Are high-trust societies more xenophobic?
Xenophobia isn't a moral failure. It's a precondition for morality.
Pühajärve maastik figuuridega - Konrad Mägi (1878 - 1925)
I found a region and a culture that finishes high in societal ‘trust’ rankings globally, yet has little trust in outsiders. - S. Musaddique
In 2023, Shafi Musaddique left England for Estonia, “lured in by the promise of clean air, quiet and a chance to continue freelance journalism” — plus the benefits of a high-trust society.
His disappointment wasn’t long in coming.
He found himself “living in one of Europe’s last remaining countries without proper hate speech laws, encountering racism and White Supremacists in broad daylight.” He also discovered that Estonians prefer to trust insiders:
Estonia (and neighbouring Nordic countries) often score high in rankings that measure public trust. Yet such metrics hide the ingrained distrust of outsiders, handed down generationally. (Musaddique, 2026)
It’s no fun being excluded from a high-trust society, but how could things be otherwise? Most humans trust only close kin and long-time friends. They have little interest in the broader community, and little desire to keep it clean, peaceful, and orderly. If Estonia opened its borders to the rest of the world, it would become like … the rest of the world. And our journalist friend would have to seek greener pastures elsewhere.
Such an outcome doesn’t seem to worry Shafi, who prefers to frame the issue in moral terms: we have a duty not to discriminate against fellow humans. But do we? Morality doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists within a community of people who, consciously or unconsciously, respect certain norms. It is thus culturally bound.
This point is made in a recent paper on the future of liberalism:
Besides the high-profile foreign policy failures arising from the failure to conceive of liberalism as culturally bound, it has also led to a neglect of the interests of the liberal moral community as such. Reconceptualizing liberalism, not as the universal birthright of humanity or the inevitable conclusion of rational thinking, but as a particular moral community with an interest in its own continuation, may be important to ensure that it does indeed continue. (Harwick & Bawa-Allah, 2026, p. 14)
Preservation of the moral community overrides the duty to be moral. If certain aspects of morality are leading your community to extinction, you should change course and adjust them accordingly. You don’t just plunge ahead.
This is especially so in high-trust societies. Belonging to one isn’t like belonging to a football club. It requires thinking and behaving in ways that run counter to the way most humans think and behave. In concrete terms, it means being unusually prone to empathy, rule following, and feelings of guilt (Frost, 2020).
But if high-trust societies like Estonia have such an ingrained distrust of outsiders, wouldn’t they seal their borders long before they risk demographic replacement? Aren’t there geographical and psychological limits to social trust? As Shafi notes, “the borders of Estonian empathy fall short.” His hosts seem unwilling to feel empathy for the entire planet.
Of course, a single observer cannot fully answer this question. Let’s turn to the academic literature and see what it has to say. Its findings may surprise you. Or maybe not.
South Korea
This country has recently interested researchers because “its high level of in-group trust coupled with a low level of out-group trust offers an intriguing case for exploring the association between social trust and anti-immigration attitudes” (Kim & Kang, 2026).
South Korea has 2.7 million people of “migration background” — foreign residents, naturalized citizens, and second-generation immigrants. They make up over 5% of the population, although this total includes ethnic Koreans from China, Russia, and elsewhere (Yonhap, 2025). There are also nearly 400,000 undocumented residents (Seo, 2025). In the elementary schools, 3.5% of all students are of non-Korean descent, a figure that rises to over 10% in a quarter of all cities, counties, and metropolitan regions. About half of these students have origins in Southeast Asia, chiefly Vietnam and the Philippines. Compared to Koreans, they have lower attendance rates and trouble keeping up with classwork (Frost, 2021; Kim, 2024; Park, 2024).
How then does the host society respond to immigration? With surprisingly little pushback. When 1,245 South Koreans were interviewed for the World Values Survey between 2017 and 2020, a slight majority favored a liberal immigration policy:
Source
Even more had no problem with immigrants as neighbors. These respondents formed a super-majority of 78% that included half of those who wanted strict limits on immigration. Apparently, consensus is needed in a high-trust society before people act on their personal beliefs, including xenophobia.
Personal action also requires approval from moral authorities, particularly those in government. If the government wants more immigration, most people will suppress any misgivings they may have:
Those who are confident in the government’s capacity to manage potential security risks, are less likely to support restrictive policy preferences despite their security concerns. This moderating role of political trust has broader theoretical implications for understanding how institutional trust serves as an anxiety-reducing psychological mechanism; especially, when facing influx of immigrants (Kim & Kang, 2026, p. 13).
Sweden
This country has experienced a greater influx than South Korea has, particularly from lower-trust societies within and beyond Europe. In 2019, 20% of the population was foreign-born and more than a third had one or two foreign-born parents.
A study of 1,352 young native Swedes shows that trust in the political system is key to reducing xenophobia. When politicians deliver on their promises and ensure well-being in the main areas of life, people trust the system, including immigration policy. The result is “a generalised expectation of trustworthiness and a widening of their circles of trusted others. This then translates into more positive attitudes toward immigrants” (Korol & Bevelander, 2023, p. 5599).
In theory, reciprocity is also key. In practice, it is often assumed. “If I am kind to another person, my kindness will be reciprocated. It it isn’t, there may be something wrong with my kindness or perhaps I’m not being kind enough.” This is how most Swedes think — or rather how they feel they should think.
European Union
Social trust is higher in Europe than in the main immigrant-sending regions, i.e., the Middle East, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. It also varies across the continent, being higher in the northwest and lower toward the south and the east (Beilmann & Lilleoja, 2015).
High-trust European societies have received most of the influx, partly because they offer a higher standard of living and partly because they are more accepting of cultural differences. This is in line with findings from a cross-country survey of about 1,500 respondents in 29 EU member states. “[R]esidents are more tolerant towards cultural minorities in high trusting societies, liberal democracies, prosperous nations and in non-postcommunist societies” (Reeskens, 2012, p. 17).
Eastern Europeans have less tolerance for cultural minorities, as well as sexual minorities and others with unconventional lifestyles: “Tolerance towards people of deviant behavior is higher in economically wealthy countries, and only marginally higher in democratic societies and in culturally diverse countries, while it is lower in postcommunist societies” (Reeskens, 2012, p. 17).
This difference is attributed by Anatoly Karlin to the “Soviet freezer.” During the Cold War, traditional values were better preserved in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe, which remained open to American culture (Karlin, 2018b).
Others argue that this east-west difference is much older. If we consider the last millennium, or even farther back in time, we find that individualism, weak kinship ties, and impersonal prosociality have characterized human relations to a greater degree north and west of the Hajnal line — an imaginary line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg (Frost, 2025a; Hajnal, 1965; hbd*chick, 2014; JayMan, 2018; Schulz et al., 2019).
Both explanations might be true. Because the Iron Curtain hindered the inflow of American values, communism eventually absorbed the pre-existing values of those who lived under it, including greater attachment to family and community — if only to gain acceptance and legitimacy.
Although Eastern Europeans show less tolerance for cultural and sexual minorities, they are more tolerant of intellectual dissent (Reeskens, 2012, p. 21). This, too, is consistent with both explanations. Eastern Europeans favorably remember the dissenters of former times, unlike Western Europeans — who lack that Cold War past. But the latter have also had a long history of intolerance for heresy, witchcraft, and the like — for them, the “Other” is a moral outsider, and not just a stranger (Frost, 2025).
With removal from the Soviet freezer, growing numbers of East Europeans have embraced the current Western model of intolerance for intellectual minorities and tolerance for racial and sexual minorities. This is especially true in younger generations, as shown by support for gay marriage in Estonia:
Y axis = Support for gay marriage. X axis = age of respondents. Blue = Russian-speakers in Estonia. Red = Estonian speakers in Estonia. (Source)
Younger generations of Estonian-speakers have been more exposed to American culture via the Estonian-language media. They are thus more supportive of gay marriage. Older generations are less supportive, having been shaped by the media of Soviet times.
No such generational difference exists within the Russian-speaking minority, who continue to be influenced by media based in Russia (Karlin, 2018a).
Discussion
Some nuance is needed if we wish to describe high-trust societies as xenophobic. Clearly, they no longer are. They now receive immigration on a large scale, with only sporadic and ineffectual pushback. Violent incidents do occur, but the victims are natives in the vast majority of cases (Immigration to Denmark - Crime).
This begs the question. If high-trust societies are a minority in the world, and if their existence requires atypical levels of empathy, rule following, and guilt proneness, why haven’t they been diluted out of existence? Why do they still exist?
First, they maintained their existence by making a moral distinction between themselves and outsiders. Insiders had already proven their commitment to the rules. Outsiders had not. Over the past century, this distinction has come to be seen as immoral, especially by moral gatekeepers — peers, colleagues, leaders of church and state, opinion makers, journalists, and so on. You must now trust everyone equally; if you refuse, you are the moral outcasts.
Second, high-trust societies have succeeded economically. When you can take people at their word and not have to check and double-check everything, transaction costs are lower throughout the economy, and many activities become cost-effective that otherwise would not be. Because markets are no longer confined to isolated points in space and time — i.e., physical marketplaces — they can spread into all areas of life to create a true market economy.
Historically, this economic success led to demographic success, particularly in Western Europe. More people lived to adulthood, and more had the means to marry and have children. In particular, successful entrepreneurs married earlier and had larger families, if only to expand their workforce. The result was a long-running population boom while growth remained anemic elsewhere.
This boom overflowed the confines of Western Europe and pushed into other parts of the world, thereby making the “West” much larger. As actor John Wayne put it: “Our so-called stealing of this country from them [the Indians] was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves” (Wayne, 1971). The latter tried to resist but were no match. They were overwhelmed military and demographically.
Populations began to grow more slowly in the West with the shift from cottage industry to factories during the 1800s. Workers were no longer recruited primarily from among the business owner’s children and relatives; they could be hired from outside the family, the community and, eventually, the nation — there were obvious advantages to hiring and firing workers at will. Meanwhile, as compulsory education removed young people from the labor force, children became a net cost, and their numbers shrank.
Thus ended the West’s population boom, first during the 1920s and 1930s and then for good in the 1970s. By this time, the rest of the world was enjoying a population boom due to Western advances in medicine, sanitation, and agriculture.
Previously, the West didn’t worry about being replaced. It was doing the replacing. It thus fell prey to an excess of confidence that persisted even after the warning lights went from green to amber. Today, the tables have turned. The West may be on the brink of a collapse as dramatic as the one that befell the North American Indian.
*****
Let’s not end on a dark note. Yes, the West is on the brink, but it might still save itself. In the U.S., the fertility decline has been much smaller for Euro-Americans than for other groups. As strange as it may seem, they are poised to become the most fertile group — thanks to subcultures like the Amish, the Mormons, and the Hassidic Jews and, more generally, to conservative Protestants and Catholics. A similar pattern may be emerging elsewhere in the world (Frost, 2025b). Northwest Europeans seem to be more adept at following rules, and this is no less true for the rules of natalism.
If immigration can be restricted — an admittedly big “if” — the West will cure itself through internal population replacement. We will be replaced, but by people like us.
References
Beilmann, M., & Lilleoja, L. (2015). Social trust and value similarity: the relationship between social trust and human values in Europe. Studies of Transition States and Societies, 7(2), 19-30. https://doi.org/10.58036/stss.v7i2.267
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