In 2019 the Pew Research Center published “Trust and Distrust in America,” based on a survey of 10,618 adults. Some 71% thought that trust between Americans had declined over the past twenty years.
Age made a large difference. Nearly half of adults under 30 (46%) were what Pew called low trusters, against 19% of adults 65 and older. Among those under 30, 71% said most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.
Welcome Wagon was founded in 1928 in Memphis, Tennessee, by an advertising man, Thomas Winston Briggs. A hostess called on families who had just moved to town, bearing a gift basket filled with coupons and promotional items from local merchants.
Briggs took the name from the frontier, where boosters of small towns greeted passing wagon trains with gifts and supplies. In the late 1960s the company made 1.5 million visits a year. The home visits ended in 1998.
The welcome was a business, paid for by the merchants whose coupons were in the basket.
New employees at Google are called Nooglers. Each one wore a propeller hat when joining the company. In the early days the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduced every new employee personally.
Doug Edwards, an early employee who suggested the hat, explained its purpose. Sergey wanted new people to be “easily identified” after the introduction, “and current Googlers could make them feel welcome.” The Computer History Museum keeps one in its collection.
In 2012 Minnesota Public Radio ran a story on newcomers to the Twin Cities under the headline “Newcomers say it’s ‘nice,’ but not warm.” Todd Klingel, president of the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce, passed on a newcomer’s line: “Minnesotans are friendly. They just don’t want any more friends.”
Ken Charles, a vice president at General Mills, put it in working hours. “That gets you the 9 to 5,” he said. “The harder part is the 5 to 9.”
In the chapter of Democracy in America titled “How Democracy Renders the Habitual Intercourse of the Americans Simple and Easy,” Alexis de Tocqueville describes Americans who meet by chance. “If they meet by accident, they neither seek nor avoid intercourse; their manner is therefore natural, frank, and open.”
In the same chapter he notes that Americans who meet abroad become friendly at once, for the simple reason that they are both American.
In 2008 Fortune asked prominent people, among them chief executives, for the best advice they had ever received. Indra Nooyi, then head of PepsiCo, answered: “Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent. When you assume negative intent, you’re angry.”
The words were her father’s.
In 1996 the organizational scholars Debra Meyerson, Karl Weick and Roderick Kramer described what they called swift trust. A later commentator notes that their main example is the film production crew. Strangers meet, take up their roles and start work at once, with no time to get to know each other.
The chapter describes contexts in which “swift judgments of trust are mandatory.” Such temporary systems “act as if trust were present, but their histories seem to preclude its development.” The theory describes the sequence. The team assumes trust first and checks and adjusts it later.
The business writer Erin Meyer places the United States among the peach cultures described by Fons Trompenaars. In them people “share information about themselves, and ask personal questions of those they hardly know.” Further in, “you may suddenly get to the hard pit protecting someone’s real, or at least more private, self.”
MIT’s office for international students quotes the same image. Americans are “soft on the outside, easy to approach, but the pit is harder.”