The US has experienced a substantial decline in social trust in recent decades. Surprisingly few studies analyze whether individual-level explanations can account for this decrease. We use three-wave panel data from the General Social Survey (2006–2014) to study the effects of four possible individual-level sources of changes in social trust: job loss, social ties, income, and confidence in political institutions. Findings from fixed-effects linear regression models suggest that all but social ties matter. We then use 1973–2018 GSS data to predict trust based on observed values for unemployment, confidence in institutions, and satisfaction with income, versus an alternative counterfactual scenario in which the values of those three predictors are held constant at their mean levels in the early 1970s. Predicted values from these two scenarios differ substantially, suggesting that decreasing confidence in institutions and increasing unemployment scarring may explain about half of the observed decline in US social trust.

近几十年来，美国的社会信任度大幅下降。令人惊讶的是，很少有研究分析个人层面的解释是否可以解释这种下降。我们使用来自一般社会调查（2006-2014）的三波面板数据来研究四种可能的个人层面社会信任变化来源的影响：失业、社会关系、收入和对政治制度的信心。固定效应线性回归模型的结果表明，除了社会关系之外，其他一切都很重要。然后，我们使用 1973-2018 年的 GSS 数据，根据观察到的失业率、对机构的信心和对收入的满意度的值来预测信任，而在另一种反事实情景中，这三个预测变量的值在早期保持在其平均水平不变。 1970 年代。