In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, media pundits and government officials have raised concerns about whether a rise in self-reported distrust in scientists might shape the public's willingness to comply with science-based regulations, both in relation to COVID-19 and in other areas. This concern is based on the assumption that distrust expressed in surveys can also affect real-world behaviour. However, existing research has not examined the extent to which expressed trust in scientists has a causal effect on the public's adherence to scientific regulations more generally. Using a between-groups experimental design, this study tests the hypothesis that increasing or decreasing trust in scientists causes a corresponding change in compliance with their recommendations across a range of domains. The results show that decreasing trust does reduce compliance, and scholars and scientists face great difficulty in raising public trust in scientists.
Ava Breitbeck (Mon,) studied this question.