More people trust Tom Hanks than scientific studies. Nearly twice as many trust Oprah Winfrey as they do religious leaders. Topping the list of trustworthiness, according to a recent Morning Consult poll, are our primary care doctors, earning the trust of half of those polled. Just 7% trust the government. Wall Street is further down, followed by Hollywood.
Only 14% of people claim to trust capitalism. Maybe it’s because they trust the wrong companies.
Millennials and Gen Zers trust the panda-huggers at Google more than any other brand. So much for privacy and patriotism. Not one nontech company rounded out Gen Z’s top five.
Gen Xers and baby boomers ranked the U.S. Postal Service as their most trusted brand, citing the reliability of the state-sponsored enterprise that lost $4 billion in 2018.
The mixed bag of actual trust in practice belies respondents’ answers and logic in theory. The public may claim not to trust the government, yet it ranks the USPS as more trustworthy than UPS. Even though some loathe capitalism, the average major brand earned the trust of an overwhelming majority of those polled. In fact, the average distrust rating for the 100 most prominent brands tracked by Morning Consult was a mere 13%.
Furthermore, community-centric capitalism may be all the rage right now, but the study shows that profits motivated by consumer approval still reign. Morning Consult found that the most important factors for trust are the protection of personal data and reliable quality and service. Fewer than half of all respondents said that producing products in “an ethically responsible way” was very important, and fewer than 2 in 5 cared about companies prioritizing anything other than profit or having political values.
Americans like profit-motivated capitalism. In fact, the only ding to free markets shown in this study is our penchant to purchase against our own self-interest.
