Now we have covered the connections between trust, income inequality, and mental health. What do we do about it?

Well, the easy solution is to make more money and be more trusting…Right?

Yes, but I’d venture to say that everyone would do that if they could. There are two metaphorical roadblocks to this. The first is that it’s far easier to proclaim that we should reduce income inequality, and each make more money than it is to actually do. The second is that it’s hard enough to find ways to give and receive more trust, let alone find the people who deserve that trust.

These roadblocks aren’t trivial, in fact as we try to look past them it often looks like there is no road being blocked, just a dead-end.

The following will focus on what we can do to increase trust in our individual lives, the next post will discuss how to increase societal trust, as well as decrease income inequality.

Personal Implications of Value Assignment

Now that we have established the importance of increasing trust to increase our happiness in our own lives. We ought to answer the question of how?

A study run by Oishi, Diener, Suh, and Lucas focused on this issue. The study was called Value as a Moderator in SWB. The study was done as a daily diary study, and it operated on the previous research that people are happier in the long term when they are happier in the short term (i.e., it adds up). The study focused, not on if people were happy, but on why people were happy. It found that people who achieved what they valued were happier across the board, but that what people valued was different.

This means that if we want to be happier, we need to align our values and actions with what makes us happy. In other words, if we value work, we should put our time and effort into work. If we value sports, we should focus on sports, so on and so forth.

This relates to increasing trust because it will help us to focus. As we cannot increase trust in every part of our lives all at once, learning what we value gives us a place to focus. To use an example from the paper, “suppose Steve and Jim are equally satisfied with their lives, and on average they experience the same amounts of positive and negative emotions. However, Steve typically feels ecstatic when he beats his friends in racquetball, whereas Jim feels happy when he gets praised by friends.” We can move this idea to trust, Steve will feel happier if he feels that he can trust his partners to play their best in racquetball, while Jim will likely feel better if he can trust his friends as they compliment him (Oishi, 1999).

Of course, there is much more research to be done to connect these two ideas, but they work together logically. No one can tell you what it is that really makes you happy, but you can focus on those areas to increase important trust in your life, which can lead to a much more satisfying life.

There are many more directions to go with the research and a lot of papers discussing how to increase trust. These range from trust in a marriage to trust with your coworkers. At the end of the day, I will leave it to you to find and research where you feel you need to grow trust. What I hope to do is to illuminate why trust matters, and why there are certain aspects of your life where it matters more.

My next and final post in this series will focus on what governments can do and where research can help in the future. I also would love to hear, either in comments or in emails, what I can focus on next and what you would like to learn about in my next series of posts.

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

Diener, Oishi, S., & Lucas, R. E. (2003). Personality, Culture, and Subjective Well-being: Emotional and Cognitive Evaluations of Life. Annual Review of Psychology, 54(1), 403–425. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145056

Dohmen, & Falk, A. (2011). Performance Pay and Multidimensional Sorting: Productivity, Preferences, and Gender. The American Economic Review, 101(2), 556–590. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.101.2.556

Hagerty. (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), 764–771. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.78.4.764

Oishi, Diener, E., Suh, E., & Lucas, R. E. (1999). Value as a Moderator in Subjective Well-Being. Journal of Personality, 67(1), 157–184. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6494.00051