Good news reduces trust in government and its efficacy: The case of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine announcement.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34882693.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0260216 and PMC identifier 8659308.
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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.
Medical subject headings
- BNT162 Vaccine
- COVID-19
- Trust