The Effect Of Social Mobility On Interpersonal Trust Of Residents

In China,the characterized type of trust defined as ‘Special Trust’ is typically grounded in Chinese ‘Guanxi’ society.Now the level of ‘Special Trust’ among people significantly declines because of the frequent social mobility brought by modernization,which may lead to the potential change of interpersonal trust.The core research question referring to how social mobility imposes impact on interpersonal trust mainly contains two aspects: on the one hand,people’s dependence upon their private ‘Guanxi’ decreases owing to the high level of social mobility,on the other hand,the field of non-private interaction is largely extended.By emerging data from CGSS2015,this research employed factor analysis to proceed ‘General Trust’ and ‘Special Trust’ as dependent variables of measuring interpersonal trust and multiple liner-regression model to illustrate how the mobility of occupation,education and residence registration influences interpersonal trust.Research conclusions proceeded reveal that the level of ‘Special Trust’ is much higher than that of ‘General Trust’ and indicate people are highly possible to firstly believe their relatives,then their colleagues,friends,neighbors and lastly the strangers,which clearly shows that the distribution of interpersonal trust is formulated as a circle around the only one core inside it.Further,more precisely,different control variables can make impacts on ‘General Trust’ and ‘Special Trust’ separately.For instance,gender,age,nation and residence registration have significant influences on ‘Special Trust’,religion,income and marital status are statistically significant on the change of ‘General Trust’,also resident area,education and occupation reputation can make significant influences on both the change of ‘General Trust’ and ‘Special Trust’.The upward-directed mobility imposes great impact on interpersonal trust,and conversely,the downward-directed mobility rarely affects the level of interpersonal trust.The levels of ‘General Trust’ and ‘Special Trust’ are both affected positively by upward-directed mobility of residence registration.The upward-directed mobility of occupation and education is negatively correlated with the level of ‘General Trust’ and is not correlated with ‘Special Trust’.The upward changes in two or three aspects of social mobility can make much more significant influences on ‘Special Trust’ than changes merely emerging in one aspect of social mobility,which is rather not statistically significant on the change of ‘General Trust’.In contemporary Chinese society,‘Special Trust’ takes the dominant position,which reveals the considerably Chinese style social structure regarded as ‘the pattern of difference sequence’ and presents how this specially traditional kind of social trust makes influence on modern society.‘Special trust’ is recognized as a way of rational choice people adopted to rebuild their primary social network,the ‘Guanxi’,during the process of social mobility.Now,different levels of changes of social structure lead to the fact that different aspects of social mobility have different impacts over interpersonal trust.Barriers constructed by education and occupation prevent people from promoting the level of ‘General Trust’,however,the gradual transformation of residence registration system provides more opportunities for improving interpersonal trust of people who achieved the upward mobility.