Impacts of Interpersonal Relationships

This will be the first of this series of blog posts, focusing on interpersonal relationships and their impact on mental health. I will be posting a new piece every two weeks. My motivation for writing these blog posts comes from literature research that I have done both within Psychology and Molecular Biology. I have come to realize that there is an enormous amount of interesting research that most people just don’t know about. This is largely a result of it being written in very technical language and being published in journals that the general public doesn’t read.

Importantly, every post will be APA cited, and every point will be supported by a paper. I am excited to take anyone that is interested on my journey of understanding interesting and relevant psychological research.

Trust: Why Should We Care?

In this post, I am going to dive into some of the research on trust and demonstrate the importance of trust both in society and between people.

First, let’s start with a definition of trust. Shigehiro Oishi, a distinguished researcher in the world of trust and happiness, described trust as the comfort that people will be honest with you. He specifically describes the absence of trust as such that “you can’t be too careful in dealing with people” (Oishi, 2011, pp. 1096).

While this is reasonably intuitive, it is significant due to trust’s relationship with happiness. An important study found that when Americans thought of others as less trustworthy, they described themselves as less happy (Preacher, Zyphur, and Zhang, 2010). It is important to note that this was a yearly analysis, so the data could have confounding variables, but this research establishes that there is clear correlation between trust and happiness.

Another study replicated the association between trust and happiness, and this one involved over 8,000 people. In this case, trust is correlated with good health as opposed to happiness, however, it is reasonable to say that health and happiness go hand-in-hand. The study concluded that “high levels of … trust and reciprocity had statistically significant associations with good self-rated health, even after adjusting for all the other variables” (Neiminen, 2010).

The big question and the purpose of this blog is “Why does this matter?” There are a few reasons. First, I think that we can all agree that being happier is a positive, if, at times, hedonistic. Second, and perhaps more importantly, trust may be causally associated with good health. We don’t know for sure, but it seems that correlation does imply some level of causation in this case. This means that being more trusting is good for us. It is beneficial to live in a society that has higher levels of trust.

Right now, it is safe to say that we don’t live in that society. There are several ways to fix this on the societal level, and the next few blog posts will discuss potential solutions. A good place to start is by making day-to-day choices. I am not a life coach, nor do I aspire to be, but the formula depicted by the research above is simple. Increased trust could lead to higher levels of happiness and potentially even longevity. How does one go about increasing trust in our fellow humans? For me, it starts with surrounding myself with good people. A good way to test this is to go back to Shigehiro Oishi’s quote and ask if you feel like you need to be careful when dealing with the people around you. If you feel like you can’t be too careful, then you are likely not in nor cultivating a trusting environment.

While many of these studies are from a decade or more ago, there have been more recent studies. I have these cited in the references section. I chose the above studies because they were more general. As the research has gone on, it has become more specific.

Citations (if people would like to learn more about the above topics they can use the following papers)

Delhey, J., & Dragolov, G. (2014). Why inequality makes Europeans less happy: The role of distrust, status anxiety, and perceived conflict. European sociological review, 30(2), 151-165.

Hagerty, M. R. (2000). Social comparisons of income in one’s community: Evidence from national surveys of income and happiness. Journal of Personality and social Psychology, 78(4), 764.

Nieminen, T., Martelin, T., Koskinen, S., Aro, H., Alanen, E., & Hyyppä, M. T. (2010). Social capital as a determinant of self-rated health and psychological well-being. International Journal of Public Health, 55(6), 531-542.

Oishi, S., Kesebir, S., & Diener, E. (2011). Income inequality and happiness. Psychological science, 22(9), 1095-1100.

Preacher, K. J., Zyphur, M. J., & Zhang, Z. (2010). A general multilevel SEM framework for assessing multilevel mediation. Psychological methods, 15(3), 209.

Tokuda, Y., Fujii, S., & Inoguchi, T. (2017). Individual and country-level effects of social trust on happiness: The Asia barometer survey. In Trust with Asian Characteristics (pp. 123-139). Springer, Singapore.