Trust a Stranger? Investigating Community Trust and Economic Inequality as Barriers to Positive Interactions among Strangers

Social interactions with strangers carry benefits for individual and community well-being. Whereas ample research has focused on social connection as vital to health, less has addressed communal and structural barriers that limit people’s ease of experiencing high-quality social interactions with unknown others in the community. One potential barrier may be the extent which people generally trust unspecified others in the area in which they live. Community trust may thus alter interaction with strangers. In one correlational and two experimental studies (total N = 1,867), we tested whether general trust in the community shapes the positive emotional quality of social interactions with strangers. We found that community trust, whether reported or manipulated, predicts the positive emotional quality of interactions with strangers, but not close others. Additionally, when randomized to perceive one’s own community as high in economic inequality, people expected lower quality connection with a stranger later that day, an effect mediated by reduced community trust. These findings suggest that community contexts influence the quality of social interaction with strangers, which is critical for developing interventions and policy to improve individual and public health.