World Happiness Report 2023 54 Trust and benevolence in times of crisis Many studies of the effects of COVID-19 have emphasized the importance of public trust as a support for successful pandemic responses.36 We have studied similar linkages in earlier reports dealing with COVID-19 and other national and personal crisis situations. In World Happiness Report 2020, we found that individuals with high social and institutional trust levels were happier than those living in less trusting and trustworthy environments. The benefits of high trust were especially great for those in conditions of adversity, including ill-health, unemployment, low income, discrimination, and unsafe streets.37 In World Happiness Report 2013, we found that the happiness consequences of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 were smaller in those countries with greater levels of mutual trust. These findings are consistent with a broad range of studies showing that communities with high levels of trust are generally much more resilient in the face of a wide range of crises, including tsunamis,38 earthquakes,39 accidents, storms, and floods. Trust and cooperative social norms not only facilitate rapid and cooperative responses, which themselves improve the happiness of citizens, but also demonstrate to people the extent to which others are prepared to do benevolent acts for them and for the community in general. Since this sometimes comes as a surprise, there is a happiness bonus when people get a chance to see the goodness of others in action, and to be of service themselves. Seeing trust in action has been found to lead to post-disaster increases in trust,40 especially where government responses are considered to be sufficiently timely and effective.41 In World Happiness Report 2021 we presented new evidence using the return of lost wallets as a powerful measure of both trust and benevolence. We compared the life satisfaction effects of the expected likelihood of a Gallup World Poll respondent’s lost wallet being returned with the comparably measured likelihood of negative events, such as illness or violent crime. The results were striking, with the expected return of a lost wallet being associated with a life evaluation more than one point higher on the 0 to 10 scale, far higher than the association with any of the negative events assessed by the same respondents.42 COVID-19, as the biggest health crisis in more than a century, with unmatched global reach and duration, has provided a correspondingly important test of the power of trust and prosocial behaviour to provide resilience and save lives and livelihoods. Now that we have three years of evidence, we can assess not just the importance of benevolence and trust, but see how they have fared during the pandemic. The pandemic has been seen by many as creating social and political divisions above and beyond those created by the need to maintain physical distance from loved ones for many months. But some of the evidence noted above shows that large crises can lead to improvements in trust, benevolence, and well-being if they induce people to reach out to help others. This is especially likely if seeing that benevolence comes as a welcome surprise to their neighbours more used to reading of acts of ill-will. Looking to the future, it is important to know whether trust and benevolence have been fostered or destroyed by three years of pandemic. We have not found significant changes in our measures of institutional trust during the pandemic, but did find, as we show below, especially for 2021 and 2022, very large increases in the reported frequency of benevolent acts. In this section we present several different types of evidence on the importance of trust and benevolence in times of crisis. First, we update our analysis of COVID-19 death rates to show how the patterns of deaths changed by modelling COVID-19 deaths for 2020 and 2021 combined, and then separately for 2022. This separation enables us to show the great extent to which Omicron variants of COVID-19 have changed the consequences of COVID-19 policy strategies. Benevolent acts in 2022 were about one-quarter higher than before the pandemic.
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