When Trust Helps and When it Hurts: Relational Domains of Social Trust and Subjective Well-being in China

Abstract

Rapid social transformation in China has reshaped everyday social interaction as mobility increases and encounters with unfamiliar others become more common, raising questions about how social trust influences subjective well-being. Existing research typically treats trust either as an individual disposition or as a contextual social resource, leaving unclear how changes in both individual and community trust relate to well-being. Using panel data from the China Family Panel Studies (2012–2020) and individual fixed-effects models, this study examines how changes in generalized and domain-specific trust relate to life satisfaction across urban and rural China. Results show that increases in individual generalized trust are consistently associated with higher life satisfaction, while the association for community-level generalized trust is more sensitive to contextual setting and model specification. At the individual level, trust in embedded relations and institutional actors is positively associated with life satisfaction, whereas trust in socially distant others exhibits less consistent and more context-dependent associations. At the community level, higher neighborhood trust was positively associated with life satisfaction, particularly in rural areas, whereas stranger trust tended to exhibit negative associations with life satisfaction, especially within rural samples and models accounting for other trust domains. The findings suggest that the well-being implications of trust vary systematically across relational domains and community contexts, indicating that different forms of trust may carry distinct well-being implications rather than uniformly functioning as supportive social resources in rapidly changing societies.