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Party over pandemic: Trust in political experts explains public support for COVID-19 policy

par Cole, Jennifer C.;Flores, Alexandra;Jiga-Boy, Gabriela;Klein, Olivier ;Sherman, David K;Van Boven, Leaf
Référence Group processes & intergroup relations
Publication Publié, 2022

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

Two experiments examined the polarization of public support for COVID-19 policies due to people’s trust or lack thereof in political leaders and nonpartisan experts. In diverse samples in the United States (Experiment 1; N = 1,802) and the United Kingdom (Experiment 2; N = 1,825), participants evaluated COVID-19 policies that were framed as proposed by ingroup political leaders, outgroup political leaders, nonpartisan experts, or, in the experiment in the US, a bipartisan group of political leaders. [AQ: 2] At the time of the study in April 2020, COVID-19 was an unfamiliar, shared, and nonpoliticized threat. Therefore, there were theoretical reasons explaining why attitudes toward COVID-19 policy may not have been politically polarized. Yet, our results demonstrated that people supported policies from ingroup political leaders more than the same policies from outgroup leaders, extending prior research on how people align their policy stances to political elites from their own parties. People also trusted experts and ingroup political leaders more than outgroup political leaders. Partly because of this polarized trust, policies from experts and bipartisan groups were more widely supported than policies from ingroup political leaders. These results illustrate the potentially detrimental role political leaders may play and the potential for effective leadership by bipartisan groups and nonpartisan experts in shaping public policy attitudes during crises.