Ain't No Trust. Judith Levine
and minority populations than other populations.26 It establishes that people are less likely to trust those who hold power over them.27 It shows us that distrust dissuades action.28 Each of these findings has great relevance for understanding both life in poverty and the workings of social policies. And yet these insights are often ignored in scholarship on poverty and social policy. I find that low-income mothers feel plagued by those they believe to be untrustworthy and that their resultant distrust undermines key goals of welfare reform policy. These findings bring home the value of heeding the trust literature’s lessons when studying the struggles of low-income families and the policies that affect them.
At the same time, this book’s findings suggest that the trust literature would benefit from paying more attention to the real-life trust problems that low-income populations face. Much of the trust literature is based on experiments or is theoretical. Actual field-based studies are few and far between.29 The investigation reported here of distrust in a natural setting shows the development and implications of distrust for real lives outside the laboratory.
In addition, the trust literature finds that powerlessness is a barrier to trust, but it has little to say about how powerlessness creates a trust barrier or how that barrier might be overcome.30 Karen S. Cook, a leading scholar on trust, has written about this limitation of the trust literature.31 The women interviewed for this book often experienced relative powerlessness vis-à-vis those with whom they interacted. Caseworkers had the power to deny them needed benefits. Bosses had the power to fire them from needed jobs. Boyfriends exerted power over them through physical intimidation or other means. This study provides insights into how the women’s relative powerlessness in these realms produced distrust and what would be needed for them to trust. For instance, women would have greater trust in their caseworkers if they knew that caseworkers were rewarded for avoiding bureaucratic errors and treating them with respect. Women do not trust caseworkers because they do not believe they share their interests. Changing the incentives for caseworkers would realign caseworker interests so that clients would begin to believe their interests were shared, which in turn would promote trust. The detailed examples from this study and similar field studies can begin to move the trust literature toward a theory of trust and powerlessness.
Another lesson of the book for the trust literature is the importance of maintaining a distinction between trust and trustworthiness. The political scientist Russell Hardin makes clear that one’s choice to place trust in another is related to but different from whether the other is indeed worthy of trust.32 Despite Hardin’s highlighting of the importance of the trust versus trustworthiness distinction, much of the trust literature focuses on trust rather than trustworthiness. When the trustworthiness of interaction partners is ignored, it is easy to focus solely on those who do not trust and see “fixing” their inability to trust as the solution. Instead, I attend at all times to the potentiality of untrustworthiness in interaction partners as a producer of distrust. Many of the contexts in which low-income women find themselves are structured in ways that promote the untrustworthiness of others. (The discussion above of caseworkers being rewarded for getting clients off the welfare rolls, even if they do so by making errors, is just one example.) Consequently, getting women to be more trusting is not the solution. Getting their interaction partners to be more trustworthy is.
A final implication for the trust literature relates to a debate in the field over whether trust and distrust stem from a personality trait, set of moral values, or from learned experience in social contexts.33 This study provides evidence that people learn to trust or distrust through experience. Many women interviewed described trusting, getting burned, and learning to distrust as a result. Women also told stories of not knowing what to expect in a situation and being surprised by the behavior of others, behavior that eventually taught them to distrust. These narratives of learning distrust through experience support experimental evidence that trust and distrust cannot be attributed to a personality trait wholly unrelated to experience and social context.34
The findings in this book also have implications for research on welfare usage and poverty. Many of the quantitative studies of low-income parents’ movement off the welfare rolls look at the impact of individual traits on outcomes. They consider the role of education, work experience, physical and mental health, drug use, car ownership, and similar factors on women’s outcomes in the reform era.35 However, the quantitative literature pays less attention to the role of social context—which this book shows is crucial for understanding low-income women’s behavior and outcomes.
The qualitative literature on welfare reform, and low-income mothers more generally, pays much more attention to social context, but most studies focus on a single context. For example, there are excellent studies of what happens in welfare offices or between romantic partners.36 Some of these studies identify distrust as an important explanation of behaviors. But few studies take a holistic approach and look across multiple settings, as this book does. Others have made important contributions by showing the role of distrust in romantic relationships or child care choices or job referrals.37 But in these studies, the investigator is narrowly focusing on the particular context of interest and, in trying to understand women’s experiences in that context, discovers distrust to play a role. This study extends such findings and shows that distrust exists in these isolated settings and more—distrust can be everywhere and has the potential to block action in every direction. Furthermore, the study provides evidence that distrust operates in similar ways in each setting. Since this book takes a more holistic approach and studies multiple contexts of women’s lives, it can create a more generalized view of how distrust and stalled action recur as a social process in almost every area of low-income women’s lives. The problem is not only that distrust blocks action when it comes to interacting with caseworkers or boyfriends. The problem is that distrust blocks action in multiple key arenas of policy concern in which low-income mothers find themselves.
This study also contributes something new to the qualitative literatures on welfare reform and low-income mothers by drawing on interviews from two time periods. Because of this, it is able to show the consistency of distrust in low-income mothers’ lives despite the introduction of a major policy change.
Ain’t No Trust also contributes to the literature on poverty more generally. It is a counterargument to a culture of poverty perspective. Culture of poverty theories posit that low-income populations respond to structural barriers, such as lack of political power or access to education, by adapting their cultural values to match their lack of opportunity. Most importantly, culture of poverty theorists suggest that these altered, and now deficient, values are passed down from parents to children across generations.38 Policy makers or taxpayers who complained that welfare had become “a way of life” and that single mothers lacked “family values” and who looked to welfare reform to change a “welfare culture” were implicitly arguing that welfare programs had unwittingly created or enabled a “culture of poverty.”
My argument joins the early work of Elliot Liebow, who forcefully argued against a culture of poverty in his study of low-income African American men who spent time on a street corner in Washington, D.C., in the 1960s.39 He asserted that the men he observed were not taught by their fathers a pathological set of cultural values that crippled their aspirations for middle-class life. Instead, Liebow argued, these men experienced the same structural barriers that their fathers had encountered, and they adapted to them over time in the same way their fathers had. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas concluded similarly that low-income women’s failure to marry the fathers of their children is not based on a set of values about marriage different from middle-class values; rather, it reflects low-income women’s strict adherence to middle-class marriage values. Edin and Kefalas argued the women feel they cannot afford marriage because they cannot afford a traditional wedding and because their potential husbands, who face both high unemployment and high incarceration rates, cannot fulfill the traditional male breadwinner role. Although they cannot achieve economic stability in time to marry before having children, they hope to marry one day.40
My findings suggest that the structural arrangements of welfare offices, of workplaces and labor markets, and of other contexts in which low-income women interact with others produce their distrust and its resultant stalled action. Many