http://www.respublica.org.uk/blog/2011/03/trust-matters

Trust matters
Professor John Helliwell looks at the impact of trust on well-being
by Professor John Helliwell

Humans are social beings, and trust is what enables people to harness and 
enjoy their social natures. New research is showing that Americans 
(represented by more than 600,000 respondents to the Gallup/Healthways 
daily poll in 2008 and 2009) are significantly happier on weekends than 
during the week (Helliwell and Wang, 2011b). Respondents are asked to rate 
the prevalence during the previous day of three positive and three negative 
emotions- happiness, enjoyment, laughter, worry, sadness and anger. Since 
the respondents are randomly sampled across different days of the week, the 
day-to-day differences in average emotions are due to day-to-day changes in 
the features of daily life. Emotions are systematically better on Saturday 
and Sunday than on weekdays, with no other significant day-to-day effects. 
So much for blue Monday - it's blue all week and happy on weekends. These 
are mainly job related differences, since they are much higher for 
full-time workers than for all others (as shown in Figure 1). Attempts to 
unravel the likely causes of these weekend effects reveal the importance of 
the quality of the social context, both on the job and off.

People are happier when they live, work and play among others whom they 
trust. When social time and trust are higher, positive emotions become more 
frequent, and negative ones less likely. A large part of the weekend effect 
is explained by the fact that on average the respondents have almost two 
hours per day more in social time with friends during the weekends, 7.4 
compared to 5.5 hours per day. The next most important factors relate to 
the quality of the social context at work. The better the social context on 
the job, the happier people are, and the smaller the weekend effect.

Figure 1 shows striking differences in weekend effect sizes according to 
what life is like in the workplace. If workplaces are divided into two 
groups according to levels of workplace trust, as assessed by the 
respondents, weekend effects are two to four times larger for those who 
work where trust levels are lower. These differences are statistically 
significant for all six emotions (the 95% confidence limits are shown by 
the vertical lines), and are largest for happiness and sadness. People are 
happier when they are working where trust levels are high, and more likely 
to be sad when they are not. Another question asks respondents whether 
their workplace supervisors treat them like subordinates or like partners. 
Weekend effects are twice as large for those who are treated like 
subordinates than for those who are treated like partners. This larger 
effect is not because weekends are happier for those treated like 
subordinates at work, as they are less happy than partners both on weekends 
and during the week- but their emotions are more strongly affected on 
working days than on weekends.

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