TY - JOUR
T1 - Good news reduces trust in government and its efficacy
T2 - The case of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine announcement
AU - Hargreaves Heap, Shaun
AU - Koop, Christel
AU - Matakos, Konstantinos
AU - Unan, Asli
AU - Weber, Nina
N1 - Funding Information:
The author(s) received no specific funding for this work other than their standard institutional research allowances.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Hargreaves Heap et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2021/12/9
Y1 - 2021/12/9
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85121037988&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0260216
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0260216
M3 - Article
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 16
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
IS - 12
M1 - e0260216
ER -
