Urban malaise or unhappiness with city life is common in developed countries. City dwellers, particularly those in the largest metropolitan areas, are reported to be the least satisfied with their lives. Using the US General Social Survey (1972–2016), this paper explores the latest happiness trends. The results confirm earlier findings of urban malaise: Americans in general are happiest in smaller cities and rural areas. However, the advantage of rural living is declining – rural Americans are becoming less happy relative to urbanites. Most interestingly, the results show that the latest generation, termed ‘Millennials’ (1982–2004), as opposed to earlier generations, are the happiest in large cities (an estimated magnitude larger than earning an additional US$100,000 in family income annually). The possible reasons for this trend are explored and directions for future research are discussed.

Background: Trust is one of the key driving forces behind human action and an important factor in shaping human interaction. Trust can improve economic growth, political and civic involvement, democratic stability, and subjective well-being. Yet, trust has been in decline for the last 60 years in the U.S. Purpose: This article tests the effect of several indicators of religiosity, including an index for both social and individual religiosity, on trust. Common religious doctrine instructs followers to place their trust solely in God, and can therefore be interpreted as a determinant of generalized trust. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to find out whether religious people are more likely to be distrustful of others and whether they are more likely to be misanthropic. Methods: We use the US General Social Survey (GSS, 1972–2018, n > 10 k ), a large, recurring, and nationally-representative sample of U.S. adults. Using the GSS, we investigate the relationship between religiosity and trust (interpersonal and generalized) in a well-controlled model using OLS regressions. We examine both the effects of social religiosity (e.g. church attendance, membership at religious organization), and individual religiosity (e.g. belief in God, feeling of closeness to God, prayer), on trust and on misanthropy. Several additional robustness tests were conducted. Results: The findings demonstrate that while social religiosity or belonging (services attendance, church membership) predicts more trust, individual religiosity or believing (prayer, closeness and belief in God) predicts lower trust. Likewise, social religiosity lowers misanthropy, while individual religiosity promotes it. Furthermore, we show that it is important to consider individual and social religiosity simultaneously because they correlate and have opposite effects–this is an intriguing and not entirely obvious finding as most people would expect that religiosity in general, has a positive effect on trust. Conclusions and Implications: Our results indicate that religiosity is a substantial determinant of social trust and of misanthropy. The divergent results based on whether religiosity is social or individual in character is a new conceptual approach towards religiosity not previously undertaken in the literature. Ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation theory explains our findings—connecting with God disrupts connection with humans.

This article examines residential segregation by skin color in forty of the largest metropolitan areas in Brazil, using census tract data from the 2010 Brazilian census. Residential dissimilarity among whites, browns, and blacks is moderate to low by US standards, and residential segregation correlates positively with socioeconomic status. By contrasting our findings with results from the 1980 Brazilian census, we observe that in thirty years, residential segregation decreased significantly in many metropolitan areas, particularly white-brown and brown-black dissimilarities. We speculate as to why these changes should have occurred.

The systematic study of misanthropy, the lack of trust in humanity, has proliferated over the last 30 years. One prominent line of research details racial and ethnic disparities in levels of misanthropy, but pays little attention to the role of religiosity, while another focuses attention on religiosity and its impact on levels of misanthropy, with only scant attention to the role of race and ethnicity. Little attempt has been made to synthesize these two strands of literature to address an important unanswered question: Does the association between religiosity and misanthropy vary by racial and ethnic group? To answer this question, we pooled data from the General Social Survey (GSS, 2000–2018). Among other things, we find stark racial differences between Blacks and Whites in terms of the effect of religiosity on misanthropy. Blacks and Latinos who attend religious services weekly (social religiosity) have significantly higher levels of misanthropy than others, while Whites who attend weekly services are less likely to be misanthropic. An important takeaway is that service attendance (a type of social capital) is associated with feelings of misanthropy for all groups (albeit in opposite directions for Blacks and Latinos versus Whites), rather than personal acts of prayer (individual religiosity). When it comes to misanthropy, we conclude that religion works differently for minorities compared with Whites. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research.

During the Reagan Revolution, a significant gender gap emerged, accompanied by an urban–rural schism in party preference by gender, one manifestation of the nation’s widening urban–rural divide. Using the General Social Survey (GSS) data from 1972 to 2018, we explore this urban–rural schism in party preference by running several ordinary least squares models and specifications. Controlling for individuals’ traits, we find that differences in the preference for governmental action to address social problems lie at the heart of this gender gap and are further explained by location. Urban women are far more likely than urban men to call for the government to solve problems of income inequality; rural women, like rural men, are much more likely to emphasize individual responsibility and self-sufficiency.