A Study of Mass Media Impact on Social Trust A Case Study of Twenty-Year-Old and Above Inhabitants of Babol City

Mass media provide their audiences with various information and analyses and then form their value system gradually. This value system, in turn, influences negative and positive attitude of people toward different matters. Recognizing the direction and rate of this influence is of great importance, because these attitudes lay base and foundation for trust. Therefore, this study endeavors to study mass media impact on social trust.The sample size of the study was 420 twenty-year-old and Above Inhabitants of Babol City and they were selected through multistep cluster sampling method. Prominent method of this study was survey and reliability of the questionnaire was measured through Cronbach's Alpha technic. Theoretical framework was based on theories of Putnam, Giddens and Coleman.Results of the study show that social trust average of the respondents is (2.78 out of 5). Significance level of T-test in simple linear regression indicates that impact of mass media consumption on social trust is significant and that affirms applied theories. In addition; multivariate linear regression (stepwise) results show that four variables, satellite T.V consumption, interior press consumption, listening to Radio Iran and surfing the internet remain in final model and they explain 20.5 percentage of dependent variable variance. The greatest impact belongs to satellite T.V consumption (Beta -.408).