In a world of distrust are Indians very trusting?

Or are they plain gullible?

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2017 was a fitting finale to the beginning of the era of post-truths. According to Ralph Keyes who wrote the book "The Post-Truth Era", at one time we had truth and lies but now we have truth, lies, and statements that may not be true but we consider too benign to call false.

The Oxford dictionary which included the word in 2016 in describing its meaning said

• Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief:
• ‘in this era of post-truth politics, it's easy to cherry-pick data and come to whatever conclusion you desire’
• ‘some commentators have observed that we are living in a post-truth age’

So the Edelman Trust Barometer 2017 is perhaps reflective of this new age. Interestingly the 2016 version summed up the year with "the growing inequality of trust." But 2017 has gone a step further as it describes it as "trust in crisis". The study calibrates the percent trust in the four institutions of government, business, media and NGOs.

And its main opening slide this year was that the trust gap had widened both from 2012 and the previous year. It is not difficult to figure out why the UK and US are prominent. 2016 were tumultuous years for both countries with Brexit and the Presidential Elections. For me France was a bit of a surprise.

But even more surprising was that India stood out from the rest of the world in the level of trust that we have in our institutions.

 Both amongst the informed public and the mass population. The study defines the informed public as the online population of ages 18+. Where as the mass population is all population which does not include the informed public and represents 87% of the global population. What is interesting is that amongst the mass population there are only 3 countries which form the "trusters" with China, India and Indonesia. Again, no surprise but these are the worlds most populous countries and the mass population in all 3 countries perhaps lag behind the rest of the world? There is also the likelihood that there is a large gap between the informed public and the mass populations in these countries. The overall literacy rate in the India may have gone up to 74.4%, but the drop in the illiteracy rate has not matched the increase in population. Also if 26% are still illiterate is it possible that illiterates are trusting because they don't know any better compared to informed public? So in many ways our masses are perhaps the more dis-informed public which in turn may lead to high levels of trust. So in a sense the mass population is even more left behind in India, China and Indonesia than in the other countries around the world.

And most importantly because of political upheaval around the world, trust in governments evaporated further. Again showed it was on the upswing with a +10% change over last year showing that the current government still has the popular vote of the public at 75%. But I went back to the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer only to find that the government that was voted out of power and accused of scams and scandals was still at 57%. Now that is an amazing amount of trust in a government that the Indians were going to vote out of power a few months later.

And while I see a lot of opinions on social media about our distrust in the media which is often accuesed of sensationalising every piece of news and thrusting opinion on the public, Indians turned out to be very trusting of the media as well.

Again not surprisingly the people that trusted media most happened once again to be the most populous countries in the world, China, India and Indonesia. Throwing a suspicion that the masses in these countries maybe trailing much behind the informed public compared to other nations.

I have seen Indians most vocal only after the announcement of Demonetisation in the country. But the Edelman Trust Barometer is unlikely to have covered that because their field work ended a week after the announcement and therefore might not have affected the results.

Some of the data thrown up by the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer therefore raises a very important question. Are Indians more trusting than other populations in the world? If they are, I would also be worried that the institutions described in the study (businesses, NGOs, media and government ) would take advantage of the fact that we are trusting.

To be trusting is alright I suppose, but I certainly hope we are not gullible. And it would be wrong to betray that trust, because as they say, trust takes years to build, seconds to break and forever to repair.

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