A Comparative Analysis of Trust among Megacities: The Case of Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo

Abstract

In recent decades, trust has become a major issue in social science as globalization has become pervasive. Hence the study of trust has become essential in understanding and coping with the serious impacts of globalization. This is especially true of contemporary globalized megacities, where great numbers of people flow into and out of countries. The security and interpersonal trustworthiness of life in the village has been supplanted by something much different, where people move about and are now an amalgam from a variety of cultures and social systems. But today we observe that trust levels are declining among many industrialized nations. The present study uses the Three-Item Rosenberg Scale, common to many general attitudinal surveys. Correspondence analysis, also used here, is a statistical technique especially useful for categorical data, yielding simple but elegant graphic displays. Data for the present study were collected based on nationwide attitudinal general social surveys among 19 nations in the Pacific region. The present study uses data from three megacities: Shanghai, Tokyo and Seoul. The trust structures of the megacities, analyzed using the Three-Item-Rosenberg Scale, are similarly consistent with respect to the locations of the three trust items. Trust was found to be associated with the social status characteristics of age, gender, and education, with younger people being distrusting and those over 50 being trusting. The present study also found that women are trusting and men are distrusting; that trusters are less educated; that optimism and wellbeing are associated with trust among the three megacities; and finally that informal social personal networks are associated with trust.