Hello again, in the previous video

we looked at trust experiments and

we introduced you to, the trust question,
we also saw how through
sampling it's possible to get results
by asking a limited number of people.
In this video we're going to
review those results, and
we will certainly question
their reliability.
Now the World Value Survey,
is a veritable fount of information, and
it's widely used in
social science research.
In every way, about 1,000
respondents are surveyed in 50 or
more different countries.
And some other question
repeated in each wave.
Trust question is one of those and
its always been included,
in the surveys from the very beginning.
Let's refresh our minds again what it is.
Generally speaking, would you say
that most people can be trusted or,
you cannot be too careful when
dealing with other people?
Now the director of
the World Value Survey,
has collated all the results into
one single index in which he
subtracted the percentage who
answered you can't be too careful,
from the ones who answered most people
can be trusted and added the sum to 100.
Basically, results above 100 indicated
that society was on balance, trustful.
Whereas, below 100, there were a majority
urging caution in dealing with others.
Now, before the most recent wave
only about 25% of those questioned,
believe that most people could be trusted.
Well, in April 2014, the latest results
were published covering 56 countries,
five of them for the first time.
Of the 122 larger countries for
which data is available, only 11 have
a majority of respondents willing to urge
that you can trust your fellow citizen.
Let's have a look at these
in a little more detail.
Topping the list are in order Norway,
The Netherlands, and
Denmark, Sweden and Finland come in,
in fifth and sixth place respectively.
So this groups together
the prosperous medium size
northern European welfare states.
New Zealand, Switzerland and
Australia also have a majority

of trusting respondents.
I'm sure you can all think of several
reasons why these countries should
share these characteristics.
You most certainly will by
the end of this course.
Now, splitting these
countries are three others.
China comes in in fourth place.
Saudi Arabia and Vietnam are ninth and
tenth place respectively.
Now there is a tendency among some social
scientists to treat these countries as
outliers, genuine but freak results that
fall outside the expected pattern, and
to exclude them from their analysis.
They're all effectively one party states
with strong continuity in leadership.
They're all relatively homogenous.
And they're all societies with
strong state control over the media.
But there are plenty of other states with
these characteristics at well that do
not produce trusting respondents.
Now, we'll look through the rest of the
results in the visualization at the end of
this video.
Now, in looking at the outcomes,
I want to start by asking some questions
you should ask of any survey data.
And then we'll raise one question
specifically about this set of trust data.
Now the first question you need to ask is
whether the sample size is large enough.
Well, even for data sets of less than
20 there are statistical tests of
probability for their accuracy.
And all social scientists would agree that
1,000 is really a pretty large sample.
So that's not a problem.
The second question we need to ask is
whether the sample itself is random,
is the survey random in design and
are the respondents chosen at random?
Looking through the technical
notes on the survey,
I was a little uncomfortable when it
described the possibility in having to
choose a handful of
respondents from two villages.
One large and one small.
They would actually allocate more
places to the larger village.
But the survey said that was all.
But even then you shouldn't be doing that.
Now, my suspicions became more
solid when I read at the top of
the collated results the following,
all data should be taken with care.
Since the sample distributions

by education and
other social democratic
variables in some countries,
may diverge substantially from their
respective population distribution.
Now that is a big problem.
A bigger problem lies with whether
the respondents are random.
Taking apart in a survey like this is
not something you undertake lightly.
There are over 200 questions,
many of them requiring you to rank
opinions on a graded list of 1 to 5.
It's going to take a couple of hours.
So you may ask your
respondents randomly but
they don't agree to participate randomly.
When my students in Beijing
did a small two minute survey,
some people deliberately walked away
to avoid the students all together.
But 40% of those who did stop,
refused to take part.
Now, who are they?
Are they ones without time, or
are they ones who don't trust surveys?
And if they're the ones that don't trust,
so, really a sample survey is only
a sample of those willing to be surveyed.
Now a third question,
is whether responses actually have
an opinion on a specific issue at all.
I mean an answer is dragged
out of them regardless.
But after a while, in two hours,
you're going to go on automatic pilot or
you're going to start giving the answers,
that you think the questioner
would like to hear.
And the phenomenon intensifies
the longer the survey gets, because for
many questions, I think the answer
is probably, I haven't got a clue,
I haven't thought about it.
Let's take a question 11, for example.
Quote, here is a list of qualities
that children can be encouraged to
learn at home.
Which, if any, do you consider
to be especially important?
Please choose up to five.
And then they hold up a list,
independence, hard work,
feeling of responsibility,
imagination, tolerance and
respect of other people, thrift and
saving money, determination, perseverance,
religious faith, unselfishness,
obedience, self expression.
You got an opinion on that?

Well, there's 200 more to come.

Now there's a final problem
specifically to the trust question.
What was the question?
You've seen it.
Generally speaking, would you say
that most people can be trusted, or
you cannot be too careful
dealing with other people?
But who are the other
people in the question?
Now a survey in the United Kingdom asked
exactly this supplementary question, and
it found that those who answered
that you could trust other
people 40% of them had
known people in mind, and
only 10% thought of people outside
their closed-circle groups.
Those who urged caution,
the numbers were reversed.
When my students repeated the exercise
in a pilot survey in Beijing,
they found exactly the same pattern.
So within the trust survey the people
are in fact answering not one question but
two different questions.
So lets sum up then.
In this video we introduced
you to the World Value Survey.
And we looked at the results
of the trust question,
the trusting end of the spectrum.
We also examine some of the problems
involved in trusting the trust results.
In the next video, we'll see what
assumptions social scientists have
made about trust, and which hypotheses
have they developed on the causes and
effect of trust in different
levels of society.
Meanwhile, I invite you to take
a look at the visualization of
the world map of trust
that we've prepared.