Trust vaccines: Introducing the trust inoculation to protect public support of governmentally mandated actions

Negative persuasive attacks and misinformation are major threats to public support of governmental mandates. Here, we introduce and investigate the treatment heterogeneity of the trust inoculation, first of a new kind of sociopsychological inoculation designed around the social dimensions of persuasion to protect against negative persuasive attacks and misinformation. In two preregistered studies, we provide evidence that inoculating citizens about the trustworthiness of key energy stakeholders moderately protected citizens’ support for a renewable energy part of national energy transitions to net-zero emissions, against multiple negative persuasive attacks, in Switzerland (N=389) and in seven European countries (N=2805). Baseline trust in energy stakeholders did not moderate the effects, but the trust inoculation protected the citizens most susceptible to negative persuasive attacks. Our findings demonstrate that sociopsychological inoculations such as the trust inoculation are promising, easily implementable and scalable interventions to protect governmental mandates from multiple negative persuasive attacks and misinformation.

Whether for pandemic or climate action, governmental mandates require public support for successful compliance. However, public support is disproportionately susceptible to persuasive attacks and misinformation. Negative persuasive attacks and misinformation are among the greatest challenges to the European energy transition. Here, we introduce the trust inoculation, a new type of psychological inoculations. We will investigate if psychologically inoculating N=2800 citizens from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. about the trustworthiness of governmental actors executing the European Green Deal protects their support for geothermal energy, a renewable energy part of this framework, against multiple negative informational messages. We will test if trust in political institutions and populist attitudes to moderate its effectiveness. Our findings will showcase if the trust inoculation is a promising sociopsychological inoculation implementable to protect governmental mandates from malicious attacks.