Trust
How Trust in Government Influences Pandemic Behavior
Who you gonna trust? Lessons learned from a multi-national study on COVID-19.
Posted January 31, 2022 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Key points
- Higher trust in one’s government was associated with more health behavior and willingness to sacrifice to protect others from COVID-19.
- Higher baseline trust in one’s government was associated with a lower rate of decline in health behaviors over time.
- Unlike health behavior, trust in one’s government had no effect on the declining rate of willingness to sacrifice to protect others over time.
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As the World Health Organization was officially labeling COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, governments across the globe were releasing information for citizens in the hopes of preventing the spread of the pandemic in their respective countries. But how likely were people to adopt these recommendations into their own lives?
Using a subset of the PsyCorona data (a large multinational study investigating the psychological effects of the pandemic), researchers Qing Han, Bang Zheng, and Mioara Cristea asked whether trust in government was related to how much people engaged in the government-recommended health behaviors we all heard about at the onset of the pandemic—washing our hands, avoiding groups, and self-isolating if we were sick. They also investigated whether trust in government was related to willingness to protect others from COVID-19.
Main Take-Home Messages
In March 2020, people in general were pretty likely to do the behaviors suggested by the WHO (washing hands, self-isolating, and avoiding crowds). But even with high rates of compliance, people were more likely to engage in those three health behaviors if they reported more trust in their government.
Between March and September 2020, people started engaging less and less in these health behaviors. However, the more people reported trust in their government during March, the more they stuck with the three health behaviors. (This is what psychologists often call a buffering effect—when a variable prevents an expected decline).
In March 2020, people were also fairly willing to make sacrifices to protect others from COVID-19. Just like the health behaviors, these prosocial inclinations decreased over time. But unlike with health behavior, trust in government didn’t buffer this dropoff—both people with relatively more and relatively less trust in government reported less willingness to sacrifice over time.
One important thing to remember is that these results were observed across 23 countries. Although there may have been different reactions to the pandemic across the world, these results suggest a unifying theme—people were more likely to engage in health behaviors and to keep that up over time if they viewed a central aspect of their government as trustworthy.
The researchers specifically measured trust in the government's management of COVID-19 protocols. They didn’t measure a specific type of government (e.g., national or local), which means trust in government may have meant one thing to one participant and another thing to a different participant. For instance, in the U.S., some participants might have thought about how much they trusted then-President Trump to manage the pandemic whereas other participants might have thought about how much they trusted Anthony Fauci and the NIH.
What This Means
Here is where we start making some guesses. A lot has changed since March 2020. It seems pretty safe to say that people are less concerned (on average) with hand washing, avoiding crowds, and self-isolating than they were in March 2020. The effects of trust in government probably still exist, though. That is, people who trust some aspect of the government more are probably still engaging relatively more in these behaviors to try to curb the spread of COVID-19.
In the U.S., many people contend that the government has made a lot of missteps in public health communication. Some mistakes are probably inevitable. However, these missteps likely contributed to fewer public health behaviors at a time people were already starting to care less.
There have also been some pretty significant changes in the federal government (a Republican president and cabinet were in place in 2020 while now a Democratic president and cabinet are in place). As this switch happened, some people may have lost trust in the government’s handling of COVID-19 whereas others may have gained some trust back. The currently available data don’t speak directly to this possibility, but it may be a small part of what would explain the trajectory of health behaviors over time in the U.S.
Post written with assistance from Matin Bahmanabadi, Hannah Pless, Anna Schwaemmle, Haley Van Steenbergh, Jenisa Gandhi, Josefina Patino, and Jordan Bush
References
Han, Q., Zheng, B., Cristea, M., Agostini, M., Belanger, J. J., Gutzkow, B., … & PsyCorona Collaboration. (2021). Trust in government regarding COVID-19 and its associations with preventive health behaviour and prosocial behaviour during the pandemic: a cross-sectional and longitudinal study. Psychological medicine, 1-32.