How Durable are Social Norms? Immigrant Trust and Generosity in 132 Countries

Abstract

This paper estimates the global prevalence of social trust and generosity among immigrants. We combine individual and national level data from immigrants and nativeborn respondents in more than 130 countries, using seven waves of the Gallup World Poll (2005–2012). We find that migrants tend to make social trust assessments that mainly reflect conditions in the country where they now live, but they also reveal a significant influence from their countries of origin. The latter effect is one-third as important as the effect of local conditions. We also find that the altruistic behavior of migrants, as measured by the frequency of their donations in their new countries, is strongly determined by social norms in their new countries, while also retaining some effect of the levels of generosity found in their birth countries. To show that the durability of social norms is not simply due to a failure to recognize new circumstances, we demonstrate that there are no footprint effects for immigrants’ confidence in political institutions. Taken together, these findings support the notion that social norms are deeply rooted in long-standing cultures, yet are nonetheless subject to adaptation when there are major changes in the surrounding circumstances and environment.

1 Introduction

The nature and quality of social norms are important determinants of how individuals behave and how well societies work. Social norms determine how readily, and how happily, people pay taxes, return lost wallets, trust neighbours and strangers, co-operate with others on and off the job, and respect the environment. But there is still relatively little known about the extent to which social norms are malleable, and how they change in the face of population migration.

There are theories and evidence supporting two quite different perspectives on the sources and persistence of social norms. On the one hand a cultural perspective stresses that social norms are a durable trait transmitted from one generation to the next through parenting activities and other aspects of early socialization. Alternatively, an experiential perspective emphasizes that such norms are mainly based on experience in the environment in which one lives. Analyzing the attitudes of immigrants is an effective way to examine the relative importance of the two perspectives, as the experiential perspective predicts that immigrants’ attitudes will be highly affected by their current surroundings in the destination country, while the cultural perspective predicts that immigrants’ social norms will be highly correlated with those prevalent in their birth countries. In this paper we examine the global footprints of two important social norms, i.e. social trust¹ and generosity to show the relative importance of culture and experience in each case.

Most previous studies of the footprint of imported trust have related to migrants to a single country, with some more recent use of a number of European countries as alternative destinations. Those studies are subject to the problem of lack of generality. To be of broader relevance, judgments about the relative importance of imported trust need to be assessed using data drawn from a fuller range of source and destination countries.

We might expect to find migration footprint effects for generosity, just as has been done for social trust. But would the footprint be likely to be higher or lower in the case of generosity? In contrast to the large number of studies on the footprint effects of social trust, there is no corresponding research base for generosity. Our research aims to partially fill this gap.

Current evidence seems to support that institutional trust differs significantly from social norms in ways that make it less likely to have a significant carry-over from conditions in the immigrant’s country of birth. Whether these patterns hold for the global sample is not yet known. Thus there is room for using global samples to test footprint effects for institutional trust and to compare them with those for social trust and generosity.

We expect social norms to have larger footprints than those associated with judgments about institutions that are expected to differ from one country to the next. If we find that immigrants and the native-born share the same judgments about the quality of institutions in the destination country, then we can thereby argue with greater conviction that the footprints of social norms like social trust and generosity are not simply due to failure to notice the current environment, since rapid adjustment will have already been witnessed for the case of local and national institutions.

We test the relative importance of culture versus experience by examining the immigration footprints for social trust, for generosity and for confidence in specific national institutions making use of a fully global sample involving migrants to more than 130 countries. These data from the Gallup World Poll enable us to establish the generality of footprint effects for two social norms, and to see whether footprint effects are, as expected, much smaller or non-existent for measures of institutional trust.²

We find significant footprint effects from their birth countries in the case of social norms—social trust and generosity, although on average immigrants largely come to share the social norms of their new countries. Moreover, the footprint effect is larger for social trust than for generosity. To see whether the social norms themselves are durable, and not just that all opinions adapt slowly to new circumstances, we also assess the judgments that immigrants form about the quality of the public institutions in their new countries. We find no evidence of footprint effects in these cases, thus increasing our confidence that social norms are indeed different.

The reminder of the paper is organized as follows. We first give a detailed literature review in Sect. 2. We then describe our data and estimation methods in Sect. 3. We present our results for social trust, and continue with our comparable results for generosity, and then contrast our footprint results for social trust and generosity with our results for confidence in domestic institutions in Sect. 4. We summarize our conclusions in Sect. 5.

2 Literature Review

In this section we review previous studies of the cultural versus experiential determinants of social trust, generosity, and institutional trust respectively.

2.1 Social Trust

It has long been held that social trust is essential to the success of group ventures, and especially to democratic governance. The important roles of social trust in the economy and society are shown by the empirical linkages between social trust and a variety of outcomes ranging from economic growth (Helliwell and Putnam 1995; Fukuyama 1995; Knack and Keefer 1997; Tabellini 2010; Algan and Cahuc 2010, 2014; Guiso et al. 2006), government efficiency (La Porta et al. 1997; Bjørnskov 2003, 2010, 2011), health outcomes (Kawachi et al. 2008), and happiness (Helliwell and Putnam 2004; Bjørnskov 2008; Chang 2009; Helliwell and Wang 2011) to deaths from traffic fatalities and suicides (Helliwell and Wang 2011; Nagler 2013).

Social trust has been found to be transmitted from one generation to the next in many countries (Algan and Cahuc 2010; Bjørnskov 2012; Dohmen et al. 2012; Guiso et al. 2006; Rainer and Siedler 2009; Rice and Feldman 1997). The reasons for the stability are hypothesized to be based on parental socialization during childhood (Fernández 2011). For example, beliefs in the trustworthiness of strangers are largely formed in early childhood and remain relatively stable over the life course, at least in the absence of major negative shocks (Dohmen et al. 2012; Katz and Rotter 1969; Tabellini 2008). But other studies also find that the current environment plays an important role in shaping an individual’s social norms (Dinesen 2012a; Nannestad et al. 2014). Studies on the determinants of social trust confirm the importance of the social characteristics of the communities in which an individual is currently living (Alesina and La Ferrara 2002; Bjørnskov 2007; Glaeser et al. 2000; Helliwell and Wang 2011; Kosfeld et al. 2005).

The cultural perspective, wherein trust is part of an enduring political culture, implies that the trust footprint of migration would be long-lasting, as suggested in Almond and Verba (1963), Putnam (1993) and Uslaner (2002). A series of papers all find a strong correlation between the social trust of Americans and national averages of answers to the same questions in their ancestral countries (Algan and Cahuc 2010; Bjørnskov 2012; Guiso et al. 2006; Rice and Feldman 1997; Uslaner 2008). Remarkably, Rice and Feldman (1997) find the correlations to be just as high for those whose grand-parents, rather than parents, were born in the ancestral country. A study on immigrants to Israel finds that those from the United States were more trusting of others than were those coming from Russia (Gitelman 1982).

Studies examining the relative importance of cultural and experiential impacts seem to yield different answers, based on different data samples. A group of studies find that the cultural impact is larger than the experiential impact. Uslaner (2008) uses individual-level US General Social Survey evidence to separate the effects of inherited trust from the effects of living among others from high-trust backgrounds. He finds some evidence for both, but concludes that the effects of inherited trust are greater than those of the current context of social trust. Dinesen (2013), by exploiting individual-level data for migrants to a number of European destination countries, finds support for both cultural and experiential perspectives, but a much larger effect from experience for immigrants from Western countries. Dinesen (2012b) finds similar results. A study of the source-country trust footprint of individual Canadian immigrants from many countries revealed a significant impact from source-country trust, but found the footprint to be smaller and less significant for those whose families had lived longer in Canada (Soroka et al. 2006). Similarly, Dinesen and Hooghe (2010) find that immigrants to Western Europe adapt more to local trust levels in the second generation than they do in the first generation after immigration.

Some others argue that experience is more important than culture. For example, Dinesen (2012a) examines the immigrants from three low-trust countries of origin (Turkey, Poland, and Italy) to high-trust countries in Northern Europe. He finds that the destination-country context has a large impact on social trust of immigrants, who show significantly higher levels of social trust than comparable respondents in their country of origin. Similarly, Nannestad et al. (2014) find that the institutions in destination countries rather than culture matter for social trust by analysing immigrants from several non-western countries to Denmark.

2.2 Generosity

Generosity, like social trust, is an important social norm (Leeds 1963; Siu et al. 2006). It varies among communities and nations, and has positive consequences for the communities where it prevails. Indeed prosocial behaviour has been argued to be an essential underpinning for the large-scale social cooperation that permitted early human groups to thrive (Wilson 1975). Individuals involved in prosocial conduct tend to be happier (Aknin et al. 2011, 2012, 2013; Dunn et al. 2008). International differences in generosity (as measured by the donation question in the Gallup World Poll) are large, and have been found to be pervasively linked, both within and among societies, to average differences in subjective well-being (Aknin et al. 2013; Helliwell and Wang 2013).

Studies highlight the importance of social and contextual influences in cultivating generosity, especially during early adolescence, e.g. parental impacts (de Guzman and Carlo 2004; Eisenberg et al. 2006; Ljunge 2014), the role of peer groups (Carlo et al. 1999; de Guzman and Carlo 2004; Eisenberg et al. 2006; Krupka and Weber 2009; Siu et al. 2006), and the impacts of other environmental sources (Carlo et al. 2011; Eisenberg et al. 2006; Grusec et al. 2002). Ottoni-Wilhelm and Zhang (2011) argues that parents will intentionally transmit generosity to their children since they place importance on the child’s identity including generosity.

No previous studies that we could find have studied the immigrant footprint effect for generosity.

2.3 Institutional Trust

Previous research on institutional trust has tended to show the importance of the local context as well as rapid adjustment to new circumstances, both types of result being in accordance with our expectations. Institutional trust is indeed important, both by providing support for government actions (Chanley et al. 2000), and as a source of happiness (Bartolini et al. 2013; Helliwell and Huang 2008, 2011). In terms of its determinants, studies have shown the importance of the current social and economic contexts: institutional trust is strongly affected by institutional and economic performance (Zmerli and Hooghe 2011). Chanley et al. (2000) find that political scandals, increasing public concerns about crime rates, and negative perceptions of economic conditions lead to declining trust in U.S. government. Stevenson and Wolfers (2011) find that countries having significantly increasing unemployment rates tend to have falling trust in national governments. Some other studies find that political corruption has a strong negative impact on institutional trust (Chang and Chu 2006; Morris and Klesner 2010).

There is some evidence that institutional trust judgments respond quickly to the current environment, and hence that, in this case, experience trumps culture. Mishler and Rose (2001) find that confidence in institutions is strongly affected by institutional performance and economic performance in post-communist societies, but find little support for cultural impact. Heineck and Süssmuth (2013) and Rainer and Siedler (2009) both find strong convergence of institutional trust in West and East Germany after reunification.³

But still there is some piece of evidence showing the footprint effect of institutional trust, e.g. Becker et al. (2011) finds that historical affiliation with the Habsburg Empire, a relatively well-functioning and respected bureaucracy in European history, increases current trust in courts and police.

3 Data and Methods

The data we use are from seven waves of the Gallup World Poll conducted in 2005–2012 in 160 countries. It is a repeated cross-sectional data set containing 941,201 observations. For the key variable social trust, we unfortunately have a smaller sample, about 200,000 observations. It is mainly surveyed in 2009–2010, with only a few countries in 2011–2012. The survey question is “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you have to be careful in dealing with people?” This and similar questions have also been widely asked in recent decades in the World Value Surveys/European Value Surveys (WVS/EVS), various national social and Barometer surveys, to gauge the levels of social trust. Within and across nations, answers to the social trust question have been shown to be reliable estimates of trustworthiness, as measured by their strong positive correlation, at the national level, with the frequency with which money-bearing wallets were returned to their owners when dropped in major cities in 14 different countries (Knack 2001).

Generosity is derived from the question on charitable donations “Have you done any of the following in the past month? How about donated money to a charity?” The answer to the question is binary. Since richer people might be more likely to donate money, we adjust people’s response to the donation question for differences in household income by regressing the donation variable on log household income in a linear probability model. We take the residual of the regression as our measure of generosity.

We also examine the footprint effect of institutional trust, several variables regarding the perception of government and society, such as confidence in judicial system and courts, confidence in police, confidence in national government, perceived corruption in government, perceived corruption in business, whether respondents trust their assets and property to be safe at all times if starting a business, whether respondents trust the government to allow their new businesses to thrive. The responses to those questions are all binary with values 0 or 1. We summarize all the variables derived from survey questions in Appendix Table 8.

The set of control variables includes age, gender, marital status, educational attainment, the natural logarithm of net household income, and social support. Social support is a binary response to “If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not?” The summary statistics of those variables for immigrants are shown in Table 1. There are in total 43,305 immigrant respondents, but only 28,907 of them answer the question about their country of origin. For those immigrants with country of origin, we are able to construct measures for the countries of birth.

Table 1 Summary statistics (immigrants only)

Since we also want to see whether immigrants have higher or lower social trust compared to non-immigrants, we run regressions for all respondents. The summary statistics of social trust and those independent variables for both immigrants and non-immigrants are presented in Table 2.

Table 2 Summary statistics (both immigrants and non-immigrants)

To examine the footprint effects of social trust and to compare trust levels of immigrants and non-immigrants, we estimate the following equation:

$$Y_{ij} = \alpha_{0} + \alpha_{1} {\text{RT}}_{j} + \alpha_{2} {\text{ST}}_{i} + \alpha_{3} {\text{IM}}_{ij} + X_{ij} \theta + u_{ij}$$

(1)

The dependent variable Y _ij is the individual level of social trust of respondent i in country j. RT _j is the average social trust in the country where the respondent currently lives. ST _i is the average social trust in the respondent’s birth country. For non-immigrants, the values in their birth countries are the same as in their countries of current residence. The national-level social trust in the 132 countries is shown in Appendix Table 9. We can see the percentage of respondents answering “yes” to the trust question “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you have to be careful in dealing with people?” varies a lot across countries, from 6.7 % in Lebanon, the lowest, to 63.0 % in Denmark, the highest. IM _ij is a dummy variable for immigrants. The vector X _ij has all other personal and demographic information including age, age squared, gender, marital status, educational attainment, the natural logarithm of net household income, and social support. u _ij is the error term.

We then confirm the footprint effect of social trust in the regressions for immigrants only. We also investigate the footprint effect of generosity and a set of variables measuring trust in institutions, such as confidence in judicial system and courts, confidence in police, confidence in national government, perceived corruption in government, perceived corruption in business, whether respondents trust their assets and property to be safe at all times if starting a business, whether respondents trust the government to allow their new businesses to thrive, for immigrants only. The equation we estimate for this purpose is:

$$Y_{ij} = \beta_{0} + \beta_{1} {\text{RT}}_{j} + \beta_{2} {\text{ST}}_{i} + X_{ij} \delta + e_{ij}$$

(2)

The dependent variable Y _ij is the individual level of trust measure of immigrant i in country j. RT _j is the average trust in the country the respondent currently lives in. ST _i is the average trust in the source country for those immigrants. The vector X _ij has the same meaning as in Eq. (1) except that in this case the sample only includes immigrants. e _ij is the error term.

4 Results

4.1 The Footprint of Social Trust: Culture and Experience Both Matter

Table 3 shows our OLS regression results⁴ using both immigrant and non-immigrant respondents following Eq. (1). In column (1) we include variables for age, gender, marital status, and education, and in column (2) we include two additional covariates, log household income and social support. The two columns give similar results, as both show that immigrants’ judgements about how much other people can, in general, be trusted are significantly correlated with trust levels in their birth countries and in the countries where they now live.⁵ The coefficients on imported trust are just under one-third as large as for trust in the current country of residence.⁶ The larger coefficient on trust in the country of residence, as found by Voicu (2012) with European data, suggests that the experiential effect is larger than cultural effect in the global sample, and that migrants from a given country are more likely to have high levels of social trust if they have moved to a higher trust environment. But we shall show later that the footprint effect is larger for those moving from a lower to a higher trust environment than vice versa.

Table 3 Footprint of social trust (all respondents)

By including all respondents, rather than just immigrants, in our sample, we can see whether, on average, immigrants have either greater or less social trust than do those living in their countries of birth.⁷ Tables 1 and 2 show that the average levels of social trust are similar for the global sample of immigrants (0.230) as for the entire group of respondents (0.238). In column (1) of Table 3 the negative migrant coefficient shows that when we account for individual demography migrants are slightly less trusting than the native-born. However, the other columns show that this effect becomes smaller and insignificant when we allow for other determinants of social trust.⁸ There is a research literature showing that people are far more likely to trust others when they have lived longer in their communities (Helliwell and Wang 2011; Putnam 2007), and will be less trusting where people from differing backgrounds have not had long to make the repeated personal connections that support interpersonal trust. Thus immigrants might, on average, have lower levels of social trust, since they have had less long to plant roots in their communities (de Vroome et al. 2013). Soroka et al. (2006, Table 5.3) found that immigrants to Canada had significantly lower social trust than other Canadians, even after adjusting for the quality of their social networks, education, and other key variables, but that this effect was entirely eliminated if account was taken of the footprint effect of the levels (on average lower) of social trust in their birth countries. Putnam (2007) found that social trust is lower in communities with high percentages of immigrants. He was not able to adjust for immigrant footprint effects, so it is not easy to tell whether his finding is due to recent US immigrants coming from countries with lower average levels of social trust, as was found for Canada. Hooghe et al. (2009, Table 1) find social trust to be lower among immigrants than non-immigrants in Europe; it is not possible to tell whether and how much this result is due to an unmeasured footprint effect. Our global data show more symmetric migration among countries of differing trust levels, so that immigrant and other respondents have the same average levels of social trust whether or not we take account of the levels of social trust in their countries of birth.

In Table 4 we estimate the same models as in Table 3, but this time our sample includes only immigrants following Eq. (2). The results in Table 4 are largely consistent with those in Table 3, assuring us that the results in Table 3 are not materially affected by the inclusion of the much larger non-immigrant population. For migrants, and equally for the total population, higher education is a strong positive predictor of an individual’s trust in others,⁹ while the log of household income has no effect.

Table 4 Footprint of social trust (immigrants only)

Across our whole global sample, those who have migrated from countries of lower trust to places of higher trust are about 20 % more numerous than those who have moved from higher-trust to lower-trust countries (3588 vs. 3076), as shown in Table 5. In that table we estimate our base model separately for these two groups of migrants in column (1) and (2) respectively. In column (3) we estimate the base model for all migrants but include a dummy for migrants from a lower-trust to a higher-trust country, and its interaction with trust in country of origin. Since including other these variables makes only a small difference to the coefficients on current-country and birth-country trust,¹⁰ we use the simpler model in Table 5 to provide larger sample size.

Table 5 Footprint effects for two different groups of immigrants

The sum of coefficients on birth-country and current-country trust is higher in model (1) than in model (2) of Table 5. This is because the column (1) sample, covering those moving to higher-trust countries, has been selected to include those for whom current-country trust is higher than birth-country trust. The coefficients on both home-country trust and birth-country trust are higher for immigrants who have moved from a lower-trust to a higher-trust country. The coefficients on current-country trust are similar in the two cases, while for source-country trust the coefficient is much higher for migrants born in lower-trust countries. The test in column (3) shows the difference to be significant at the 5.4 % level. This suggests that people from low-trust environments remain more affected by the low trust in their country of origin than are migrants from higher-trust to lower-trust countries. This asymmetry, with migrants from high-trust environments being less likely to bring the high trust from the country of origin to the current country of residence,¹¹ suggests that social trust is harder to build than to destroy.

4.2 Generosity: Evidence of Footprints for Prosocial Behaviour

Since generosity and social trust are both important social norms, they are both likely to be learned in youth and possibly relearned when times change or people migrate to a new and different society. Thus we might expect that the migration footprint effects we find for social trust have some echo in the data for generosity. The Gallup World Poll asks respondents if they have given to a charity in the past 30 days. International averages vary a lot, from below 10 % in 15 countries to over two-thirds in eight countries.

When people move from one country to another, is their generosity in their new country of residence determined by the social norms where they now live, or is it also determined in part by the prevalence of generosity in their countries of origin? Table 6 estimates Eq. (2) using only immigrants, showing that migrants tend to adapt fairly fully to the norms of generosity in their new countries. However, as we expected, there is for all migrants taken together a significant footprint effect from the norms in their countries of origin.¹²

Table 6 Footprint of generosity among immigrants

4.3 Trust in National and Local Institutions: Experience Trumps Culture

In this section we estimate the same model as in column (1) of Table 6 for various measures of institutional trust, to see if there is any footprint effect. Our main presumption is that the footprint from confidence in the same institutions in their birth country will be much smaller than was the case for social trust, and may well not exist. This is because institutions are more readily seen to differ among countries than is human nature. Social trust assessments are more likely to depend on judgements about human nature, while assessments about local institutions are likely to depend on their features more than on those of the corresponding institutions in the immigrant’s country of birth. Our results in Table 7 support this presumption, as they consistently show strong effects from the current country but no footprint from similar judgments in the source country.

Table 7 No footprint effect for trust in institutions (immigrants only)

There may be other reasons, beyond a footprint effect, for immigrants and others to value institutions differently. For example, Maxwell (2010) finds evidence among migrants to Europe that confidence in political institutions is higher among first-generation immigrants than among the native-born, a result he attributes to optimism due to their choice to move to the new environment in hopes of improving their lives (de la Garza et al. 1996). There is some evidence of such an effect in our global sample. On average, immigrants are slightly more likely to trust all local institutions than are the native-born. When we allow for differing immigration shares, and compare immigrants’ trust assessments with those of the native-born in the same country, immigrants remain more trusting than the native-born for trust in the judicial system and trust in the national government.¹³

5 Conclusions

Data from large samples of migrant and non-migrant respondents to the Gallup World Poll have permitted us to establish some fairly general conclusions about the links between immigration and social norms. First, we have generalized earlier findings that migrants tend to make social trust assessments that mainly reflect conditions in the country where they now live, but nonetheless show a significant footprint effect from their countries of origin. For our sample of migrants to 132 different countries, the average size of the footprint effect is about one-third that of the effect of local conditions. We also found that the footprint effect seems to be smaller for those who move from higher-trust to lower-trust nations, suggesting that social trust may be harder to create than to destroy.

Second, we found that for our global sample of migrants and non-migrants, their average levels of social trust are the same, after adjusting for footprint effects and each individual’s own personal trust-supporting circumstances.

Third, we found that the altruistic behaviour of migrants, as measured by the frequency of their donations in their new countries, is strongly determined by social norms in their new countries, but also has significant footprint effects from their countries of origin. These results are the first to investigate footprint effects for the altruistic behaviour of immigrants.

Finally, we found, as expected, that confidence in local institutions of several types is influenced by the quality of these institutions (as measured by the assessments of others) and not at all by the quality of the same institutions in their countries of origin.

Our results appear to us to be mutually consistent. Taken together, they support the notion that social norms are deeply rooted in long-standing cultures yet are nonetheless subject to adaptation when there are major changes in the surrounding circumstances and environment. Migration provides a strong test, as it takes individuals brought up in one culture and transfers them to another. Although migrants tend to associate in their new countries with others from the same source country, we find nonetheless that two important social norms, as represented by social trust and generosity, adapt substantially to the prevailing norms in their new countries of residence. Nonetheless, the continuing importance of cultural and social norms established in earlier life is demonstrated by the significant footprint effects that we find for both social trust and generosity.

Our results showing no footprint effects for confidence in specific institutional features of immigrants’ new countries confirm that our previous footprint results are not simply evidence that people are slow to absorb the features of their new environment. When asked specific questions about the institutional features of their new countries, immigrants’ answers reflect the characteristics of those institutions, with no footprint from the quality of the institutions in their countries of birth. Thus the footprint results for trust and generosity have strong claims to reflect broader social norms, just as we and others have argued.

Appendix

See Tables 8 and 9.

Table 8 Variable definitions

Table 9 Social trust in the 132 Countries