Trust in America: The Role of Media, Materialism, and Deception

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: By any relevant measure and across age ranges, social trust has severely declined in the United States over the last few decades. This paper examines two potential causes for this lack of trust: social media use and materialism, examining various data sets to find trust scores among high schoolers and adults over time and against evolving behavior. I find that levels of social trust are waning in both groups, but despite the media’s critique of millennial spending habits and complaints that social media is ruining recent generations, I find that this decline is not related to either increasing social media use nor materialism. My study is limited, as the analyses are merely correlational, rather than causal, but it nevertheless challenges widely-accepted assumptions about millennials, post-millennials, social media use, and materialism.

Type of resource	text
Date created	June 2017

Author	Tecklu, Nahva
Advisor	Hancok, Jeff

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/qq667tv8143

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).

Preferred Citation: Tecklu, Nahva. (2017). Trust in America: The Role of Media, Materialism, and Deception. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/qq667tv8143

Masters Theses in Media Studies, Department of Communication, Stanford University

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