Study: Good news reduces trust in government and its efficacy: The case of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine announcement

Science is catching up to what Political Science has long since understood: Fear empowers government

I came across the following study. It speaks for itself. Selected excerpts below, emphasis mine:

Good news reduces trust in government and its efficacy: The case of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine announcement

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34882693/

Abstract

The announcement of Pfizer/BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine success on November 9, 2020 led to a global stock market surge. But how did the general public respond to such good news? We leverage the unexpected vaccine announcement to assess the effect of good news on citizens' government evaluations, anxiety, beliefs and elicited behaviors in the US and the UK. While most outcomes were unaffected by the news, trust in government and elected politicians (and their competency) saw a significant decline in both countries. As the news did not concern the governments, and the governments did not have time to act on the news, our results suggest that the decline of trust is more likely explained by the psychological impact of good news on reasoning style. In particular, we suggest two possible styles of reasoning that might explain our results: a form of motivated reasoning and a reasoning heuristic of relative comparison.

Introduction

Pfizer/BioNTech’s announcement on November 9, 2020 that its COVID-19 vaccine was, according to its own clinical trials, 90% effective triggered a global surge in stock markets. Actors in the markets plausibly adjusted their beliefs about future corporate earnings as a result of the announcement; noticeably so for those companies that had been most affected by the COVID-19 lockdowns as their share prices rose the most [1]. In this paper, we are concerned with whether the general public also adjusted their beliefs, attitudes or behavior in response to this good news. We answer this question by leveraging the vaccine news as an unexpected event in nation-wide surveys in the US and the UK. Our main result is that, although, as Pfizer suggested, ‘this was a great day for science and humanity’, it was not a great day for government. Trust in government and elected politicians (and their competency) fell in both countries in response to the vaccine announcement. Or in other words, positive news caused a sizeable reduction in political trust.

This is a new as well as a surprising result. It is new because, to our knowledge, the influence of positive news on trust in government and elected politicians has not been studied before. There is evidence on the effect of negative news. It is well known, for example, that at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, trust in government and support for incumbents rose [2–6]. This rise has been variously interpreted as a ‘rally round the flag’ and a response to COVID-19-related anxiety. There are similar results for the H1N1 flu [7] and for other disasters like tornados and floods, though the results are not always as clear [8]. Good news, on the other hand, has not been studied in the same way. Several studies have shown that the release of (good or bad) municipal audit outcomes or information about political corruption affects citizens’ attitudes, voting behavior and tax payments [9–11]. Yet, in these studies, the (good or bad) news is directly related to government and politicians’ performance. By contrast, we are interested in identifying the general effect of ‘good news’, especially when seemingly unrelated to government actions and performance.

The result is surprising because, in contrast with the literature on the determinants of government trust where it is government actions and efficacy that cause changes in trust [12, 13], we find that trust in governments depends on something other than their actions, at least during COVID-19-like episodes. There is a large literature in psychology on how positive (negative) news can cause positive (negative) affect or mood changes in individuals with the result that individuals assess events and behave differently and usually in a manner congruent with their mood change [14]. However, with the vaccine announcement, there was no congruence: the evaluation of government moved in the opposite direction (i.e., negative) to the likely change in affect from the (positive) announcement. Indeed, the same discordance was observed after the onset of COVID-19 bad news when trust in government improved. Yet, whereas that initial improvement in the evaluation of government could have been related to the actions of government in the face of the pandemic (e.g., imposition of strict lockdowns and the introduction of other restrictive measures to stop the spread of the virus), there was no change in our experiment in the evidential base on government actions from which to form judgments about trust and competence. The government and elected politicians had no time to do anything material, except applaud the discovery of an effective vaccine.

We draw instead on the strand of the psychology literature on emotions where mood has been found to affect reasoning style, with good news tending to encourage top-down heuristic reasoning with little attention to detail [15]. Thus, we hypothesize two possible reasoning style mechanisms. First, there is a form of motivated reasoning. The COVID-19 pandemic constituted a major new source of uncertainty and anxiety for many people [16]. To maintain a sense of self-efficacy during those challenging times, they needed to pin their hopes on something that could contain the new source of uncertainty and anxiety [17]. As a result, they adjusted their beliefs accordingly. Governments are a possible agent for controlling COVID-19 uncertainty and trust in government is a sufficiently subjective belief to admit adjustment. This might explain why trust in governments first rose (in what is known as a ‘rally round the flag’ effect). But when the vaccine was announced, people had something else to pin their hopes on. Consequently, their need for trust in government declined. One can think of it as a ‘reset’ in people’s beliefs about governments, returning them to their pre-pandemic levels, once the announcement signaled that we would be soon reaching the end of the current crisis.

Second, the reasoning heuristic may have been that of relative comparison. The vaccine announcement did not concern government efficacy; hence, its competence in absolute terms should not have changed. Yet, the same is not true in relative terms. In particular, the vaccine news shed a positive light on the competence of scientists. By comparison, governments’ competence appeared rather bleak. This, in turn, may account for the decline in trust in government and politicians. Though we cannot directly test these two mechanisms, our evidence suggests that both may have been at work in the aftermath of the good vaccine news.

Our results have important implications for government efficacy and performance as the main explanatory factors behind the scarring effects of pandemics and other crises in general [13]. Since we find that such effects are more likely to arise from the operation of psychological reasoning mechanisms as opposed to an assessment of governments’ own actions and decisions, our results are put in sharp contrast with existing theories on the determinants of political trust.

Conclusion

Our results are surprising and carry implications for the evaluation of government efficacy and for the literature on the effect of good news. They are surprising in that they document a fundamental discord between citizens’ positive affect (and mood) following the vaccine announcement and their assessment of governments and their performance. To account for this, we suggest (a combination of) two possible mood effects on reasoning style. First, there is a form of motivated reasoning [29]. Our conjecture is that people’s beliefs are adjusted to support a requisite locus of control for decision-making to be a source of a sense of self-efficacy. At the onset, COVID-19 created a major new source of uncertainty and anxiety. People’s locus of (internal) control fell [37] and they needed to pin their hopes on something that could contain the new source of uncertainty and anxiety at levels required for self-efficacy. They adjusted their beliefs, where possible, accordingly. Governments are a possible agent for controlling COVID-19 uncertainty, and trust in government is a sufficiently subjective belief to admit adjustment. This may explain why trust in governments first rose. Yet, when the vaccine announcement was made, people had something else to pin their hopes on and so they re-adjusted their beliefs accordingly. As a result, trust in government fell. A similar mechanism has been found to be at work in task selection and mood-balancing. People who seek to optimize their positive affect choose to engage in mood-enhancing activities when they feel bad, and in unpleasant ones when they feel good [38]. Such a form of motivated reasoning aims at maximizing the sense of self-efficacy that people derive from their actions and emotions. Thus, it may well be that emotions—and the desire to balance mood and affect—shape behavior as well as beliefs and attitudes.

Second, there is the reasoning heuristic of relative comparison, which is similarly consistent with our findings (see Tables Tables1 and and2). Though the vaccine news did not affect governments, and politicians did not have the time to act on the news, (political) competency is not only evaluated in absolute terms, but also in relative terms. While the vaccine announcement shed a positive light on the competence of scientists, governments and elected politicians appeared relatively less potent and effective. This, in turn, might explain a decline in trust in politicians.

Irrespective of the exact interpretation, our results strongly suggest that factors other than governments’ own actions and performance can explain citizens’ trust in them, at least in the context of the pandemic. Moreover they point to a possible asymmetry between positive and negative news. The one is not the opposite of the other in its effect on behavior and beliefs, thus suggesting that the extant literature on negative news be complemented by one on good news.