New research published in the journal Psychology, Health & Medicine suggests that trust in science plays a critical role in compliance with COVID-19 prevention guidelines. The findings indicate there are several social and psychological factors, including political conservatism, that influence trust in science, which in turn predicts how often people follow the safety measures.
“Despite all the efforts to inform the public about the COVID-19 prevention guidelines and the need for ‘flattening the curve’ (i.e., slowing the spread of the virus), there have been numerous instances of people ignoring the risks as well as the risk-mitigating measures,” explained study author Nejc Plohl, a PhD student at the University of Maribor.
“The public discourse about such individuals has quickly turned to labeling them as uneducated, right-wing, and so on. While such finger-pointing is very common, it is rarely useful — even if/when the labels are accurate, the characteristics on which they are based are normally very resistant to change.”
“As such, we were first interested in finding out which of these general characteristics are important and second, we wanted to take an additional step towards investigating the role of a specific and relatively malleable mechanism (i.e., trust in science), which could be the important link between more general sociodemographic and personality characteristics and compliance with COVID-19 prevention guidelines,” Plohl said.
Using an online survey, the researchers collected socio-demographic data and other information from 525 participants from around the world. Unsurprisingly, participants who perceived COVID-19 as a more serious threat were more likely to act in accordance with preventive measures and safety guidelines, such as frequently washing hands and practicing social distancing. The same was true among participants who expressed greater trust in science.
But the researchers found that participants who scored higher on measures of political conservatism, religious orthodoxy and conspiracy ideation tended to be less trusting of science, which in turn led to a lower level of compliance with preventive measures. More intellectually curious participants, on the other hand, tended to be more trusting of science.
Greater trust in science was associated with heightened COVID-19 risk perception, while greater political conservatism was associated with reduced COVID-19 risk perception.
“The results rather surprisingly show that political conservatism, religious orthodoxy, believing conspiracy theories and intellectual curiosity do not directly lead to a higher or lower compliance with COVID-19 prevention guidelines. However, these characteristics still play an important role as they are significant drivers of trust in science, which, in the next step, predicts compliance (together with perception of COVID-19 risk),” Plohl told PsyPost.
“Moreover, at least in our sample, a somewhat intuitive factor of compliance with COVID-19 prevention guidelines, education, was not related to compliance in any way (neither directly nor indirectly via trust in science).”
But the study — like all research — include some limitations.
“A major caveat is that the study was not conducted on a representative sample (our sample was relatively highly-educated). It is also possible that, due to convenience sampling, our sample was somewhat biased towards having higher trust in science and being highly compliant with COVID-19 preventive measures,” Plohl said.
“There are several questions that could be addressed in the future to complement our findings. For example, it would be interesting to extend the model by adding a valid measure of scientific literacy (i.e. the knowledge and comprehension of science).”
“We hope that our study brings additional attention to the importance of strengthening the level of public trust in science and scientists. As this is not an easy endeavor, actions need to be taken as soon as possible and on many different levels, with some examples being an active and clear participation of scientists in public discussions, informing the public about the key aspects of the scientific process, and promoting ethical and transparent research practices within the scientific community,” Plohl added.
The study, “Modeling compliance with COVID-19 prevention guidelines: the critical role of trust in science“, was authored by Nejc Plohl ans Bojan Musil.