The Curious Case of Social Trust - Examining the Impact of Ethnic Heterogeneity and Segregation on Social Trust in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Sammanfattning: Social trust is a fundamental part of the grease that ensures the smooth functioning of human society. It is what enables human co-existence in a society largely populated by mutual strangers. This thesis studies social trust in an environment of ethnic heterogeneity and segregation, using Bosnia-Herzegovina as a case study. It does this by consulting previously collected survey data from the UNDP, as well as through fresh collection of data from a game-theoretical experiment held on the ground in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The experiment was done in Bosnia-Herzegovina's two major cities, where the objective was to map the level of trusting, cooperative and altruistic behavior shown by the participants. The thesis incorporates the results from both the survey data and the experiment. It finds dual implications from the two sources. The survey data implies a high level of distrust throughout the population, whilst the experiment shows a remarkably high level of trusting, cooperative and altruistic behavior, implying that reconciliation in the divided population is indeed possible. The thesis thus finds that high degrees of ethnic heterogeneity and segregation contribute to lower levels of social trust - but that ethnic heterogeneity might be bridgeable if other social factors, such as inter-ethnic socialisation, provide a counterweight to centrifugal tendencies. As such, various kinds of ethnic heterogeneities by themselves do not necessarily imply low levels of social trust.