A-CULTURATED’S JUNE 2026 WRITING PROMPT

Can Social Trust Survive Beyond Its Cultural Origins?

A Scandinavian’s search for a middle ground between trust and caution

Photo by Brock Wegner on Unsplash

There are some things that don’t travel across cultural borders as easily as chocolate croissants. Social trust is one of them.

The controversial story of Anette Sørensen, a Danish mother, is an example of how culturally inherited assumptions about trust can lead to misunderstandings when people move between cultures. In 1997, Anette was arrested in New York after leaving her baby daughter sleeping in a stroller outside a restaurant while she ate inside with the child’s father.

When NYPD officers arrived and found the child unattended, both parents were arrested and the baby was placed in protective care for four days. Although the charges were eventually dropped, the case became internationally famous for exposing the enormous gap between Scandinavian and American attitudes towards child safety and parenting.

It may be easy to criticise Scandinavian parenting for being too relaxed, but in reality it exposed something deeper. Norms about social trust can be difficult to sustain outside their cultural context.

In Scandinavia, it is common to leave your baby outside to nap even in public spaces. The perceived health benefits of fresh air, reduced overheating risk and exposure to natural rhythm are said to be the main reasons, though for many it is simply a matter of “how it’s done around here”.

Even in the cold winter months, you will see babies at nurseries napping outside, bundled in warm clothing. It is so common that when temperatures do plummet below -10 degrees on rare occasions there will be public announcements in the news for parents to take extra precautions with advice to check more frequently on their offspring and to add extra layers of clothing or bedding when napping outside. A major reason why this practice works in Scandinavia is the high-level of social trust that exist.

This social trust is evident in everyday life. If I needed to stop at the kindergarten or supermarket on my bike ride back from work, I would often leave my laptop in the basket and not bother locking my bike. At the beach, I wouldn’t hesitate to leave my belongings unattended when I go for a swim and on a number of occasions, I have been asked by strangers to keep an eye on their shopping bags and even their children while they venture off to the toilets.

It’s blissfully trusting. So trusting in fact that even to a Dane like me it can still surprise me. When I moved into a new flat on the 5th floor of an apartment block in Copenhagen, I had a bed delivery in the evening. After numerous failed attempts to get it into the elevator and no one to help me carry it up, I ended up leaving it out on the sidewalk the entire night. To my delightful surprise, my brand spanking new bed was still waiting for me the next morning along with a couple of removal men to heist it up to its final destination.

Thefts do of course happen in Scandinavia, but there is fundamental difference in attitude that trust is self-reinforcing. Most people genuinely believe that strangers are usually honest and rules are generally followed and therefore they tend to cooperate more, cheat less and feel comfortable leaving things unattended. Because most people behave that way, the trust keeps getting confirmed. It’s the expectation of how people behave that in itself changes their behaviour.

But what happens if the collective assumption is that strangers are dangerous and others will cheat? Then people start adapting defensively and this in turn reinforces mistrust.

On our street in London only few of the town houses had security cameras on the outside when we first moved in. Over time the number of houses with security camaras increased steadily, signalling that this wasn’t a safe neighbourhood. The crime rates may not have changed much and the camaras may statistically have created a safer environment, but emotionally it felt more threatening. Eventually, even we put up a camara. “To deter burglars”, I was told. It didn’t make me feel safer. It made me feel embarrassed for publicly displaying mistrust.

Exhibiting a high-level of social trust can be seen as controversial by those who have grown up with different assumptions about social trust. In their eyes, Scandinavians are often regarded as being naïve. Time and again people who care about me have urged me to take more precautions: not to leave a stranger waiting unattended in my house, not to trust a builder with a spare house key, not to leave the car window open on a hot summer’s day while I go shopping, not to let the window cleaner know we are going on holiday, and so on. As the list of well-intended warnings becomes increasingly long, the seeds of self-doubt are beginning to take root, quietly unsettling the social trust that once came so naturally to me.

But is it really naïve to believe in the good in people? And what happens when that belief is broken?

What is emerging is an internal conflict between the values I inherited and the realities I am being encouraged to accept. To trust feels increasingly risky; to distrust feels like a betrayal of who I am. Consequently, I find myself weighing each situation and each encounter against the risk of being let down.

The question is no longer simply whether someone is trustworthy, but whether the consequences of being wrong are worth the risk of remaining open to trust in the first place.

As a cling to my cultural inherited belief about social trust, I probably accept greater risks than many people would consider sensible. Occasionally, that trust is betrayed, and while it can be frustrating and sometimes hurtful, I take some comfort in knowing that I accepted the possibility from the outset. Slowly, however, I am starting to accept that not all risks are worth taking simply to remain faithful to a cultural ideal. It saddens me a little to admit this, but after more than two decades of living abroad, experience has taught me that trust and caution need not be opposites. Perhaps growing up lies not in abandoning trust, but in choosing more carefully where to place it.

Our new home in the English countryside has no cameras to deter burglars. It is still a topic of heated discussion, but this is one risk that I am prepared to take. Perhaps that decision says less about the likelihood of a burglary than it does about the kind of life I want to live. Somewhere between naivety and suspicion lies a place where trust remains possible. Not because it is always rewarded, but because a life without it feels like a greater loss.

This story was written in response to A-Culturated’s June Writing Prompt.