Research from the University’s School of Psychology has found that the public trust national leaders more when decisions around the Covid-19 pandemic are made with the equal welfare of the population in mind.
National leaders have faced urgent and serious moral dilemmas throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, from who to prioritise for medical treatments, to whether to implement lockdowns, to whether medicine and PPE should be kept within a country or sent wherever it can do the most good. Some leaders have argued that we need to adopt a utilitarian approach to these moral dilemmas, focusing on maximising good consequences for everyone involved – even if that means letting some people die, or even if that means sending resources and treatment outside the country to provide a greater benefit to people in other countries. New findings published in Nature Human Behaviour suggest that how leaders make these judgments can have important consequences on the trust of the public.
Trust in national leaders plays a major role in people’s compliance with public health guidelines, such as social distancing, physical hygiene and mask wearing. Therefore, public trust in leaders is likely to be crucial for successfully containing the Covid-19 pandemic around the world. But how might this trust depend on leaders’ specific moral judgments in such dilemmas?
To answer this question, Dr Jim Everett (School of Psychology) worked with Yale University’s Clara Colombatto and Molly Crockett to assemble a multidisciplinary team of 37 international researchers. Drawing upon real case studies and the philosophical literature, they identified five moral dilemmas that have been actively debated during the Covid-19 pandemic and investigated how leaders’ responses to such dilemmas shape how trusted they are. In online experiments involving nearly 24,000 people in 22 countries, Dr Everett and colleagues had participants rate their general trust in leaders based on theoretical handlings of moral dilemmas and cast a “vote” for a leader they trusted the most to be responsible for making a charitable donation, based on their decision making on Covid-19 dilemmas.
Participants showed more trust in leaders who endorsed utilitarian views about impartial beneficence dilemmas, for example arguing that medicine and PPE should be sent wherever in the world it can to do the most good, rather than favouring their own citizens. But they showed less trust in leaders who endorsed utilitarian views in instrumental harm dilemmas, who suggested we must be willing to prioritise some over others for the greater good).
The research paper pulls out examples of leaders who were not well received by the public during the pandemic for showing a utilitarian willingness to sacrifice some for the greater good. For example, President Donald Trump and Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick were keen to avoid lockdowns and risk the health of older generations to prioritise the US economy, and leaders in Italy suggested prioritising scarce ventilator resource for young patients over older patients.
Dr Everett said: ‘Leaders have faced huge dilemmas during the pandemic, both publicly and behind the scenes. While final decisive actions will never please everyone, our research suggests that national leaders can be trusted more when people are treated equally – even if this means prioritising aid to those in other countries. This insight may prove useful in guiding how leaders can approach future moral dilemmas that could be faced in the pandemic, and other future global issues.’
The research paper ‘Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis’ is published by Nature Human Behaviour. doi: 10.1038/s41562-021-01156-y