Gen Z is the most suspicious generation — just 13% believe ‘most people can be trusted’
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Gen Z has the lowest interpersonal trust of any generation, with only one in eight teens and young adults believing that most people can be trusted, according to a bombshell new poll.
Only 13% of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) said that they could trust the majority of people, while almost three-quarters (74%) said “you can’t be too careful,” according to a study by political scientist Ryan Burge at Washington University.
Millennials were slightly less paranoid, with roughly a quarter (24%) agreeing that most people could be trusted and two-thirds (67%) erring on the side of caution, as shown by the polling compiled using data from the General Social Survey between 2021 and 2024.
Gen X and Boomers had similar levels of interpersonal trust, with 30% and 29% respectively saying that most people could be trusted.
The Silent Generation was by far the most trusting, with 41% of those surveyed believing most people to be trustworthy, and 51% saying it pays to be careful.
But the data also shows a steep drop in interpersonal trust among Gen Z in 2020, during the COVID pandemic.
In 2018, just over 20% of Gen Z believed most people could be trusted, but in 2025, that figure is in single digits.
Boomers and millennials also saw a slight drop in interpersonal trust since 2020, but nowhere was that more pronounced than in Gen Z.
The data found that across all generations, people with a college education were more likely to believe that others could be trusted compared to those with a high school diploma or less.
Some two-thirds (67%) of Gen Z-ers with a 4-year degree or more felt that other people couldn’t be trusted, compared to a staggering 80% of those with a high school diploma or less.
That divide was even more pronounced among millennials, where 48% of those with college degrees expressed mistrust of others, compared to 82% of those in their peer group who didn’t attend higher education.
“This is an empirical fact: unless they experience a significant increase in trust — which we haven’t seen in fifty years of polling data — Gen Z will be the least trusting generation in modern American history,” said Burge.