How Institutions Can Create Social Cohesion
Issue 103: On how relationships, identities, and institutions work together to create social cohesion and trust
Dom and his former PhD student Nick Ungson just finished editing a special issue about “the psychology of social cohesion” for the journal Translational Issues in Psychological Science. With our outstanding team of associate editors1, we were delighted to receive fascinating papers on complex relationships between social cohesion and volunteering, how wise reasoning can improve intergroup relations, and the tension between increasing social cohesion and pursuing social change, among other topics.
The special issue will officially come out in March and we are overdue to contribute an editorial–something we had forgotten about entirely! So here is a sneak peek…
Let’s start with trust
Social cohesion is commonly defined as “the strength of relationships and the sense of solidarity among members of a community” It matters because it is tightly linked to trust. Deciding who to trust is the central problem of social life. Whether you are deciding whether to get married, buy a house, sign a contract, share a secret, or simply get on an elevator alone with a stranger, figuring out who you can trust is essential. When we get it right, good things happen; when we get it wrong, disaster ensues.
In communities with strong relationships and social cohesion solving the trust problem is easy. These communities enforce norms for behavior and people look out for each other. When someone breaks their word or behaves in an unsavory way, everyone tends to hear about it and people face social sanctions (and, hopefully, correct their behavior). In communities without strong relationships or solidarity, however, people are more vulnerable to exploitation by others. This is a stressful state to live it, which may be among the reasons why low social cohesion is linked to higher levels of mortality.
Relationships and solidarity are key to social cohesion and trust. However, they are not the only way to create trust. Sociologist Lynn Zucker pointed out that there are three ways to produce trust:
We form relationships with people and learn first-hand or through gossip whether they are good or bad eggs;
We form groups with people and come to feel a sense of shared identity and solidarity, which increases both trust and trustworthiness;
And we create social institutions (known as rules and procedures) that help to regulate how people interact with each other.
The importance of institutions
Why is it that when you buy something in a store, you are rarely nervous about handing your credit card information over to a complete stranger? You don’t know the person. They may well not belong to any of the groups you belong to; indeed, they could be from another race, religion, or political party. But that doesn’t matter. You trust them because financial rules and procedures make it safe to give them your private information.
You know that they are disincentivized from cheating you because there is a good chance they will be caught and punished if they do. You also know that the credit card company is pretty good at detecting fraud and that they will very likely reimburse you if you happen to be ripped off. These institutions and systems make it safe to trust people—even strangers or members of out-groups.
These social institutions often feel invisible: like the air we breathe, we don’t notice them until they are gone. They are may be large and highly consequential, like the justice system or the democratic laws that govern transitions of power between leaders. And they can be small, like the rules at our universities that ask everyone to disclose conflicts of interest, helping us trust that the decisions others are making are not motivated by personal gain.
In our research, we have been investigating an interesting property of social institutions, which is that when they are working well, they can reduce people’s need to rely on relationships and shared group identities for trust. Good institutions can reduce bias and discrimination.
Consider the credit card example above. You hand over your card to the person behind the counter, not because you know them or they belong to the same group as you, but because your exchange is governed by rules and procedures that make it safe. Similarly, in our research, we have found that when people trust in social institutions, they exhibit less bias against other groups and they are more willing to work with and cooperate with people with different identities.
In this way, good institutions are one of the most powerful ways to bridge the divides between different identity groups.
It goes further than this, though. Effective institutions don’t just substitute for relationships and identities in creating trust, they can also foster new sorts of relationships and identities. By freeing people from the cages of their established social networks and group memberships they can find trust in a wider range of people. Good institutions allow them to form bonds with different kinds of people and find solidarity among other communities. Strong institutions, in other words, may be crucial for creating a broader sense of social cohesion across society.
Worrying about democracy
We would argue that the role of institutions in this regard is particularly important in diverse pluralistic democracies – heterogeneous societies composed of groups with different religious practices, racial and ethnic backgrounds, political beliefs, languages, cultural heritages, etc. In societies far too large for everyone to know each other and where a shared national identity competes with other solidarities, reliable institutions carry a lot of weight in helping us trust one another and cooperate in the democratic experiment.
For that reason, it should concern all of us that trust in major institutions has been steadily falling in many democratic societies. The average confidence in institutions has nearly fallen in half during out lifetimes—from nearly 50% in 1979 to a mere 27% last year. And the pattern looks increasingly grim.
Without trusted institutions to create a broader cohesion, people will likely fall back on more parochial identities and nepotistic social networks. The social fabric starts to fray. Things come undone. Corruption and discrimination is likely to follow.
We don’t think it’s just us who worries about the current moment in this regard. The famous opening of W. B. Yeats poem, The Second Coming, resonates with a certain urgency:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”
We spend most of our time researching and writing about group identities. But when it comes to social cohesion, institutions have a crucial role to play and deserve far more attention. The rapid declines in institutional trust are, in many cases, warranted. Many of our major institutions have not been functioning well. They are often biased. They are often slow and ineffectual. They are too frequently opaque and unresponsive.
But burning them to the ground is not the answer. We will dearly miss them when they are gone. We have a colleague who does research in war torn countries around the world. To simply get through an airport, he needs to bring enough money to bribe security officials at every checkpoint. If he knows how to do it well, he can safely catch his flight. Without it, he’d be stranded. This is the type of future we face if our institutions continue to erode.
Addressing these problems will be essential for repairing the frays and the tears in our social fabric. We all have a vested interest in making them stronger and we all benefit when they work well.
News and Updates
Jay was recently part of a panel on depolarization and pluralism at the Templeton World Charity Conference. Panelists explore ways to transform the power of our differences into constructive solutions for the crises we face in modern times.
Separated by polarization, humanity's ability to flourish is compromised. This session explored ways to achieve depolarization of our communities and help people flourish. Panelists presented insights gleaned from research and practice on how to transform the power of our differences to find constructive solutions for the crises we face in modern times. You can watch the full video for free here.
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Catch up on the last one…
In last week’s newsletter, we provided some tips — based on practices from Jay’s lab — about how teams can collectively help their members find a healthy balance between work and the rest of life.
Translational Issues in Psychological Science has the cool and unusual operating principle that every aspect of the process has to involve early career researchers, including on the editorial team. Our associate editors were Juan Valladares, Sareena Chadha, and Lauren Girouard-Hallam.