Trust in Times of Terror? A Multilevel Study of the Impact of Terrorism on Social Trust

Although one of the central aims of terrorism is to erode social cohesion and cause distrust between different groups in a society, systematic empirical research exploring this relationship remains largely absent. To address this gap in the literature, the present study takes a cross-national perspective linking country-level data on terrorist attacks with individual-level survey data from the World Values Study Round 6 collected in 2010-2014 (Study 1). The results from the multilevel regression models show that a higher level of prior terrorist-related deaths leads to a lower level of trust, especially in people from another religion or nationality. We cross-validated the results by using cross-sectional data from the Afrobarometer (Study 2) and the European Social Survey (Study 3) collected during the same period. These replications provide more accurate conclusions on the included parameters and confirm the negative impact of terrorism on a wide range of interpersonal trust measures.