People Are Trusted More If They Grew Up Poor — But Not If They Currently Are

VANCOUVER, Canada — When you meet someone new, do you automatically judge how trustworthy they seem based on subtle clues about them? A new study from Canada reveals that Americans make snap decisions about who to trust based on social class, but not in the way you might expect.

The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, revealed that people consistently place more trust in others who grew up poor than those raised wealthy. But when it comes to someone’s current financial situation, we trust them less if they’re struggling now, even while we’re more likely to help them out.

This contradiction exposes a quirk in human psychology that affects everything from job interviews to business deals to everyday interactions. We seem to believe that childhood poverty builds character, while current poverty suggests someone might be desperate enough to betray our trust.

“Trust is essential for healthy relationships. Without it, romantic partnerships can fail, workplaces can suffer, and social divisions can grow,” says lead researcher Kristin Laurin, Ph.D., from the University of British Columbia, in a statement. “But what makes people trust someone in the first place?”

Laurin and her team conducted 17 separate studies involving nearly 2,000 participants to uncover these patterns. The findings show that people generally trusted and expected trustworthy behavior from others whose childhoods were spent in lower-class circumstances compared to those from higher-class backgrounds. However, while participants were willing to help people currently experiencing financial hardship, they didn’t necessarily expect those individuals to honor that trust.

What Makes People Trust Others?

The studies used various methods to test trust, with the most common involving economic games where participants could send money to partners, knowing those partners could either share the profits or keep everything for themselves. In some studies, participants used raffle tickets instead of cash. Participants typically sent more resources to people described as having grown up poor, even when those individuals were now wealthy.

In other experiments, researchers presented participants with detailed profiles of potential partners that included casual mentions of family background—things like working at McDonald’s to pay off student loans versus having parents pay for tuition, or spending vacation at grandparents’ house versus at a vacation home in Italy.

The pattern generally held across different scenarios: trust games, cooperation exercises, and real-world situations like choosing someone to pet-sit or handle group tasks. Whether the targets were imaginary strangers or real acquaintances, similar biases emerged.

The Morality Factor

Why do we trust people who grew up poor more than those raised wealthy? The answer appears rooted in moral stereotypes. Participants consistently rated people from lower-class childhoods as more moral, honest, and ethical—qualities directly linked to trustworthiness.

Research has long documented stereotypes about social class. People from lower-class backgrounds are typically viewed as warmer and more moral, while wealthy individuals are often perceived as cold, out of touch, arrogant, and selfish. These character assumptions directly influence decisions to trust someone.

Even when someone had climbed the economic ladder as an adult, participants still viewed them through the lens of their upbringing. A successful lawyer who grew up working-class was seen as more trustworthy than one born into wealth, regardless of their current identical circumstances.

Current Struggles Tell a Different Story

The picture became more complex when researchers looked at people’s present-day financial situations. Participants were more likely to send money to someone currently struggling financially in trust games, but they didn’t expect that person to be trustworthy in return. In fact, they often expected the opposite.

This suggests our “help” for people in current financial distress comes not from trust but from altruism; we want to help them because they need it, not because we believe they’ll do right by us. The researchers found evidence that participants viewed giving money to currently poor people as a more kind and generous action.

This creates an uncomfortable reality: we may help people experiencing poverty while simultaneously suspecting they might take advantage of us. It’s compassion mixed with wariness.

Someone interviewing for a job who mentions growing up in a working-class family might potentially benefit from subtle trust advantages, while someone currently experiencing financial hardship might face hidden skepticism even as they receive help.

The research also reveals how deeply childhood experiences shape our adult reputations in ways we might not even realize. Your stories of past struggles might actually make people trust you more in professional settings decades later.

Economic segregation means these dynamics don’t always play out in daily life; wealthy people often interact primarily with other wealthy people. But when social classes do mix, these biases may quietly influence decisions about everything from business partnerships to lending money to friends.

Rather than consistently favoring either rich or poor people, our brains appear to run different calculations for childhood versus current circumstances, and for trustworthiness versus neediness.

The Trust Paradox

The very experiences that make us want to help someone (current financial struggles) also make us question their trustworthiness, while the experiences that boost our trust in someone (growing up poor but succeeding) may make us less likely to feel they need our help.

“We didn’t examine whether a person’s childhood or current class background actually influences their behavior,” says Laurin. “That’s a question for future studies—especially to understand when trust is misplaced or when people miss chances to trust others fairly.”

Trust forms the foundation of everything from marriages to business deals to democratic institutions. When our trust decisions get filtered through unconscious class stereotypes, it may affect who gets opportunities, who gets second chances, and who gets the benefit of the doubt.