Gen Z Doesn't Trust Anyone - by Ryan Burge

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Gen Z Doesn't Trust Anyone<br>Is it because they aren't that religious?

Ryan Burge<br>Jun 11, 2026

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This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

The amount of cynicism in the world is sometimes hard for my mind to grasp . I really struggle watching TV shows and movies that have a really bleak view of the world. I don’t want to watch The Golden Girls all the time (although it is a really great thing to put on the TV right before bed), but I just can’t spend a lot of my time meditating on the evilness of the human experience over and over again. I think it’s bad for my soul, to be honest.<br>The internet only makes it worse. During the college football playoffs, the Indiana Hoosiers went on an absolute heater. They were playing out of their minds. In the semi-final game against Oregon, they blew them out of the building, winning by 34 points. On the first play from scrimmage, an Indiana player (D’Angelo Ponds) intercepted a pass and ran it back for a touchdown. After the game had ended, an equipment manager from Oregon found Ponds on the sideline and presented him with the ball that he had intercepted to start the game. It was an absolute class act.

The cfb lliason@realfbllliason

After the game, Oregon Football equipment staffer went up to D'Angelo Ponds and gave him the ball from his pick 6! What an unbelievable person! That’s what college football is all about!

ESPN College Football @ESPNCFB

"It's not just what we didn't do. It's what they did do."

Dan Lanning and Dante Moore speak after Oregon's 34-point loss to Indiana in the CFP semifinal.

9:44 AM · Jan 10, 2026 · 11.2M Views

795 Replies · 5.33K Reposts · 148K Likes

While most of the comments were positive, a few of them were so incredibly cynical.

“Staged. Only doing it because of the cameras and for clicks”<br>“He’s just doing that in the off chance that they get Ponds to enter the portal and transfer to Oregon next season”

It almost feels like there is a growing group of people who can see no goodness in the world. And that viewpoint is being celebrated and amplified on social media.<br>I get the foreboding sense that Americans just don’t trust each other anymore. They think that everyone is selfish, cruel, and without a moral compass. People don’t start a company to build a great product; they do it to make themselves a fortune. Politicians don’t run for office because they want to make life easier for their fellow citizens; they do it because they are power-hungry.<br>Well, the other day I was browsing the codebook for the 2024 General Social Survey on the Association of Religion Data Archives and was reminded of a really pertinent question to this discussion. It simply asks:

Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?

You know what, I am kind of surprised at how stable these lines are over time . It does look like there has been a decline in people saying, “others can be trusted,” but it’s a pretty subtle shift. For the Silent Generation, it declined ten percentage points across about five decades of data. For Boomers, it was rock steady from 1972 through 2010, then it dropped noticeably in the last couple of years.<br>But check out Generation X. If anything, their level of interpersonal trust has actually gone up over time, and now it’s at basically the same level as Boomers. Back in 2010, the gap between those two lines was ten percentage points. I need someone to explain that to me. And, while you are at it, figure out what’s going on with Millennials. I think trust is up, but it’s not a clear pattern.<br>Then, that Gen Z line is pretty easy to figure out: trust started out low and has only slipped from there . It was slightly above 20% in 2018. Now, it’s in the single digits. Oof. There’s no generation that is less trusting of other people than Gen Z.<br>I do feel like I need to zoom in on the last couple of years of data, though. Just to make this point plain.

I think this graph does a better job of showing the complete picture when it comes to interpersonal trust. Look at the middle three generations: Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. The share who say that “you can’t be too careful in trusting other people” is really similar: 62%, 64%, and 67%. It’s not like these folks have a huge well of goodwill toward random strangers. In contrast, the share who say folks can generally be trusted is around 30% among Boomers and Gen X, but is clearly lower among Millennials at 24%.<br>Gen Z is just on a different planet, though. The share who can’t trust others at all is 74%; that’s seven points higher...