Local economic decline has contributed to the backlash against globalization, but we know little about the effects on citizens’ trust in global governance. While economic geography theory predicts that trust in international institutions is lower in historically poorer areas due to feelings of being left behind, the evidence is surprisingly mixed. In this article, we explain this puzzle by proposing reference dependence as a crucial cognitive bias leading individuals to evaluate local economic decline relative to their locale’s wealth in the past. Citizens in poorer areas evaluate economic outcomes against lower baselines, making economic decline less salient and reducing the tendency to attribute losses to international economic institutions (IEIs). This helps explain why richer areas, where decline is more salient, tend to blame IEIs. Our argument yields testable hypotheses, which this registered report proposes investigating in a survey experiment based on representative samples of the United States and two American counties experiencing economic decline. In a priming experiment, we will assess how raising the salience of local decline, and decline relative to other areas, affects trust in IEIs, and the extent this effect depends on both salience and blame attribution. The results are expected to explain why historically rich, declining areas are less likely to trust IEIs, than historically poor areas, across partisan lines and other group divisions.