<p>Life history theory posits that higher environmental adversity (or simply “adversity) causes lower interpersonal trust (or simply “trust”) by motivating people to pursue a faster life-history strategy. While prior studies largely supported this hypothesis, they 1) did not always distinguish among theoretically distinct types of adversity and trust, 2) overlooked the potential cross-cultural variation in the association between adversity and trust, and 3) often relied on subjective measures of adversity and cross-sectional samples that are difficult to infer causality with. With the World Values Survey (WVS) 6 and 7 (<i>N</i> = 89,472 and 94,149), we found that resource scarcity was mainly negatively related to ingroup trust and trust in family members, not outgroup trust or its sub-items. In fact, resource scarcity was positively related to trust in people met for the first time in both WVS 6 and 7. Importantly, the aforementioned correlations exhibited notable cross-cultural variation, with the negative correlation between resource scarcity and trust in family members being the most robust across countries and regions. Further, with a Chinese panel dataset (<i>N</i> = 560), we found that subjective childhood unpredictability—but not childhood or current harshness—negatively predicted trust in family members but not other types of people. These findings offered mixed support for the life-history explanation of trust and raised several questions to be addressed in future work for a more sophisticated evolutionary psychological account of trust.</p>