A practical agenda for incorporating trust into pandemic preparedness and response.

Despite widespread acknowledgement that trust is important in a pandemic, few concrete proposals exist on how to incorporate trust into preparing for the next health crisis. One reason is that building trust is rightly perceived as slow and challenging. Although trust in public institutions and one another is essential in preparing for a pandemic, countries should plan for the possibility that efforts to instil or restore trust may fail. Incorporating trust into pandemic preparedness means acknowledging that polarization, partisanship and misinformation may persist and engaging with communities as they currently are, not as we would wish them to be. This paper presents a practical policy agenda for incorporating mistrust as a risk factor in pandemic preparedness and response planning. We propose two sets of evidence-based strategies: (i) strategies for ensuring the trust that already exists in a community is sustained during a crisis, such as mitigating pandemic fatigue by health interventions and honest and transparent sense-making communication; and (ii) strategies for promoting cooperation in communities where people mistrust their governments and neighbours, sometimes for legitimate, historical reasons. Where there is mistrust, pandemic preparedness and responses must rely less on coercion and more on tailoring local policies and building partnerships with community institutions and leaders to help people overcome difficulties they encounter in cooperating with public health guidance. The regular monitoring of interpersonal and government trust at national and local levels is a way of enabling this context-specific pandemic preparedness and response planning.

Bien qu'il soit largement admis que la confiance est un facteur crucial lors d'une pandémie, peu de propositions concrètes ont été formulées quant aux modalités de son intégration dans la préparation aux prochaines crises sanitaires. L'une des raisons tient au fait qu'établir la confiance est considéré, à juste titre, comme un processus lent et complexe. La confiance mutuelle et celle placée dans les institutions publiques est essentielle dans la préparation aux pandémies, les pays devraient donc tenir compte de la possibilité que leurs efforts pour instaurer ou restaurer cette confiance échouent. Intégrer ce facteur dans la préparation aux pandémies signifie reconnaître que la polarisation, la partialité et la désinformation sont susceptibles de persister. Cela signifie aussi travailler avec les communautés telles qu'elles sont actuellement, et non telles que nous souhaiterions qu'elles soient. Le présent document dévoile un programme politique concret visant à inclure la méfiance comme facteur de risque dans la planification des mesures de préparation et de riposte aux pandémies. Nous suggérons deux types de stratégies fondées sur des données factuelles: (i) des stratégies visant à préserver la confiance préexistante au sein d'une communauté durant une crise, notamment en luttant contre la lassitude face aux pandémies par le biais d'interventions de santé et d'une communication honnête, transparente et sensée; mais aussi (ii) des stratégies qui favorisent la coopération dans les communautés dont les membres se méfient de leur gouvernement et de leurs voisins, parfois pour des raisons historiques légitimes. Lorsque des doutes subsistent, les mesures de préparation et de riposte aux pandémies doivent éviter de recourir à la contrainte et privilégier des politiques locales adaptées ainsi que des partenariats avec les responsables et les institutions de la communauté, afin d'aider les gens à surmonter les difficultés qu'ils rencontrent vis-à-vis des directives de santé publique. Un suivi régulier de la confiance envers les autres et les autorités à l'échelle régionale et nationale permet de planifier une préparation et une riposte spécifiques face aux pandémies.

A pesar del reconocimiento generalizado de que la confianza es importante en una pandemia, existen pocas propuestas concretas sobre cómo incorporarla a la preparación para la próxima crisis sanitaria. Uno de los motivos es que generar confianza se percibe, con razón, como algo lento y difícil. Aunque la confianza en las instituciones públicas y en los demás es esencial en la preparación para una pandemia, los países deben prever la posibilidad de que fracasen los esfuerzos por infundir o restablecer la confianza. Incorporar la confianza a la preparación ante una pandemia significa reconocer que la polarización, el partidismo y la desinformación pueden persistir y comprometerse con las comunidades tal y como son actualmente, no como desearíamos que fueran. Este documento presenta una agenda política práctica para incorporar la desconfianza como factor de riesgo en la planificación de la preparación y respuesta ante una pandemia. Proponemos dos conjuntos de estrategias basadas en la evidencia: (i) estrategias para garantizar que la confianza que ya existe en una comunidad se mantenga durante una crisis, como mitigar la fatiga pandémica mediante intervenciones sanitarias y una comunicación honesta y transparente que haga entrar en razón; y (ii) estrategias para promover la cooperación en comunidades donde las personas desconfían de sus gobiernos y vecinos, a veces por razones legítimas e históricas. Cuando hay desconfianza, la preparación y las respuestas ante una pandemia se deben basar menos en la coerción y más en la adaptación de las políticas locales y la creación de asociaciones con las instituciones y los líderes de la comunidad para ayudar a las personas a superar las dificultades que encuentran en la cooperación con las orientaciones de salud pública. El seguimiento periódico de la confianza interpersonal y gubernamental a nivel nacional y local es una forma de hacer posible esta planificación de la preparación y respuesta ante una pandemia específica para cada contexto.

The event-driven nature of online political hostility: How offline political events make online interactions more hostile.

Hostile interactions permeate political debates on social media, but what is driving the long-term developments in online political hostility? Prior research focuses on individual-level factors such as the dispositions of users or network-level factors such as echo chambers. Moving beyond these accounts, we develop and test an event-oriented explanation and demonstrate that over the course of the 2020 election year in the United States, all major shifts in political hostility on the social media platform Twitter were driven by external offline events. Importantly, these events were magnified by Twitter users within the most politically hostile and most ideologically homogeneous networks. Further contributing to the individual and network-oriented accounts, we show that divisive offline events mobilized individual users not already disposed for hostility and may have helped facilitate the formation of echo chambers. The dynamics of online interactions-including their level of hostility-seem crucially dependent on developments in the offline world.

The COVID-19 pandemic eroded system support but not social solidarity.

While the World was busy mitigating the disastrous health and economic effects of the novel coronavirus, a less direct, but not less concerning peril has largely remained unexplored: the COVID-19 crisis may have disrupted some of the most fundamental social and political relationships in democratic societies. We interviewed samples resembling the national population of Denmark, Hungary, Italy and the US three times: in April, June and December of 2020 (14K observations). We show that multiple (but not all) measures of support for the political system decreased between April and December. Exploiting the panel setup, we demonstrate that within-respondent increases in indicators of pandemic fatigue (specifically, the perceived subjective burden of the pandemic and feelings of anomie) correspond to decreases in system support and increases in extreme anti-systemic attitudes. At the same time, we find no systematic trends in feelings of social solidarity, which are largely unaffected by changes in pandemic burden.

Political repression motivates anti-government violence.

We examined whether political repression deters citizens from engaging in anti-government behaviour (its intended goal) or in fact motivates it. Analyses of 101 nationally representative samples from three continents (N = 139 266) revealed a positive association between perceived levels of repression and intentions to engage in anti-government violence. Additional analyses of fine-grained data from three countries characterized by widespread repression and anti-government violence (N = 2960) identified a positive association between personal experience with repression and intentions to engage in anti-government violence. Randomized experiments revealed that thoughts about repression also motivate participation in anti-government violence. These results suggest that political repression, aside from being normatively abhorrent, motivates anti-repressor violence.

Epidemic modelling of monitoring public behavior using surveys during pandemic-induced lockdowns.

BACKGROUND: Implementing a lockdown for disease mitigation is a balancing act: Non-pharmaceutical interventions can reduce disease transmission significantly, but interventions also have considerable societal costs. Therefore, decision-makers need near real-time information to calibrate the level of restrictions. METHODS: We fielded daily surveys in Denmark during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic to monitor public response to the announced lockdown. A key question asked respondents to state their number of close contacts within the past 24 hours. Here, we establish a link between survey data, mobility data, and hospitalizations via epidemic modelling of a short time-interval around Denmark's December 2020 lockdown. Using Bayesian analysis, we then evaluate the usefulness of survey responses as a tool to monitor the effects of lockdown and then compare the predictive performance to that of mobility data. RESULTS: We find that, unlike mobility, self-reported contacts decreased significantly in all regions before the nation-wide implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions and improved predicting future hospitalizations compared to mobility data. A detailed analysis of contact types indicates that contact with friends and strangers outperforms contact with colleagues and family members (outside the household) on the same prediction task. CONCLUSIONS: Representative surveys thus qualify as a reliable, non-privacy invasive monitoring tool to track the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions and study potential transmission paths.

Mobile phone data obtained from companies such as Google and Apple have often been used to monitor public compliance with pandemic lockdowns and make predictions of future disease spread. Survey data obtained by asking people a series of questions can provide an alternative source of information. We undertook daily surveys of a representative subset of the Danish population immediately before, and during, a lockdown during the COVID19 pandemic. We compared the modeling results obtained from the surveys with data derived from the movement of mobile phones. The self-reported survey data was more predictive of future hospitalizations due to COVID than mobility data. Our data suggest that surveys can be used to monitor compliance during lockdowns.

Do Experimental Manipulations of Pathogen Avoidance Motivations Influence Conformity?

By conforming to ingroup norms, individuals coordinate with other group members, preserve cohesion, and avoid costs of exclusion. Previous experiments have shown that increased concerns about infectious disease increase conformity. However, coordination with other group members has multiple benefits, most of which exist independent of pathogenic infection. Hence, a strong causal effect of pathogen avoidance motivations on conformity seems unlikely. Results from five experiments (N = 1,931) showed only limited support for the hypothesis that experimentally increasing pathogen avoidance motivations influences conformity. Overall, our findings are not consistent with the notion that the human mind contains a fast-acting psychological mechanism that regulates conformity as a function of short-term pathogen avoidance motivations.

Discriminatory attitudes against unvaccinated people during the pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, sizeable groups of unvaccinated people persist even in countries with high vaccine access1. As a consequence, vaccination became a controversial subject of debate and even protest2. Here we assess whether people express discriminatory attitudes in the form of negative affectivity, stereotypes and exclusionary attitudes in family and political settings across groups defined by COVID-19 vaccination status. We quantify discriminatory attitudes between vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens in 21 countries, covering a diverse set of cultures across the world. Across three conjoined experimental studies (n = 15,233), we demonstrate that vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards unvaccinated individuals at a level as high as discriminatory attitudes that are commonly aimed at immigrant and minority populations3-5. By contrast, there is an absence of evidence that unvaccinated individuals display discriminatory attitudes towards vaccinated people, except for the presence of negative affectivity in Germany and the USA. We find evidence in support of discriminatory attitudes against unvaccinated individuals in all countries except for Hungary and Romania, and find that discriminatory attitudes are more strongly expressed in cultures with stronger cooperative norms. Previous research on the psychology of cooperation has shown that individuals react negatively against perceived 'free-riders'6,7, including in the domain of vaccinations8,9. Consistent with this, we find that contributors to the public good of epidemic control (that is, vaccinated individuals) react with discriminatory attitudes towards perceived free-riders (that is, unvaccinated individuals). National leaders and vaccinated members of the public appealed to moral obligations to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake10,11, but our findings suggest that discriminatory attitudes-including support for the removal of fundamental rights-simultaneously emerged.

Pandemic fatigue fueled political discontent during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Health authorities have highlighted "pandemic fatigue" as a psychological consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and warned that "fatigue" could demotivate compliance with health-related policies and mandates. Yet, fatigue from following the policies of authorities may have consequences far beyond the health domain. Theories from the social sciences have raised that real and perceived costs of policies can also drive sentiments of discontent with the entire political establishment. Integrating theories from the health and social sciences, we ask how pandemic fatigue (i.e., perceived inability to "keep up" with restrictions) developed over the pandemic and whether it fueled political discontent. Utilizing longitudinal and panel surveys collected from September 2020 to July 2021 in eight Western countries (N = 49,116), we analyze: 1) fatigue over time at the country level, 2) associations between pandemic fatigue and discontent, and 3) the effect of pandemic fatigue on political discontent using panel data. Pandemic fatigue significantly increased with time and the severity of interventions but also decreased with COVID-19 deaths. When triggered, fatigue elicited a broad range of discontent, including protest support and conspiratorial thinking. The results demonstrate the significant societal impact of the pandemic beyond the domain of health and raise concerns about the stability of democratic societies, which were already strained by strife prior to the pandemic.

Experimental and cross-cultural evidence that parenthood and parental care motives increase social conservatism.

Differences in attitudes on social issues such as abortion, immigration and sex are hugely divisive, and understanding their origins is among the most important tasks facing human behavioural sciences. Despite the clear psychological importance of parenthood and the motivation to provide care for children, researchers have only recently begun investigating their influence on social and political attitudes. Because socially conservative values ostensibly prioritize safety, stability and family values, we hypothesized that being more invested in parental care might make socially conservative policies more appealing. Studies 1 (preregistered; n = 376) and 2 (n = 1924) find novel evidence of conditional experimental effects of a parenthood prime, such that people who engaged strongly with a childcare manipulation showed an increase in social conservatism. Studies 3 (n = 2610, novel data from 10 countries) and 4 (n = 426 444, World Values Survey data) find evidence that both parenthood and parental care motivation are associated with increased social conservatism around the globe. Further, most of the positive association globally between age and social conservatism is accounted for by parenthood. These findings support the hypothesis that parenthood and parental care motivation increase social conservatism.

Political conspiracy theories as tools for mobilization and signaling.

Political conspiracist communities emerge and bind around hard-to-falsify narratives about political opponents or elites convening to secretly exploit the public in contexts of perceived political conflict. While the narratives appear descriptive, we propose that their content as well as the cognitive systems regulating their endorsement and dissemination may have co-evolved, at least in part, to reach coalitional goals: To drive allies' attention to the social threat to increase their commitment and coordination for collective action, and to signal devotion to gain within-group status. Those evolutionary social functions may be best fulfilled if individuals endorse the conspiratorial narrative sincerely.

Moralizing the COVID-19 Pandemic: Self-Interest Predicts Moral Condemnation of Other's Compliance, Distancing, and Vaccination.

The emergence of the novel coronavirus has put societies under tremendous pressure to instigate massive and rapid behavior change. Throughout history, an effective strategy to facilitate novel behaviors has been to morally condemn those who do not behave in an appropriate way. Accordingly, here, we investigate if complying with the advice of health authorities-for example, to physically distance or vaccinate-has emerged as a moralized issue during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 1, we rely on data (N = 94K) from quota-sampled rolling cross-sectional online surveys from eight countries (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the United States). We find that large majorities find it justified to condemn those who do not keep a distance to others in public and around half of respondents blame ordinary citizens for the severity of the pandemic. Furthermore, we identify the most important predictors of condemnation to be behavior change and personal concern, while institutional trust and social distrust also play large but less consistent roles. Study 2 offers a registered replication of our findings on a representative sample of Britons (N = 1.5K). It shows that both moralization and condemnation of both vaccination and general compliance are best predicted by self-interested considerations.

Willingness to Take the Booster Vaccine in a Nationally Representative Sample of Danes.

We estimate the willingness to take the booster dose in a representative sample of Danes. We estimate an overall willingness in the adult Danish population of about 87 percent and a willingness of about 95.5 percent among primary vaccine takers. Moreover, we show that these percentages are significantly lower among younger populations, as well as among groups who do not see COVID-19 as a threat to society, those who do not feel that they have the ability to follow recommendations ('self-efficacy'), those who do not perceive the advice of the health authorities as effective against disease spread ('response efficacy'), and those who feel that the costs of following recommendations are high ('response cost').

Communicate hope to motivate the public during the COVID-19 pandemic.

How should health authorities communicate to motivate the public to comply with health advice during a prolonged health crisis such as a pandemic? During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, for example, people have had to comply with successive restrictions as the world faced multiple races between controlling new waves of the virus and the development and implementation of vaccines. Here, we examine how health authorities and governments most effectively motivate the public by focusing on a specific race: between the Alpha variant and the implementation of the first generation of COVID-19 vaccinations in the winter of 2021. Following prior research on crisis communication, we focus on appeals to fear and hope using communicative aids in the form of visualizations based on epidemiological modelling. Using a population-based experiment conducted in United States ([Formula: see text]), we demonstrate that a hope-oriented visual communication aid, depicting the competing effects on the epidemic curve of (1) a more infectious variant and (2) vaccinations, motivates public action more effectively than a fear-oriented visual communication, focusing exclusively on the threat of the new variant. The importance of the implementation of such hope-oriented messages is further highlighted by cross-national representative surveys from eight countries ([Formula: see text]), which demonstrate that feelings of fear towards the Alpha variant alone were insufficient to activate strong compliance. Overall, these findings provide general insights into the importance of hope as a health communication strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Information about herd immunity through vaccination and empathy promote COVID-19 vaccination intentions.

OBJECTIVE: An effective vaccine against COVID-19 is a desired solution to curb the spread of the disease. However, vaccine hesitancy might hinder high uptake rates and thus undermine efforts to eliminate COVID-19 once an effective vaccine became available. The present contribution addresses this issue by examining two ways of increasing the intention to get vaccinated against COVID-19. METHOD: Two preregistered online studies were conducted (N = 2,315 participants from the United Kingdom) in which knowledge about and beliefs in herd immunity through vaccination, as well as empathy for those most vulnerable to the virus, were either measured (Study 1) or manipulated (Study 2). As a dependent variable, individuals' self-reported vaccination intention once a vaccine against COVID-19 became available was assessed. RESULTS: In Study 1 (N = 310), the intention to get vaccinated against COVID-19 was correlated with knowledge about and belief in herd immunity through vaccination (r = .58, p < .001), as well as with empathy for those most vulnerable to the virus (r = .26, p < .001). In Study 2 (N = 2,005), information about herd immunity through vaccination (Cohen's d = .13, p = .003) and empathy (Cohen's d = .22, p < .001) independently promoted vaccination intention. CONCLUSIONS: The motivation to get vaccinated against COVID-19 was related to and could be causally promoted by both mere information about herd immunity through vaccination and by empathy. As such, the present research provides a better understanding of the intention to get vaccinated against COVID-19. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Did the European suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine decrease vaccine acceptance during the COVID-19 pandemic?

On March 11, 2021, the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID-19 was suspended in three Nordic countries and, on subsequent days, in other European countries. Using data on vaccine acceptance in eight Western countries obtained on a daily basis, we show that these decisions - and associated news - decreased public vaccine acceptance in several countries and part of this decrease happened in response to suspensions in other countries. The findings demonstrate the importance of international coordination between health authorities during a pandemic such that local authorities are able to put the decisions of foreign authorities into perspective.

Does face mask use elicit risk-compensation? Quasi-experimental evidence from Denmark during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

BACKGROUND: Public use of face masks has been widely adopted to halter the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but a key concern has been whether the effectiveness of face mask use is limited due to the elicitation of false feelings of security that decrease the observance of other protective behaviors, the so-called risk-compensation. METHODS: We exploit quasi-experimental variation, prompted by three major changes in policy, to assess whether public use of face masks elicit risk-compensation by increasing the number of close contacts or decreasing attention to distancing and hygiene measured in daily nationally representative surveys (N = 106 880). RESULTS: Number of close contacts: face mask use prompted by the policy changes decrease the number of contacts in two of the three interventions. In the remaining intervention, it has no effect. Attention to hygiene: across the changes, face masks use does not affect people's attention to hygiene. Attention to distancing: in two of three interventions, face mask use increase attention to distancing. In the remaining intervention, we see a decrease in attention. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, public use of face masks may occasionally elicit a narrow form of risk-compensation; specifically, reducing engagement in physical distancing. However, such narrow forms of risk-compensation are limited: the results do not reveal any effects on the actual number of physical contacts, only on the psychological attention to distancing advice. Moreover, the negative effect only appears for one of three interventions. The other two interventions suggest that face mask use increases attention to physical distancing.

The Psychological Burden of the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Associated With Antisystemic Attitudes and Political Violence.

What are the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for people's political attitudes and behavior? We tested, specifically, whether the psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic relates to antisystemic attitudes (dissatisfaction with the fundamental social and political order), peaceful political activism, and political violence. Nationally representative two-wave panel data were collected via online surveys of adults in the United States, Denmark, Italy, and Hungary (ns = 6,131 and 4,568 in Waves 1 and 2, respectively). Overall, levels of antisystemic attitudes were low, and only a small share of interviewees reported behavioral intentions to participate in and actual participation in political violence. However, preregistered analyses indicated that perceived COVID-19 burden was associated with antisystemic attitudes and intentions to engage in political violence. In the United States, the burden of COVID-19 was also associated with self-reported engagement in violence surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests and counterprotests. We found less robust evidence that perceived COVID-19 burden was associated with peaceful activism.

Transparent communication about negative features of COVID-19 vaccines decreases acceptance but increases trust.

During the rapid development and rolling out of vaccines against COVID-19, researchers have called for an approach of "radical transparency," in which vaccine information is transparently disclosed to the public, even if negative information can decrease vaccine uptake. Consistent with theories about the psychology of conspiracy beliefs, these calls predict that a lack of transparency may reduce trust in health authorities and may facilitate the spread of conspiracy theories, which may limit the long-term capabilities of health authorities during and after the pandemic. On the basis of preregistered experiments conducted on large, representative samples of Americans and Danes (N > 13,000), the current study contrasts the effects of vague vaccine communication with transparent communication, which discloses either positive or negative vaccine features. The evidence demonstrates that transparent negative communication may indeed harm vaccine acceptance here and now but that it increases trust in health authorities. Furthermore, the alternative of vague, reassuring communication does not increase vaccine acceptance either and leads to both lower trust and higher endorsement of conspiracy theories.