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Data

Share of people agreeing with the statement "most people can be trusted"

Integrated Values Surveys
See all data and research on:
Trust

What you should know about this indicator

  • When available, we consider “Don’t know” and “No answer” to be valid response categories and include them in percentage calculations. “Missing” responses, however, are excluded from the set of possible answers.
  • The years in the data represent the latest year of each Integrated Values Surveys wave, which is not necessarily the year of the survey. For example, the 2022 wave (IVS wave 7) includes surveys conducted between 2017 and 2022. This is done to improve comparability across waves.
Share of people agreeing with the statement "most people can be trusted"
Integrated Values Surveys
% of respondents replying "Most people can be trusted" when asked "Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?" Possible answers include "Most people can be trusted", "Do not know" and "Need to be very careful".
Source
Integrated Values Surveys (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
June 27, 2025
Next expected update
June 2026
Date range
1984–2022
Unit
%

Related research and writing

A dark blue background with a lighter blue world map superimposed over it. Yellow text that says Trust by Our World in Data

Trust

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Max Roser, and Pablo Arriagada

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Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Integrated Values Surveys – Integrated Values Surveys (IVS)

The European Value Study (EVS) and the World Value Survey (WVS) are two large-scale, cross-national, and repeated cross-sectional longitudinal survey research programs. Since their emergence in the early 1980s, the EVS has conducted 5 survey waves (every 9 years) and the WVS has conducted 7 survey waves (every 5 years). Both research programs include a large number of questions, which have been replicated over time and across the EVS and the WVS surveys. Such repeated questions constitute the Integrated Values Surveys (IVS), the joint EVS-WVS time-series data which at the moment covers a 40-years period (1981-2022).

Retrieved on
June 27, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSEVStrend.jsp
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
    

  • EVS (2022): EVS Trend File 1981-2017. GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7503 Data file Version 3.0.0, doi:10.4232/1.14021
    • 

  • Haerpfer, C., Inglehart, R., Moreno, A., Welzel, C., Kizilova, K., Diez-Medrano J., M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin & B. Puranen et al. (eds.). 2022. World Values Survey Trend File (1981-2022) Cross-National Data-Set. Madrid, Spain  &  Vienna,  Austria:  JD  Systems  Institute  &  WVSA Secretariat. Data File Version 4.0.0, doi:10.14281/18241.27.
    •

The European Value Study (EVS) and the World Value Survey (WVS) are two large-scale, cross-national, and repeated cross-sectional longitudinal survey research programs. Since their emergence in the early 1980s, the EVS has conducted 5 survey waves (every 9 years) and the WVS has conducted 7 survey waves (every 5 years). Both research programs include a large number of questions, which have been replicated over time and across the EVS and the WVS surveys. Such repeated questions constitute the Integrated Values Surveys (IVS), the joint EVS-WVS time-series data which at the moment covers a 40-years period (1981-2022).

Retrieved on
June 27, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSEVStrend.jsp
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
    

  • EVS (2022): EVS Trend File 1981-2017. GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA7503 Data file Version 3.0.0, doi:10.4232/1.14021
    • 

  • Haerpfer, C., Inglehart, R., Moreno, A., Welzel, C., Kizilova, K., Diez-Medrano J., M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin & B. Puranen et al. (eds.). 2022. World Values Survey Trend File (1981-2022) Cross-National Data-Set. Madrid, Spain  &  Vienna,  Austria:  JD  Systems  Institute  &  WVSA Secretariat. Data File Version 4.0.0, doi:10.14281/18241.27.
    •

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

We collected the data by merging the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, following the methodology described in the Integrated Values Surveys (IVS) website.

We processed the indicators from microdata of the IVS using Stata. Weights are applied for each country.

We consider “Don’t know” and “No answer” to be valid response categories and include them in percentage calculations. “Missing” responses, however, are excluded from the set of possible answers.

We processed the years in the data to represent the latest year of each IVS wave, which is not necessarily the year of the survey. For example, the 2022 wave (IVS wave 7) includes surveys conducted between 2017 and 2022.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of people agreeing with the statement "most people can be trusted"”, part of the following publication: Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Max Roser, and Pablo Arriagada (2016) - “Trust”. Data adapted from Integrated Values Surveys. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Integrated Values Surveys (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Integrated Values Surveys (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Share of people agreeing with the statement "most people can be trusted" – Integrated Values Surveys” [dataset]. Integrated Values Surveys, “Integrated Values Surveys (IVS) Version 4” [original data]. Retrieved March 31, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear