Trust in other people is general when it includes remote and dissimilar others (i.e., out-groups). But whether trust in outgroups can be created independently of trust in in-groups is controversial, and conclusive evidence has been unavailable so far. This article fills this gap, analyzing under which conditions outgroup-trust emerges independent of ingroup-trust. Using data of fifty societies from the most recent World Values Surveys, we establish four insights. First, a high level of ingroup-trust is so common that it comes close to an anthropological universal. Second, outgroup-trust varies greatly and is only -- yet not always -- high when ingroup-trust is high. Third, a society’s outgroup-trust ex-tends beyond the level projected by ingroup-trust when human empowerment diminish-es people’s dependence on ingroups and opens them to cooperation with outgroups. Fourth, neither cultural legacies nor social divisions absorb the effects of empowerment and cooperation. To a large extent, trust generalizes to outgroups as a result of modernity’s emancipative impulses.