A multi-level perspective of the psychological constructs of trust and social cohesion in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa

Trust and social cohesion are the bedrock of community life. They determine whether people cooperate with strangers, whether families weather crises together, and whether citizens extend confidence to the institutions that govern them. Yet despite their centrality, the psychological constructs through which trust is formed, maintained, and repaired remain poorly understood in sub-Saharan African contexts and still more poorly theorised within frameworks that take African philosophies seriously. This study investigates these constructs across three countries; Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa at individual, family, and community levels. Using a qualitative, participatory action research (PAR)-informed, constructivist–interpretivist design, we conducted 85 semi-structured in-depth interviews across six paired urban–rural sites and analysed the data using abductive, reflexive thematic analysis implemented in ATLAS.ti. The findings reveal that trust is not a fixed personality trait but a dynamic, sequential architecture built from four core psychological constructs: cognitive appraisal, affective security, confidentiality, and structured repair. This architecture operates at each level of social life within individuals as a self-regulatory evaluation process, within families as relational bonding and restorative practice, and within communities as institutionalised mutual aid and perceived procedural fairness. Crucially, the study also documents the conditions under which this architecture collapses: pervasive baseline insecurity in South African sites that forecloses the trust sequence before it can begin; trust vacuums generated by religious leader misconduct in Uganda; and the decoupling of practical cooperation from personal affective trust in Kenya under sustained economic pressure. By grounding the analysis in African epistemological traditions particularly ubuntu and Pan-Africanist thought the study extends psychological theory beyond its Euro-American limits and offers a culturally grounded, multi-level framework for designing and sequencing trust-building interventions. All procedures were conducted in compliance with multi-country institutional ethics protocols.