A new study finds just 13 percent of Gen Z believes most people can be trusted, the lowest interpersonal trust level of any American generation on record.
Political scientist Ryan Burge, 42, at Washington University compiled the data using the General Social Survey from 2021 to 2024. His analysis shows Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, is dramatically more suspicious than their elders. While 13 percent of Gen Z said most people could be trusted, a crushing 74 percent agreed with the statement “you can’t be too careful.”
Millennials proved slightly less paranoid, with roughly 24 percent believing most people could be trusted and 67 percent erring on the side of caution. Gen X and Boomers landed in similar territory, at 30 percent and 29 percent respectively. The Silent Generation, born before 1946, was by far the most trusting cohort, with 41 percent believing most people to be trustworthy and just 51 percent saying it pays to be careful.
The data reveals a steep collapse in Gen Z trust that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2018, just over 20 percent of Gen Z believed most people could be trusted. By 2025, that figure had fallen into single digits. Boomers and millennials also saw slight drops since 2020, but nowhere was the decline more pronounced than among Gen Z.
“This is an empirical fact: unless they experience a significant increase in trust — which we haven’t seen in fifty years of polling data — Gen Z will be the least trusting generation in modern American history,” Burge said.
Education emerged as a significant dividing line across all generations. Among Gen Z, 67 percent of those with a four-year degree or more felt other people couldn’t be trusted. That figure jumped to 80 percent among Gen Z members with a high school diploma or less. The gap was even more stark among millennials, where 48 percent of college graduates expressed mistrust compared to 82 percent of those without higher education.
The findings land amid broader research showing Gen Z’s skepticism extends across institutions and digital life. A separate Checkr survey of 3,000 consumers found 80 percent of Gen Z have questioned whether photos or videos they saw online were real, and 70 percent have abandoned a platform, app, or website because it felt fake or overrun by scams. That same study found 55 percent of Gen Z say they always investigate before buying, booking, or meeting someone new.
In the viral moment that helped define this generational portrait, Burge’s data visualization of the trust collapse spread rapidly across social platforms. The chart showed Gen Z’s trust line plunging below every other generation’s trajectory, with the steepest drop visible right at the 2020 pandemic mark. Commenters seized on the graph as proof of a generation shaped by isolation, online misinformation, and institutional failures during their formative years.
Burge’s study did not examine causes for the trust collapse, though the timing suggests COVID-19 lockdowns, remote schooling, and widespread social disruption played central roles. The General Social Survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, has tracked American attitudes since 1972, making the Gen Z trust nadir unprecedented in more than five decades of data collection.