RESUMO
The coronavirus pandemic increased the role played by scientific advisers in counselling governments and citizens on issues around public health. This raises questions about how citizens evaluate scientists, and in particular the grounds on which they trust them. Previous studies have identified various factors associated with trust in scientists, although few have systematically explored a range of judgements and their relative effects. This study takes advantage of scientific advisers' heightened public profile during the pandemic to explore how people's trust in scientists is shaped by perceptions of their features and traits, along with evaluations of their behaviour and role within the decision-making process. The study also considers people's trust in politicians, thereby enabling us to identify whether trust in scientists reflects similar or distinctive considerations to trust in partisan actors. Data are derived from specially designed conjoint experiments and surveys of nationally representative samples in Britain and the United States.
RESUMO
Previous studies of vaccine hesitancy in the context of COVID-19 have reported mixed results in terms of the role played by political and institutional trust. This study addresses this ambiguity with a global analysis of the relationship between trust and vaccine hesitancy, disentangling the effects of generalized trust orientations, trust in specific institutions and conspiracy mentality. It first draws upon a cross-national survey of 113 countries to demonstrate that trust in government is a predictor of vaccine hesitancy across global regions. It further draws on original surveys fielded in seven countries (France, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Croatia, Brazil, India), which deploy a diverse range of measures, to disentangle the individual-level predictors of vaccine hesitancy. Our findings confirm the robust effects of trust in government across countries, but when including other trust measures in the same models, the most robust effects are those of trust in health institutions and conspiracy mentality. Weaker associations are observed for right-wing ideology and online political engagement, while the consumption of traditional media tends to predict the willingness of individuals to be vaccinated.
RESUMO
As COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out across the world, there are growing concerns about the roles that trust, belief in conspiracy theories, and spread of misinformation through social media play in impacting vaccine hesitancy. We use a nationally representative survey of 1476 adults in the UK between 12 and 18 December 2020, along with 5 focus groups conducted during the same period. Trust is a core predictor, with distrust in vaccines in general and mistrust in government raising vaccine hesitancy. Trust in health institutions and experts and perceived personal threat are vital, with focus groups revealing that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is driven by a misunderstanding of herd immunity as providing protection, fear of rapid vaccine development and side effects, and beliefs that the virus is man-made and used for population control. In particular, those who obtain information from relatively unregulated social media sources-such as YouTube-that have recommendations tailored by watch history, and who hold general conspiratorial beliefs, are less willing to be vaccinated. Since an increasing number of individuals use social media for gathering health information, interventions require action from governments, health officials, and social media companies. More attention needs to be devoted to helping people understand their own risks, unpacking complex concepts, and filling knowledge voids.
