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Building mutual trust with the people on your street may benefit everyone's health and welbeing

Trusting your neighbours means better health

Here’s an easy way to improve your health: trust your neighbours.

A new study from the University of Missouri shows that health improves as trust in our neighbours increases.

“I examined the idea of ‘relative position,’ or where one fits into the income distribution in their local community, as it applies to both trust of neighbours and self-rated health,” said Eileen Bjornstrom, the study’s author and an assistant professor of sociology in the MU College of Arts and Science.

“Because human beings engage in interpersonal comparisons in order to gauge individual characteristics, it has been suggested that a low relative position, or feeling that you are below another person financially, leads to stress and negative emotions such as shame, hostility and distrust, and that health suffers as a consequence. While most people aren’t aware of how trust impacts them, results indicated that trust was a factor in a person’s overall health.”

Contrary to expectations, Bjornstrom found that those with a higher income, relative to their community, were more likely to be distrustful of their neighbours. Simultaneously, while taking into account factors such as level of education, income, and age, people who reported that “their neighbours can be trusted” also reported better health on average.

“I was surprised about the direction in which relative position was linked to distrust. If affluent individuals are less likely to trust their poorer neighbours, it could be beneficial to attempt to overcome some of the distrust that leads to poor health,” Bjornstrom said.

“It is possible that shared community resources that promote interaction, such as sidewalks and parks, could help bridge the neighbourhood trust gap, and also promote health and well-being. Residents of all economic statuses might then benefit if community cohesion was increased.”

While there was not a direct link between low relative position among neighbours and better health, Bjornstrom believes that further study needs to occur in different contexts. She believes that research on relative position in the workplace or among social networks would provide greater insight.

“For example, relative position at work could matter for health because it might be associated with autonomy or other benefits,” she said.

The study appears in the journal Social Science & Medicine.