Consider the following situation: Two experts give you advice about whether you should eat or avoid the fat in common cooking oils.
One of them tells you confidently that there are “good” or “bad” fats, so you can eat some oils and not others. The other is more hesitant, saying the science is mixed and it depends on the individual and the situation, so probably just best to avoid them all until more evidence is available, or see your doctor to find out what is best for you.
Whose advice do you follow?
Neither one of these experts is factually incorrect. But the confident source likely has some additional appeal. Research suggests that people are more likely to follow advice delivered with confidence and to reject advice delivered with hesitancy or uncertainty.
During the pandemic, public health officials have seemed to operate on this assumption – that confidence conveys expertise, leadership and authority and is necessary to get people to trust you. But public health recommendations about COVID-19 are complicated by the rapidly changing scientific understanding of the disease and its spread. Each time there’s new information, some of the old knowledge becomes obsolete and is replaced.
Over the course of the pandemic, Pew Research Center polling has found that the percentage of Americans who feel confused and less confident in public health officials’ recommendations because of changing guidelines has grown.
Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky have needed to update advice as the pandemic continues.
Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images
In a landscape of constantly changing science, is communicating with total confidence the best way to win public trust? Maybe not. Our research suggests that, in many cases, people trust those who are willing to say “I don’t know.”
We are psychological scientists who study the emergence, in childhood, of what is termed “epistemic trust” – which is trusting that someone is a knowledgeable and reliable source of information. Infants learn to trust their caregivers for other reasons – attachment bonds are formed based on love and consistent care.
But, from the time children are 3 or 4 years old, they also begin to trust people based on what they claim to know. In other words, from early in life our minds separate the love-and-care kind of trust from the sort of trust you need to get reliable, accurate information that helps you learn about the world. These are the origins of adult trust in experts – and in science.
Observing trust in the lab
The setup of our lab studies with kids is similar to our starting example above: Kids meet people and learn facts from them. One person sounds confident and the other sounds uncertain. The children in our studies are still in preschool, so we use simple “lessons” appropriate to the age group, often…
