust in Strangers and Neighbors
These are personal reflections, not institutional statements. The views here are mine alone and do not represent any organization I am affiliated with.
In an earlier post, I wrote that in both Cairo and Istanbul, trust is not an abstract idea. It is a practical, everyday thing that people lean on to help each other and get through hard times. I wrote that from my own experience, not from any data. So I went looking for what the numbers actually say. The World Values Survey has been asking people in Turkey, Egypt, and many other countries two simple questions for decades: do you think most people can be trusted, and do you trust a stranger you just met?
Those are two different questions. The first asks about people in general. The second is more direct: a person standing in front of you, someone you know nothing about yet. A country can score differently on each one, and the gap between the two can tell us something about where trust actually lives, in close circles or out in the wider public.
A falling line in Turkey
The clearest trend here is a decline. Looking at every Turkey survey wave from 1999 to 2022, the share of people who said most people can be trusted fell from 37.9 percent in 1999 to 2004 to just 7.4 percent in the latest wave, 2017 to 2022. The share who picked the opposite answer, that you need to be very careful with people, rose to 92.6 percent over the same years.
This is not just a Turkey story. Trust has been falling in many countries, and researchers who study trust and social capital, writers like Robert Putnam and Ronald Inglehart, point to things like city growth, weaker neighborhood ties, and political polarization as possible reasons. I write about their work in my teaching notes on culture and institutions too. Turkey fits that wider pattern rather than standing apart from it, but I would not pin a drop this steep on just one cause.
Meeting someone for the first time
The second question is more direct: when you actually meet someone new, do you trust them at all? The latest wave of the survey, from 2017 to 2022, asked this in eleven countries, from Denmark, Switzerland, and Great Britain on the high end to Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt on the lower end.
Turkey and Egypt sit near the bottom here, at 25 and 19 percent, far below Denmark at 76 percent or Great Britain at 54 percent. They are close to Jordan, Morocco, and Iraq, all in the high twenties. Most of the lowest scores in this group come from the Middle East and North Africa, aside from Tunisia and Iran, which matches what other researchers have found in earlier surveys.
What this number misses is the trust that does exist. People can score low on trusting a stranger and still have deep trust within family, neighbors, and community, which is exactly what I described in writing about Cairo and Istanbul. People in both cities lean on strong, reliable networks to support each other. They are just more careful with someone they have never met before. A simple survey question cannot see that difference, which is one reason a number on its own never tells the whole story.
Sources: World Values Survey Association and the EVS–WVS research group, World Values Survey Wave 7 (2017–2022) and the EVS–WVS Integrated Time Series 1981–2022, variables on generalized trust (“most people can be trusted”) and trust in a stranger met for the first time, Turkey and the comparison countries shown above. Figures are the weighted percentages reported in the WVS/EVS online data analysis tool.