The Global Trust Inventory (GTI), conceptually assessing trust in others ranging from close interpersonal relationships to relationships with government and financial institutions as a whole, was administered to representative online samples in 11 democratic states (N = 11,917 from Europe, the Americas, and New Zealand). A seven-factor solution had configural, metric, and reasonable scalar invariance in multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. Using latent profile analysis, individual-level measures of trust were derived that complement existing measures of social capital in their impact and implications. Western societies had proportionately more people with high propensity to trust, Catholic/European intermediate, and Latin American societies the least. A High Trust Profile had virtues associated with social capital: greater participation in political discussion, greater elaboration of political thinking, more community engagement, less prejudice, and greater participation in elections. A Low Trust Profile exhibited opposite tendencies. Demographically, high trust was associated with higher self-reported social status, home ownership, older age, and political conservatism. A more complex set of relationships differentiated two intermediate profiles, dubbed Moderate and Low Institutional Trust. Conceptually, the GTI operationalizes a holistic view of trust as a “synthetic force” that holds various aspects of society together, ranging from interpersonal to institutionalized relationships.

Using the Global Trust Inventory, an integrated measure of trust toward 21 relationships and institutions, the structure of trust was explored in four East Asian societies (Mainland China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan). The Western model, in which trust is distributed among seven factors representing different branches of society, did not generalize to these East Asian societies, perhaps due to differences in culture and institutional power structures. Instead, two unique structures of trust were identified. Mainland China had a top-down structure of trust (the China model), in which trust is hierarchically separated between the central government and subordinate implementing bodies. The other three democratic East Asian societies shared a hybrid structure of trust (the Democratic East Asian model) that has a degree of similarity to both the China model and the Western model. Having established two similar, but still distinct models, a crosscultural comparison was made on the proportions of trust profiles generated by latent profile analysis. Mainland China had the largest proportion of people with a high propensity to trust, followed by Japan and South Korea, and Taiwan was the least trusting. Implications of the structure of trust and this alternative approach to conducting cross-cultural comparisons are discussed.

Psychology has begun contributing to social theory by providing empirical measures of actually existing cosmopolitanism that complements more purely theoretical conceptions of the construct common in philosophy and sociology. Drawing from two waves of research on representative adult samples from 19 countries (N = 8740), metric invariance was found for the three factors of cosmopolitan orientation (COS): cultural openness (CO), global prosociality (GP), and respect for cultural diversity (RCD). In terms of etiology, among Wave 1 measures, the personality factor of agreeableness was the best predictor of the cosmopolitan factors of GP and RCD at Wave 2, whereas openness of personality best predicted CO. Wave 1 measures of education, political liberalism, and self‐reported social status independently also explained a small amount of variance in COS. Functionally, COS was shown to predict less prejudice against immigrants, and more support for global civil society, even after controlling for social dominance orientation. All three COS factors independently predicted better attitudes towards immigrants. GP was the best predictor of trust in the United Nations, whereas RCD was the best predictor of support for environmental protection. The three‐factor model of COS appears well‐calibrated for assessing actually existing cosmopolitanism across cultures.

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Living historical memory (LHM) was assessed amongst representative samples of adults from 40 societies (N = 22,708), who completed online surveys asking them to name three historical events in living memory that have had the greatest impact on their country. Multilevel analyses revealed that the number of LHM nominations was positively but variably related to national identity, with stronger links in developing countries. LHM was consistently and more strongly associated with lower social dominance orientation, and lower system justification. LHM appears to support national identity, especially in developing countries where there is greater need for national progress. While LHM fosters bottom-up aspirations for group-equality universally, it instills critical systemic evaluations in developing countries especially. It appears that LHM in developing countries has progressive functions, contextualizing current disadvantages as being linked to history, but nonetheless drawing from living memories to band people together in positive collective remembrance of the advent of nationhood.

Individual selves and the collectives to which people belong can be mentally represented as following intertemporal trajectories—progress, decline, or stasis. These studies examined the relation between intertemporal trajectories for the self and nation in American and British samples collected at the beginning and end of major COVID-19 restrictions. Implicit temporal trajectories can be inferred from asymmetries in the cognitive availability of positive and negative events across different mentally represented temporal periods (e.g., memory for the past and the imagined future). At the beginning of COVID-19 restrictions, both personal and collective temporal thought demonstrated implicit temporal trajectories of decline, in which future thought was less positive than memory. The usually reliable positivity biases in personal temporal thought may be reversable by major public events. This implicit trajectory of decline attenuated in personal temporal thought after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions. However, collective temporal thought demonstrated a pervasive negativity bias across temporal domains at both data collection points, with the collective future more strongly negative than collective memory. Explicit beliefs concerning collective progress, decline, and hope for the national future corresponded to asymmetries in the cognitive availability of positive and negative events within collective temporal thought.

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