In the past 40 years in the U.S. we've witnessed a massive decline in our openness to trust other people. A recurring survey asks people, "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 early 1960s, significant majorities said that people can generally be trusted. But by the 1990s the distrusters had a 20-percentage-point margin over the trusters, and those margins have increased in the years since."