The age of trust

What do you anticipate as you look into the future and see yourself getting older? Maybe you are seeing more time on your hands or possibly you are contemplating loss of physical power or perhaps your thoughts immediately leapt to the wrinkles you will undoubtedly accrue? Certainly ageing like any living process is a mixture of gains and losses. For the last few decades it is the losses that have been a societal focus and so being “anti”-ageing has become an acceptable, if misguided, point of view. Certainly ageing is a process of change but there are many gains to go along with the losses and a new study has shown that one of the gains of ageing is “trust”.

This was the conclusion drawn from two studies published by researchers in a paper recently.

The first study involved 198,000 people from 83 countries aged 14-99 at the start of the study and followed over 26 years and interviewed at various stages through that 26 yr period between 1981 and 2007. The results showed that older people showed higher levels of trust and that the higher the sense of trust the greater the sense of wellbeing.

In the second experiment 1,230 people aged 18-89 were followed for four years. This time the results showed that interpersonal trust increased with age across all age groups and this was true whether the subjects were baby-boomers, Gen-Xers, or Gen Y-ers.

It appears quite likely then that trust increases along with ageing. The researchers think this might be because as people get older they are more likely to want to give back to people and so see them as more trustworthy.

We do know that as people age they are more likely to focus on the positives and be less likely to dwell on the negatives. Other research has also indicated that more intelligent people are more likely to trust others because they are better judges of character. Maybe it is that as we age intelligence grows, and that intelligence may be intellectual, emotional, or social. Possibly that intelligence allows for greater discernment with age allowing appropriate trust to replace the generalised fear and loathing of youth?

Whatever the cause though, trust does seem to increase with age and that is a good thing on many levels…trust me.