Global social trust survey: Turkey sits at the bottom of the rankings

Pew Research Center’s global study dated 1 December 2025 measures how much people trust one another in 25 countries and produces an up-to-date map of social capital. In the survey, respondents are asked the classic question: “Generally speaking, can most people be trusted, or do you have to be very careful in dealing with people?” In Sweden, 83 percent of adults say “most people can be trusted,” while in Turkey this share remains at only 14 percent. The overwhelming majority of adults in Turkey – around 84 percent – say it is more important to be cautious than to trust others. This picture places Turkey, together with Mexico, Kenya and Brazil, among the middle-income countries with the lowest levels of social trust.

The relationship between income level and trust

The study also clearly reveals the gap in trust between high-income and middle-income countries. Pew calculates the median share of those who say “most people can be trusted” at 59 percent across 16 high-income countries. When the same question is asked in nine middle-income countries, the median falls to 27 percent. This shows that as per-capita national income increases, social trust generally rises as well; in middle-income economies such as Turkey, however, trust levels are positioned noticeably lower. Within this middle-income group, Turkey is classified as one of the countries with the lowest levels of trust.

Looking at the global distribution, trust is more widespread in Northern Europe and some other high-income countries, whereas in Latin America, certain parts of Africa and middle-income economies such as Turkey, narratives of distrust dominate. In countries like Sweden and the Netherlands, a large majority of society believes that “most people can be trusted,” while in Turkey, Mexico, Kenya and Brazil, the majority clusters around the answer “you have to be very careful in dealing with people.”

The United States occupies an intermediate position in this picture. Despite very high per-capita income, about 55 percent of Americans say “most people can be trusted,” while a large remaining share prefers to be cautious.

Demographic breakdowns: Education, income and age

Pew’s data show that, in addition to cross-country differences, there are systematic gaps between social groups within the same country. In most countries, the share of people who say “most people can be trusted” increases as the level of education rises. Especially in high-income countries, trust levels among university graduates are significantly higher than among those with lower levels of education. A similar pattern appears when broken down by income. Pew reports that in 12 countries, most of which are high-income, people in the upper income group express higher levels of trust than those in the lower income group.

When age groups are examined, adults aged 50 and above in 11 countries report higher levels of trust than those under 34. For example, in Australia, 80 percent of people aged 50 and over say “most people can be trusted,” whereas this rate falls to 55 percent among those under 34. By contrast, the picture is more heterogeneous for variables such as gender, ethnicity and religion. In some countries, men report higher trust levels than women; in others, ethnic or religious minorities show lower levels of trust than majorities. A large part of these differences is intertwined with other structural variables such as education, income and political orientation.

According to the survey, the share of people in Turkey who say “Most Muslims can be trusted” is 14 percent. Turkey is at the very bottom of the list. In Sweden, 83 percent say “most Christians can be trusted” and 86 percent say “most atheists can be trusted.”

The table below is the data version of the chart above. It shows the “level of social trust by religious identity.”

The question asked was: “Generally speaking, can most people be trusted?” The value shown is the percentage (%) of respondents who answered “Most people can be trusted.”

Turkey’s chronically low trust profile

From Turkey’s perspective, Pew’s 2025 data do not point to a new situation but rather to a long-standing, chronic trend. Analyses based on World Values Survey data and published by TEPAV show that between 2005 and 2014, Turkey ranked as the third-lowest country in terms of social trust among 29 countries. In the same study, only 8 percent of respondents in Turkey said “Generally speaking, most people can be trusted.” In Sweden, the corresponding figure is reported as 63 percent. In other words, over roughly a 20-year horizon, Turkey has never exited the low-trust band.

In other words, over roughly a 20-year horizon, Turkey has never exited the low-trust band.

In Ipsos’s 2022 “interpersonal trust” study, which offers a global comparison, Turkey is listed alongside Brazil and Malaysia among the countries where the share of those saying “most people can be trusted” remains below 15 percent. Read together with Pew’s 2025 findings, these results show that Turkey has consistently occupied the “lowest trust” league worldwide.

Recent academic work on Turkey suggests that this low level of generalized trust coexists with strong “in-group trust.” A 2023 study using World Values Survey data finds that people in Turkey place high trust in family members and very close circles, but have very low levels of trust toward people they do not know or do not feel they belong with. In this sense, trust in Turkey is concentrated within a narrow circle, does not extend to the broader social scale and, as a result, limits the quality of the country’s social capital.

Economy, governance and the social capital gap

This picture has significant implications for the economy and governance. In societies with high levels of trust, the costs of doing business, contracting processes, monitoring burdens and the costs of resolving disputes tend to be relatively low. Even when legal and bureaucratic safety nets are needed, the underlying “assumption of trust” accelerates transactions and reduces waste of resources. In low-trust contexts, the opposite dynamic comes into play: carrying out the very same transaction requires more controls, more procedures, more time and more institutional capacity.

From an institutional perspective, it becomes clear that the level of social trust is a critical variable that cannot be ignored in public policy design. When principles such as transparency, accountability and participation are implemented consistently, both institutional trust and interpersonal trust can be strengthened. In the opposite scenario, distrust in institutions and distrust between individuals can feed into one another, creating a “cycle of mistrust.” The coexistence in Turkey of high trust in close circles with low trust in the broader society and institutions reveals a fragile configuration in this regard.

Capacity to live together and the trust gap

Pew Research Center’s 2025 global trust study shows that Turkey still has a level of social trust far below the world average – and that this is not new, but a trend stretching over roughly three decades.

When data from different sources such as Ipsos and the World Values Survey are laid side by side, the picture becomes even clearer: in terms of generalized trust, Turkey has long been in the lowest tier of countries worldwide, and this creates an invisible cost in many areas, from economic performance and the quality of democracy to urban life and crisis management.

For this reason, trust should not be seen merely as a cultural “temperament” issue, but as a strategic infrastructure component that must be taken into account in policy design. The point indicated by the data is simple but critical: the less we trust one another, the more expensive, fragile and unsustainable it becomes to manage the problems we need to solve together.

Onur Metin reported this for HepsiVeri.

Source:

Where most people trust others and where they don’t around the world

Türkçesi için: https://hepsiveri.com/2025/12/insanlar-ne-kadar-guveniyor-turkiye-sonda/