"We gotta stand a little closer."

Trust [truhst]

-noun

1. reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.

Trust is a very important part in any relationship, wether it be between a couple, between friends, in the government, a higher power, etc. When one’s social capital is high one builds trust in others. For example, I live in a neighborhood where everyone knows each other and we are all involved in the activities that go on around us and are all always hanging out at one another’s homes. Because of this there is a high level of trust in my neighborhood, we trust that no one would steal from another, and we trust that one will always be there for another in a bad situation. But as for neighborhoods where there is a lack of social capital, there is an obvious lack of trust between one home and another.

I decided to walk around Winston-Salem and ask strangers to write down their personal spiel on trust. Some of the questions I asked them to marinate on were:

How many people can you trust?

Who do you trust?

What does trust mean to you?

Does our country have trust?

It was interesting because I could physically see trust in this experiment. When I first would approach someone I would ask them “Excuse me, do you have a moment?” most people looked concerned and would reply “Umm, maybe, it depends…” and I could see at first they did not trust me and were skeptical that I was selling something or asking for money. Once I explained to them that I was doing a project for my Civics class on social capital and that I only wanted their opinion on what trust means to them their faces would soften and I could see that they began to trust my word. I even had a woman give me her business card and another women give me a great big hug. Reading through everyone’s ideas of trust really touched me. Some people found trust in something higher than human and felt as though they could not trust any person, some people felt that trust was rooted in mankind and faith in mankind. It felt like I learned a lot about trust in this lab, and it definitely touched me deep inside.