Lower rates of r r religiosity associate with mo trust o others y ed ore of

Efriq que August 27 2011 7

I saw so OECD figures on trust ("Perc ome centage of people expre p essing a hig level of tr in gh rust others") at the natio level fo 32 count ) onal for tries, and tra acked them down to thi page. [1] is (The da come fro two sour ata om rces - the Eu uropean Social Survey and the Int y ternational Social S Survey Programme e.) Specific cally, at the bottom is a spreadsheet (CO1.XL that has some displ e LS) lays of the data, d includin plots loo ng oking at the relationship between Trust and tw economic factors (m p T wo c median income, and incom inequality These ar 2008 figu , me y). re ures. I decid to throw Irreligion [2] ded w (specifi ically, the 2007-2008 G Gallup figur there, wh relate t the questi "Is relig res hich to ion gion importa in your d ant daily life", a the Irrel and ligion figures are the p percentage responding negatively) into the mix and see how that related. e t As it turns out, qui strongly: ite :

But of c course, may that rela ybe ationship is actually exp plained by t those other variables th he OECD identified, i income and income ine d equality. Inc come is med househ dian hold income e (US$PP Income inequality is measured by Gini co PP). e d oefficient (l is more equal, high is low e h more un nequal). Let look at th t's hose as well (Ignore the plot at the bottom rig for now) The l e ght ). black nu umbers are linear corre elation coef fficients.

ee y st fficient has a down All thre variables are strongly related to Trust. The plot agains Gini Coef slope (n negative cor rrelation) in ndicating tru goes dow when inc ust wn comes are less equal - not n surprisi ing. So I dec cided to fit a model to see what the important drivers we Are any of the varia t ere. y ables still rele evant after t other tw have been included? the wo n ? h ormally not assume a st traight line, here the re , elationships are all so near to n Though I would no straight it's not wor trying to do someth t rth o hing fancy, so I just fit a linear regression of Trust on s T the othe three vari er iables.
lm(Trust ~ Inco ome + Gini iCoeff + I Irreligion data = oecdtr) n, Coefficients: Estimate St td. Error t value Pr(>|t|) P (Intercept) 3.704e+01 2.107e+01 1.758 0.09270 1 Income 1.034e-03 2.854e-04 3.625 0.00150 4 GiniCoeff -6.232e+01 4.535e+01 -1.374 0.18320 1 Irreligion 4.065e-01 1.330e-01 3.056 0.00579 1 Residual standa ard error: 8.221 on 22 degre n ees of fre eedom (8 observations deleted due to mi issingness s) Multiple R-squa ared: 0.8119, Adjus sted R-squ uared: 0.7 7862 F-statistic: 31.65 on 3 and 22 DF p-value 3.671eF, e: -08

(Analys includin plots perf sis, ng formed in R R.) The ma things to note is that all of the v ain o t variables maintain the s same sign o relationsh of hip when th other var he riables are in ncluded com mpared to lo ooking at th relationsh alone (th is he hip his

not always the case - adjusting for other important variables can sometimes flip things around). After including the other variables, Trust still increases with Income and Irreligion, and still decreases with increasing Income Inequality. The fourth plot above is of Trust against the fit from this model - it accounts for a lot of the variation in trust in other people across the countries involved. However, as we see from the regression output, the Income Inequality (Gini Coeff) variable is no longer statistically significant - most of its relationship to Trust can be accounted for by the other variables. But Income and Irreligion are both still highly significant predictors of Trust. That doesn't mean that having low levels of religious belief necessarily causes to more trust (it's probably that they both relate to other social factors, like social services, public health, support for the unemployed, crime rates and so on).
[1]http://www.oecd.org/document/24/0,3746,en_2649_37419_2671576_1_1_1_37419,00.html [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_by_country