Trusting a Stranger: Why It Used to Be the Norm, and Today Feels Like the Exception

Trusting a stranger, argued Danish philosopher Knud Løgstrup, is the natural default of human behavior; distrust is the exception that needs explaining. Zygmunt Bauman, in ‘Liquid Love’ (2003), picks up that idea to ask how much of it survives in a culture of reality shows and increasingly revocable bonds. His answer is more nuanced than it first appears, and the trust survey data we review here add further nuance still.

It is a characteristic of human life that we normally encounter one another with natural trust.

Knud Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand (1956)

“Only because of some special circumstance do we ever distrust a stranger in advance […] under normal circumstances we accept the word of a stranger, and we do not distrust him until we have some particular reason to do so. We never suspect a person of falseness until we have caught him in a lie.”

Bauman cites this passage in Liquid Love as a starting point for exploring an uncomfortable question: is it still true?

A rural pastor who became a philosopher of the resistance

Løgstrup conceived much of this thinking during the years he spent as a pastor in a small parish on the Danish island of Funen, before moving to Aarhus to teach theology and ethics at the university. Bauman notes, not without a certain irony, that he doubted these same ideas could have taken shape once Løgstrup had settled in the city and had to confront, as an active member of the Danish resistance during the Nazi occupation, the realities of a world at war.

Løgstrup’s own biography already contains a tension his work never fully resolved: trust as a natural impulse, tested by extraordinary circumstances.

The television show that inverted his verdict

Bauman sets Løgstrup’s thesis against a very specific cultural phenomenon: the massive success of shows like Big Brother, Survivor or The Weakest Link. In Bauman’s reading, the underlying message of Survivor is distrust of everyone else.

Bauman suggests that followers of that kind of reality TV would invert Løgstrup’s original verdict until it was practically turned on its head: it is a characteristic of human life that people meet each other with natural suspicion.

Why trust doesn’t survive inside the game

The reason, according to Bauman’s analysis, isn’t incidental. Within the logic of a televised survival game, trust, compassion and mercy become a strategic disadvantage.

The reasoning can be followed step by step:

1. The game rewards calculation, not trust. Every decision is judged by its effect on your own survival within the game, not by its moral worth.
2. Trusting another player exposes you to a rewarded betrayal. If one player trusts and the other doesn’t, the one who trusted loses; the incentive system systematically favors whoever betrays first.
3. The result is a self-reinforcing spiral of distrust. The more players adopt the strategy of not trusting, the more rational it becomes for everyone else to do the same.

Whoever isn’t tougher and more calculating than the rest risks being eliminated, with or without remorse from those who make that call. The show reproduces, as entertainment, a Darwinian logic in which whoever is best at not trusting survives.

It’s the same structure that game theory studies in the prisoner’s dilemma: when the game lasts a single round and betrayal is rewarded, distrust looks like the rational choice.

How this plays out in everyday life

Consider a familiar situation, not a real case but an illustration of the pattern: someone starts a new job and, in their first week, a coworker offers help without asking for anything in return.

Many people’s instinctive reaction today isn’t simply to accept, as Løgstrup described as “normal,” but to wonder what that person is after, what hidden interest might lie behind the gesture.

That suspicion doesn’t come from any specific bad experience with that coworker, but from a general mental habit, trained by years of vague warnings about not trusting anyone. Løgstrup would say that default suspicion is the real anomaly, not the initial trust.

What the data say: do we really trust less?

Bauman writes as an essayist sociologist, not with surveys. But the question of whether trust in strangers has fallen has been measured, using a classic question repeated for decades: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?”

In the United States, the answer shows a clear decline. Jean Twenge, Keith Campbell and Nathan Carter (2014) analyzed the General Social Survey and found that the share of adults who said most people can be trusted fell from 46% in the early 1970s to 33% in 2010-2012. That’s the figure that best fits the title of this article.

But it isn’t a universal trend. International comparisons, from the World Values Survey to the European Social Survey, consistently place the Nordic countries at the top, with Denmark among the leaders, and far ahead of many Latin American countries. In an analysis of 60 countries, Jan Delhey and Kenneth Newton (2005) spoke of “Nordic exceptionalism”: the highest-trust countries combined ethnic homogeneity, a Protestant tradition, good government, wealth and income equality.

And in Denmark the trend has gone the opposite way from the United States: according to Kim Mannemar Sønderskov and Peter Thisted Dinesen (2014), Danish social trust rose markedly between 1979 and 2009.

The irony is striking: Løgstrup’s country isn’t just still one of the places in the world where the most people say most others can be trusted; more people say so now than in the late 1970s, shortly before his death. Our editorial reading is that the “anomaly” Bauman describes is real, but it isn’t the fate of an era: it depends a great deal on where you live and on how far you can trust the institutions that surround strangers.

A nuance Bauman won’t let slide

Even so, Bauman doesn’t treat Løgstrup’s thesis as invalidated. He makes a key point: Løgstrup never claimed that moral impulses arose from reflection or risk calculation.

On the contrary, his argument was that the hope of morality lay precisely in its pre-reflective spontaneity, in the fact that trust, when genuine, doesn’t stop to ask “what do I get out of this?” before it shows itself.

Under that logic, the fact that there are fewer and fewer guarantees that trust will be returned doesn’t prove the spontaneous impulse has disappeared: at most, it proves it’s finding less and less fertile ground to take root in.

Two kinds of distrust worth telling apart

Bauman’s reading of Løgstrup offers a useful distinction for thinking about your own experience, which can be summed up in two quite different categories:

• Specific, justified distrust, directed at a particular person for a particular reason: someone lied before, broke a commitment, gave real signs of being unreliable.
• Generalized suspicion, held in advance toward any stranger, with no particular evidence backing it up in that specific case.

Løgstrup saw the first as a normal part of social life and the second as the anomaly that would truly require explaining, though Bauman himself acknowledges that the contemporary world seems, more and more often, to flip that hierarchy.

Trust as a “sovereign expression of life”

Løgstrup described trust, alongside compassion and mercy, as manifestations of what he called the “sovereign expressions of life”: acts that don’t answer to a calculation of personal gain or an obligation imposed from outside, but that arise, in his framing, with no need for any further motive.

Bauman connects this idea with philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of “responsibility for the other”: both agree that depending on someone, or letting someone depend on you, isn’t a weakness to be eliminated, but the very foundation on which any genuine moral bond is built.

Read this way, the world Bauman describes throughout the rest of Liquid Love, bent on reducing every form of dependence to a risk best avoided, wouldn’t simply be updating Løgstrup’s thesis: in many ways, it would be working against it.

Trust and close relationships

This tension between spontaneous trust and learned suspicion isn’t limited to strangers: it also runs through our closest bonds.

Attachment research describes how early experience with available, consistent caregivers is linked to greater ease in trusting others in adult life, a pattern explored in more detail in the secure attachment profile.

If you’re curious about how that disposition shows up in your close relationships, our attachment style test explores the four styles that research describes.

Conclusion: the anomaly changed places

What Løgstrup described as the norm, spontaneous trust toward a stranger, works in much of contemporary culture as the exception that needs justifying, and the American surveys confirm it. The Danish ones, on the other hand, are a reminder that this inversion isn’t inevitable.

Bauman doesn’t rule on which stance is correct. He offers a distinction for noticing the shift: whether an automatic suspicion toward someone new responds to a real, specific reason, or to the habit of an era that learned to expect the worst before having any proof.

Sources

• Løgstrup, K. E. (1956). Den etiske fordring. Gyldendal.
• Bauman, Z. (2003). Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Polity Press.
• Delhey, J. and Newton, K. (2005). Predicting cross-national levels of social trust: Global pattern or Nordic exceptionalism? European Sociological Review, 21(4), 311-327. doi:10.1093/esr/jci022
• Sønderskov, K. M. and Dinesen, P. T. (2014). Danish exceptionalism: Explaining the unique increase in social trust over the past 30 years. European Sociological Review, 30(6), 782-795. doi:10.1093/esr/jcu073
• Twenge, J. M., Campbell, W. K. and Carter, N. T. (2014). Declines in trust in others and confidence in institutions among American adults and late adolescents, 1972-2012. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1914-1923. doi:10.1177/0956797614545133