Reassessing social trust: gossip, self-policing, and Covid-19 risk communication in Norway

Abstract

This article analyses patterns of compliance with COVID-19 regulations in Southwest Norway. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and a series of interviews, we contrast grassroots discourses with the Norwegian government’s own emphasis on ‘trust’ in its risk communication strategies. As opposed to the official claim that Norwegians complied with COVID-19 emergency regulations because they trusted the authorities, the evidence suggests that citizens complied more due to the informal pressure of their peers. Affective reciprocity and moral judgement, including the dynamics of kinship sociability in which they are expressed, here acquire a critical analytical dimension. In dialogue with dominant theories of trust in risk studies, we argue that such relational aspects of everyday life should be taken into consideration as essential factors for any health risk mitigation strategy.

Keywords:

• Covid-19
• trust
• risk communication
• morality
• pandemic policy
• Norway

1. Introduction

In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus was spreading in Europe, the Norwegian Government appointed a special committee to evaluate its response to the outbreak in the country. The committee published a congratulatory report in April 2021, which among other factors attributed the relative low number of COVID-19 cases in Norway to the high level of ‘trust’ (in Norwegian: tillit) allegedly existing between Norwegian citizens and the authorities. The report however did not define how ‘trust’ was expressed in the (manifestly bureaucratic) relations between the Norwegian state and its citizens. Without that definition, the committee’s report remains largely theoretical. This raises some questions: What was the empirical expression of trust in the Norwegian society during the pandemic? To what extent did trust play a role in local communities’ adherence to COVID-19 regulations in Norway? Did common citizens also associate mundane risk calculations with trust in governmental authorities?

In this article we provide tentative answers to these questions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and a series of semi-structured interviews with Norwegian citizens living in Rogaland County, South-West Norway, we argue that an all-encompassing discourse of ‘trust’ cannot reliably explain levels of compliance with governmental risk communication messages during the recent outbreak of COVID-19 in Norway. Rather, it was one’s own image of oneself as good person or considerate kin that locally characterised people’s decision-making process with regards to compliance. Our analysis thereby reveals a tension between governmental communication, which were often phrased as nominal imperatives that individuals should adopt, to the relational perception of compliance at the level of grassroots activity, which reflected the emotional and moral content of people’s meaningful relationships with others around them.

We develop this argument in several stages. First, we summarise the risk context that informs this study. We then provide a methodological description of the research, followed by a presentation of the grassroots narratives we recorded during the fieldwork and interviews. In the discussion we analyse the implicit and explicit critiques that our research participants expressed concerning the notion of ‘trust in the government’ and provide some lessons for policy makers in Norway and beyond concerning the constructive space of kinship sociability in patterns of health policy compliance.

1.1. Risk context

1.1.1. Trust in risk communication literature

Trust is a multifaceted concept that can be understood in at least two senses. First, trust is an action that refers to others, whether vertically towards institutions or horizontally towards persons. Trust is thus often expressed as a form of deference between people or organisations, and in that sense, it is performative and outward-oriented. Second, trust is a moral disposition within the person (Freitag & Traunmüller, 2009; Siegrist et al., 2000; Uslaner, 2002), which includes both rational (cost-benefit) calculations and experiential (or emotional) manifestations. Here, trust is understood as something that happens ‘inside’ people, a suspension of self-monitoring or doubt that is felt as a form of abiding commitment. (Löfstedt, 2005; Slovic et al., 2004; Smith, 2005). External and internal manifestations of trust are mutually inclusive because one’s own tendency to trust (or not) stems from the kinds of public actions that are established contextually as desirable or condemned in popular social discourses and cultural styles (Smith, 2005).

Both these notions of trust feature prominently in the risk communication literature alongside notions of risk perception, acceptability, and uncertainty (Balog-Way et al., 2020). In the 1990s, sociologists of risk began to look more systematically at the relationship between perception, trust, and democratic decision-making procedures (Slovic, 1993). Research on the topic was accelerated in the aftermath of several health risk scandals, which transformed the relationship between regulators and citizens in different countries.¹ Some risk scholars have pointed out that in European countries these crises caused a shift in public opinion towards a ‘post-trust’ environment (Freitag & Traunmüller, 2009; Löfstedt, 2005), where trust can no longer be taken for granted and citizens demand more critical information to comply with public risk mitigation policies (cf. Fjaeran & Aven, 2021). Since the early 2000s, the common definition of trust in the field of risk studies has been ‘the willingness to rely on those who have the responsibility for making decisions and taking actions related to the management of technology, the environment, medicine, or other realms of public health and safety’ (Siegrist et al., 2000, p. 354). This definition assumes that the ‘willingness to rely’ on decision makers constitutes an essential aspect of any functioning democracy (Fjaeran & Aven, 2021). Yet, to be democratically effective a widespread public reliance on politicians and institutions must meet certain standards of communication (Slovic, 1993). Trust in that sense can be derived from ‘the generalised expectancy that a message received [in the public sphere] is true and reliable and that the communicator demonstrates competence and honesty by conveying accurate, objective, and complete information’ (Renn & Levine, 1991, p. 179).

Elaborating this definition, Renn and Levine (1991) ultimately suggest that risk-communication would enhance public trust – and thus increase levels of compliance with controversial policies (Fjaeran & Aven, 2021) – if risk-awareness messages could convey: (a) Perceived competence (trust will emanate from degrees of expertise); (b) Objectivity (trust results from the perceived lack of bias in information); (c) Fairness (trust is felt when all relevant points of view have been properly acknowledged and represented); (d) Consistency (arguments are based on past experiences and previous communication efforts); and (e) Faith (trust will result from a perception of ‘good will’).

1.2. Emergency routine: trust and pandemic risk communication in Norway

In March 2020 the Norwegian authorities responded to the COVID-19 outbreak in the country with a set of rules that immediately limited movement in public spaces. Emergency mitigation measures included an initial lockdown (March to May 2020), setting up of specialised COVID-19 wards in hospitals, the closure of borders, assembly limitations (which were routinely updated throughout 2020 and 2021), and the installation of infection control infrastructure at a large scale (Norges Offentlige Utredninger NOU, 2021). These measurements strongly impacted the dynamic of everyday life even after the initial lockdown (March-May 2020). All public spaces, including private shops, located antibacterial gel dispensers near entrances, accompanied by signs that instructed people to continuously sanitise their hands. Some public institutions mandated distancing rules using tapes that were glued to the floor. Shops installed transparent acrylic plates as barriers between service providers and customers. Although the government initially refrained from mandating the use of masks, it later did recommend using them. Whereas national-level regulations encompassed the regional and municipality levels, including workplaces, all municipalities and workplaces could also add their own regulations in accordance with local levels of infection or other contextual considerations (Evensen et al., 2023). Everyday routines in Norwegian cities and towns were thus quickly replaced by new COVID-19 ‘emergency-routines’ (Shapiro & Bird David, 2017), a term Shapiro and Bird David use to describe prolonged limitations on regular social conduct, which thus turn a state of emergency into quasi-normalised reality.

To ensure compliance, Norwegian risk communications included (1) constant appeals to keeping physical (‘social’) distancing of up to two metres at all time; (2) a continuous ‘stay at home’ and home office imperative for most people; (3) advice against travelling inside and outside the country; (4) frequent reminders on hygiene habits; (5) instructions on the number of people that can gather in private houses (which changed in accordance with infection levels); and (6) in the winter of 2020/1, the authorities recommended that people should wear face masks when they use public transportation, with some local variations (Bourrier et al., 2022). Instructions to the public were broadcasted regularly via press conferences and via daily reporting on the national NRK radio and television networks. On some occasions municipal authorities also sent alerts to residents by direct text messages.

From the very beginning, high-ranking public officials invoked the cultural idioms of trust (tillit) and ‘voluntary work’ (dugnad) as essential components in any large-scale risk mitigation strategy.² On 18^th of March 2020, for example, during a dramatic speech to the nation concerning the impending crisis, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg explicitly linked ‘trust’ and dugnad with both successful crisis management and Norwegian national unity. She said:

The generation before us has created a society in which we have trust in and respect for each other … when terror and accidents have hit us, we have gotten through it as a community. When freedom has been threatened, Norwegians have given one another everything. This has given our country an advantage more powerful than any weapon, which is more valuable than any oil fund: Namely, that we trust each other! It is this trust that will carry us through the crisis we are now facing. Without the high level of trust between citizen and authorities, we would never be able to engage the entire country in the dugnad [required] to defeat the coronavirus

(Solberg, 18.03.2020).

Solberg’s statement effectively contextualised the fight against COVID-19 as an exercise in/of national trust. This might explain why the executive summary of the Norwegian Special Committee Report – released about a year after Solberg’s speech – also declared that ‘in Norway, people trust each other and the authorities [and this] is one of the factors that made Norwegian society well equipped to face the crises’ ((2021)(6): 26). To support this, the report cited opinion polls conducted locally and internationally over time, which consistently measured high levels of ‘trust and solidarity’ in the Norwegian society ((2021), pp. 23–24; cf. Segaard, 2020). For example, the PANDRISK project – using data from the Norwegian Citizens’ Panel – found that at the end of March 2020, 69 per cent of Norwegians reported that they trusted the way the government handled the pandemic; 66 per cent trusted municipal authorities; and 80 per cent trusted the health authorities (Sætrevik et al., 2021; Helsingen et al. 2020). The authors of this study claimed that while ‘interpersonal trust’ might have also increased compliance, widespread public trust specifically directed towards health authorities and politicians could better explain why the early phase of the coronavirus pandemic in Norway was not as severe as in other European countries. Article 12 in the executive summary of the Norwegian Committee Report further connected this claim with risk communications message, arguing that ((2021)(6): 27):

The authorities have overall succeeded in communicating to the population. The government has communicated openly that they have been unsure of how the pandemic would develop and how the infection control measures would work. They have published the professional advice they have received and made no secret of the fact that the decisions they have made were political. As we see it, openness has helped build trust. A large majority of the population expresses confidence/trust in the information they received from the health authorities during the pandemic. That the population has changed behaviour in the face of the pandemic, is a clear indication that the authorities have arrived with their messages to the population.

This paragraph ticks all the boxes commonly recommended by risk specialists to encourage compliance (Renn & Levine, 1991). It includes transparency as evidence for reliability; efficient use of resources; declarative professionalism; and acknowledgement of the political background that guides policy. The NOU report thus confirms that the government had in fact done everything ‘by the book’, while also adding that this reliance on risk modalities – concretised to address a major health risk – resulted in the form of widespread compliance. The statistical impact of the pandemic in Norway seemingly supports this claim. By 31 December 2020, Norway registered only 436 COVID-19 related deaths in a population of about 5.5 million inhabitants. In total there were about 50.000 reported COVID-19 cases in Norway between February and December 2020, a figure considered low at a global scale (World Health Organization, 2020). To examine the central claims of the NOU statement more closely, in this study we explored how everyday citizens perceived governmental policies in Norway during the pandemic and the explicit role they assigned to trust in their decisions whether to comply with pandemic containment policies, or not.

2. Methodology

Part of a wider research framework that compared COVID-19 risk communication in five European counties, we set out to investigate grassroots responses to official COVID-19 risk mitigation strategies in Norway³. Data for this research were collected using ethnographic fieldwork, which included free conversations, observations, and semi-structured interviews with selected participants. We chose these methods to prioritise the daily experiences and generic narratives of members of the public, focusing especially on the mundane practices citizens employed to respond to state policies.

We conducted fieldwork between February and June 2021. It included participation in everyday activities in five households located in the rural parts of the vast Rogaland County, as well as observations and note taking in shopping malls, public transportation, the university campus, and department stores in Stavanger – the region’s capital city. The households we chose to visit belonged to people socially positioned at an arm’s-length from the researchers, such as acquaintances of family members who lived in the Ryfylke Islands area of Rogaland (viz. ‘rural parts’) or friends of friends who lived in Stavanger (viz. ‘urban’). We had no prior relationships with any of the participants. We were thus able to impersonally document Covid-affected lifestyles in both rural and urban peripheries during the research period, including how they were impacted by governmental decisions taken at the administrative centre of the Norwegian state in Oslo. In all cases, we focused on local popular responses to the COVID-19 communications messages and levels of compliance with different risk mitigation measures promoted nationally or locally by the authorities.

To delve deeper into the main behaviour patterns and practices we observed in the public sphere, we also conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 participants. To recruit the interviewees, we used snowball sampling during fieldwork in both rural and urban spaces in the Rogaland County. This included direct requests to interview some participants that we met during fieldwork. We also asked colleagues and acquaintances from the area to publicise our research among their local social networks. The criteria for recruitment were people above 18 years of age who have been residing in Rogaland from at least February 2020 until the end of data collection in June 2021. The interviews were conducted in participants’ homes, cafes, workplaces or online, depending on their preferences. As with our observations in local households, we made sure that all interviewees were socially positioned at an arm’s-length from the researchers, which in this context meant that no family members or close friends were recruited. In all cases, the interviews revolved around the following themes: (1) access to and perceptions of risk communication by authorities; (2) influence of COVID-19 regulations and recommendations on everyday routines; (3) daily decision-making process behind compliance or non-compliance; and (4) opinions on the Norwegian aphorism of ‘trust’ in this context.

Our interviewees included two young people (aged 19–20), six young adults (30–45), two in a middle-age group (45–65) and one person above 70⁴. Three of the interviewees were immigrants who had been living in Norway for periods between 2 and 6 years. The rest were born in Norway or had arrived to live in Norway as children. Two of the participants were not residents of Rogaland. They were included in the interview sample because they lived in urban peripheries and had expressed their interest in contributing to our study⁵. Four participants were employed (both in skilled and semi-skilled jobs) while two were unemployed. Two participants ran their own businesses, and the remaining were either retired, students or on long-term sick leave. All participants received a thorough explanation about the research objectives including a commitment that they would be able to withdraw their participation at any time. On this basis we asked for and obtained written and verbal consent. We altered participants’ names in line with the ethical standard practice aimed at protecting participants’ identities.

To analyse the interviews, we used Braun and Clarke’s (2022) six-phase guide. We first read the transcripts thoroughly to gain familiarity and get a contextual impression of the data. In the second phase, we reread the transcripts and generated initial codes, i.e., our own interpretations of patterns of meaning, in line with the study’s research questions. We consequently combined all the similar codes and quotes while labelling them in clusters and organising them into sub-themes. We then engaged with the sub-themes in light of the relevant literature on trust in risk studies and public health. On this basis we developed the primary sub-themes into higher ordered themes. The four resulting themes were: (1) Performative compliance (2) inconsistent regulation; (3) moral dilemmas; and (4) social intimacy. The final analysis discusses these grassroots narratives as they relate to the official COVID-19 policy in Norway, including their likely relevance to health risk researchers and policy makers.

Upon writing the results, we did not distinguish analytically between the narratives we collected during free conversations, the practices we observed and the narratives we collected during the interviews. This was in line with the common method for the presentation of ethnographic data, which highlights holism as its central philosophical building block (Evans-Pritchard, 1951; Marcus, 1986). We would summarise our holist approach in terms of 4 central assumptions: (1) controlled experimentation will always miss the totality of possibilities of any real-life situation; (2) the knowledge and values that people mobilise and act upon when they interact with academic researchers should be taken at face value; (3) researchers do not possess any advantage over the study population, whose own reasoning is always-already validated as truthful by their everyday life experiences, whatever these would be; and thus (4) the entire ethnographic effort, which includes interviews as well as free conversations and multiple observations, should bear the quality of reciprocity between equals (cf. Geertz, 1988). All types and forms of interactions with research participants thus received equal analytical weight.

3. Findings

3.1. Performative compliance

Most of the participants in this study reported that the shift from pre-Covid-19 normative routines to Covid-related emergency routines was quick and generally smooth. They cited two main reasons. First, since Rogaland is vast and mostly rural, all participants claimed that they were ‘better off’ than city dwellers, who were confined to small apartments and subjected to stricter infection control measures. In Rogaland, including the County capital city Stavanger, people could use public spaces freely, indeed throughout much of the COVID-19 restriction period shops and other utilities remained open. Second, since the authorities did not in practice enforce the limitations very strictly, all research participants claimed they found it easier to ‘cut corners’ by complying partially, or sometimes not at all.

It was this ability to ‘cut corners’ that added a strong performative aspect to our participants understandings of rule abidance in the context of COVID-19 regulations in Norway. Kari, for example, a pensioner from one of the islands in the Ryfylke area, said that in 2020 she restricted the number of visitors to her house during public holidays. Yet, she ignored other ‘recommendations’, or merely performed them. When some of Kari’s children visited with their own children for a Sunday dinner, she asked them to sit in ‘cohorts’, which meant that each visiting household sat close together but at a distance from the other visitors. When the dinner was over, they socialised in the living room. Kari thus ‘complied’ with the regulations but at the same time silently allowed their provisional breaching.

Olav, a pensioner resident of Stavanger, consciously decided to ‘trick’ the system so he could spend time with his daughter, her husband, and their grandson during the 2021 Easter vacation. That was in response to the Norwegian government instructing before the holiday that only two visitors were allowed into homes. Olav came up with a creative solution: the entire extended family will all go to the family summer cabin (their hytte) in the mountains, where his daughter’s family would be defined as ‘the host’ and could thus accept two visitors – Olav and his wife. Olav told us this story with a wink, openly indicating he is proud for having found a way to cut corners without officially crossing the line; after all, up to five persons in a house was still ‘allowed’. Steve, a resident of Stavanger who immigrated to Norway before the pandemic and was regularly attending Norwegian language classes during 2020, provided another ironic example of performative behaviour in one of the lessons:

I washed my hands when I got into the class [as recommended], so [no] Corona, like, I’m safe. And [then the teacher said]: ‘I will now take this water bottle, which belongs to him, and I am going to give it to her … And now I will take his water bottle back and give it to these two’, and then they hold it. Now, ‘they have his water bottle’. And she is teaching us about how to say his, hers, theirs, but if you just muted the sound, she could be giving an example of how an item is used as a vector for the spread of a disease … They could have just put little dialogue boxes and people would be like, ‘oh yeah, she is showing how a disease is passed in the population’. That was just insane. I was just, like – do we care, or not? Because if we do … [laughs]

Kari’s ‘cohorts’, Olav’s ‘trick’ and Steve’s disease transmission parody are all examples for what Ulrich Beck (1992) has called ‘the cosmetics of risk’, wherein theatrical, visibility-oriented behavioural patterns serve to cover or even erase the need for deeper solutions. A lenient following of the rules does not diminish the risks, which are in fact reinforced precisely when people stop assessing levels of risk on the ground; ‘cohorts’ would not protect family members who interact closely with one another right after the dinner and tiny droplets could stick to the bottle that is being handed over in a classroom where nobody wears masks or gloves even though all students were previously required to sanitise their hands. Being sanctioned also created the common impression among our participants that risk mitigation measures in Norway were inconsistent.

3.2. Inconsistent regulation

Elena, a resident of Stavanger who had been living in Norway for six years at the time of our interview, ridiculed Norwegian border controls when she described how some of her unvaccinated friends drove freely into Norway through Sweden or entered by ferry from one of the Baltic countries without being stopped even once; while others who flew into one of Norway’s airports were refused entry although they were already vaccinated. Steve even claimed that ‘there is a disconnection between what is happening and the obvious data. For instance, all the kindergartens are closed, we have zoom [teaching] in the [language] school, but the cafes and restaurants are open, and nobody is wearing masks’. Local risk mitigation measures, he said, therefore generated ‘stress’ for people who were at heightened risk:

There is a government policy that is actually creating your situation, not alleviating it … for one person it’s the fact that there is (sic) no kindergartens, and they are single parents. For another it’s the fact that they can’t get vaccinated, and they work in a corona [risk] environment (like hospitals) … those unique situations exist, and it’s like they [the government] think they have got everything covered, but there are so many places where people get completely squeezed out. This means that probably a huge proportion of the population suffers from this stress.

Lars and Katrina, a couple residing in the Ryfylke archipelago, exemplified what such ‘stress’ might mean empirically. In their opinion, the government as well as the local municipality had produced inconsistent messages, and this created much uncertainty among the public. Referring to the blanket enforcement of municipal COVID-19 regulations in all schools in Rogaland, which at times contradicted the gathering restrictions demanded by the Norwegian government from Oslo, Katrina said:

You have the school regulations that the children cannot have free time together. But we have a leisure club for children in the afternoon so I called the municipality and I asked them if it’s okay to continue with the club. And their answer was, ‘that’s okay if the children are just doing one activity and do not move between activities’. So, this is okay, but it’s not okay that they take the break together? Where is the commonsense?

Katrina said she found herself consistently confused about the levels of risk that her actions would mitigate, or, alternatively, enhance in different situations. She claimed that it would have been better if the government had refrained from regulating altogether, providing instead general guidelines by which local communities could then adjust in relation to their local living conditions. Explicitly suggesting that governmental policies expressed a lack of trust in Norwegian citizens, she said:

Instead of regulating all these rules it should be up to the community; trust us, trust our decisions. This is the main problem all over Norway – when you listen to all these rules – ‘this is okay, this is not okay, but if you are doing this then it’s okay’, you know? – everybody gets frustrated because they are putting up too many contradicting rules and it does not make sense. Instead, they should just say ‘you should think about this and this and this and decide for yourself what is common sense or not’.

Most of the people we interviewed – even those who explicitly expressed ‘trust’ in governmental decisions – agreed that the frequent changes of the rules (mainly about gathering restrictions) as well as their differential application in different situations and regions, created ‘grey areas’ in which no clear guidance was available at all. This issue challenged their own reliance on governmental instructions, instead pushing them to take concrete day-to-day choices based on their own moral standards.

3.3. Moral dilemmas

Torhild, who resided in Stavanger, told us of her partner’s mother, who was elderly and had a chronic disease. When the pandemic hit and visiting regulations came into force, Torhild and her partner preferred not to visit her partner’s mother at all. The mother contested. She claimed that refraining from visiting her might prolong her life, but it would certainly reduce her life quality. Torhild thus found herself in what she described as a ‘moral dilemma’, wherein on the one hand she wanted to comply with the instructions and on the other hand completely accepted her mother-in-law’s logic. She said:

Throughout the whole Corona period it felt like protecting life was the most important thing and I think there is a problem with this narrow definition. It is narrow even for the people you are trying to protect… The people ask you to come and visit them and you don’t do it because you are told not to do it from the top or the people who are in control. This creates a mismatch, a moral dilemma really, what is the right thing to do?

Torhild’s dilemma exemplifies what many of our interlocutors encountered when they attempted to apply the measures recommended by the authorities. Her narrative is a testimony to the way that risk communication in Norway during the COVID-19 pandemic generally created a feeling of discontent among many citizens, as it emphasised ‘trust’ and demanded compliance regardless of actual day-to-day situations and considerations. Torhild further argued that for that reason compliance should not be understood as the blind expression of trust, but rather, as an act of consideration towards others during mundane action:

I don’t trust the authorities. I don’t distrust them either. It’s more about the feeling of not obeying the rules, like, the signals that you send to your community by not doing it, than [it is about] directly trusting [the authorities] … So [for example] my son continued following the rules because he thought they are important even though the prime minister did not follow⁶. It’s more like we do these things because we feel we should, not because we trust the government. Even if many people in the government would not follow the rules, we would still obey them if we thought this could help protect other people. Maybe not for very long, but we would do it regardless of the politicians …

Interestingly, Torhild’s ideas also resonated with the narratives of research participants who did express ‘trust’ in authorities. Randi, for example, a resident of a medium-size town in east Norway, told us in an interview that she ‘trusts’ the Norwegian political system at large, and that this in itself ‘brings peace’ into her mind. At the same time, however, Randi admitted that she experienced an ‘overload’ of COVID-19 rules which caused her to follow only the basic regulations communicated at the beginning of the pandemic (mainly regarding social distancing). Reflecting Torhild’s narrative, Randi described a dissonance between trust as a general category that she associated with ‘democracy’ – an ideal-type relationship between citizens and the state – to COVID-19 risk aversion, which mainly manifested in her own small-scale mundane considerations. While Randi revered and defended trust, she did not actually follow governmental publications at all, relying instead on family members (especially her sister) who followed the regulations strictly and occasionally updated her about policy changes.

Most of the research participants claimed that risk aversion cannot be reduced to blind obedience, regardless of the level of ‘trust’ one feels towards state authorities. Precisely because occasional clashes between the COVID-19 regulations and the ongoing practice of kinship sociability generated moral dilemmas, participants generally agreed that compliance should take the form of personalised responses in different daily situations. Some of them, as Torhild did, described risk assessment in those situations as being guided by a personal moral compass that is tuned towards guaranteeing the wellbeing of fellow members of the local community. As we now turn to demonstrate, nearly all research participants expanded upon this assertion to claim that compliance arose almost spontaneously from the affective substance of kinship sociability and its underlying moral components (Sahlins, 2011) ⁷.

3.4. Social intimacy

Social relations within and across families were important factors for our research participants when they considered how and to what extent they will comply with the new COVID-19 regulations. The public debate on cabin visits (hytte) during the holiday periods, exemplifies this well. Just before the Easter vacation of 2021 the national media in Norway reported that numerous people in the Oslo district cancelled their planned vaccination appointments with the health services. Instead, those who cancelled travelled to their holiday cabins with their families (Norges Offentlige Utredninger NOU, 2021). Notably, giving up your appointment meant you would not be able to get a new one for several weeks or even months. It is not only the symbolic space of the ‘hytte’ as the prototypical model of idealised Norwegian simplicity or authenticity (Abram 2012) that is emphasised here, but also the familial intimacy that is practiced in this symbolic space (Gullestad, 2002). Clarifying this assumption, Steve made a direct connection between individual risk assessment, moral dilemmas, and familial intimacy. He said:

If you have mom and dad living alone and they both have health and risk issues, and you know that the only thing that makes them happy in the world is for you to bring all four of your children to their house for a family dinner, well, you are going to do it, unless you think there is a huge health risk. But … it’s also where the biggest rifts in a family will come out. Usually everybody kind of ends up on the same end, but when some people’s [risk] scale comes out like this and another like that, and you are talking about huge moral things, like ‘are you with us or against us?’, ‘do you care about mom and dad or not? ‘, ‘do you think we are infectious people?’, so there’s a pressure on people to make decisions that don’t always coincide with the kind of rational decision-making process the authorities would like them to have.

For Steve, people’s intimate participation in each other’s life is a moral value that competes with and at times even cancels rational calculations. In small scale communities, however, such intimacy can be extended to friends and neighbours (Sahlins, 2011) to the extent it becomes a mechanism of social control (Gluckman, 1963). Marit, for example, a resident of an island in the Ryfylke area, said she was ‘very angry’ at her teenage children after they threw a party in the family home when she and her husband were away. She explained that she was not angry because they breached the COVID-19 rules, which at the time only allowed the gathering together of up to 5 persons in a household, but because Marit had heard about the party from neighbours. She said:

… This is a very open-eyed society, people are following, [and] we can’t do so much without people watching us … I think that is why everyone is trying to keep the rules. When someone doesn’t keep the rules, people talk about them, and nobody wants to be talked about!

Mirroring Steve’s assertion above, Marit’s comment demonstrates that to be ‘talked about’ might stir unwanted scandal; and thus, any sign of deviance can taunt the moral integrity of persons and families, who distinguish themselves apart as they prioritise their own individual needs on the potential expense of the entire community (cf. Douglas, 1996, p. 38). Randi, the interlocutor who rarely sought information on COVID-19 regulations although she claimed she fully ‘trusted’ the authorities, also indicated that overly individualistic behaviour could cause direct confrontations. Randi’s sister, for example, who complied with the rules, avoided meeting Randi and her husband for a while because Randi’s husband did not follow the recommendation to use masks in public spaces. Katrina and Lars further emphasised the tension revolving around rule abidance when we asked them why cabin owners who usually resided in the nearby city generally did not use their cabins on the island during the pandemic. They said:

Katrina: [People respected these demands] because people can see you and they talk. There’s a lot of Corona-police out there … If they saw someone [they don’t know] drive off the ferry [they think] – ‘that one should not be here’, and they start [gesturing ‘gossip talk’]

Lars: But not to the government, only to the other people in the island …

Katrina: yeah, [they say] ‘these people are in their cabin, they are not allowed to be here, they shouldn’t be here’, everybody is like the corona police, so people get the paranoia …

Interviewer: Did it get to a stage of people saying to others ‘get out of here’?

Katrina: No … just talking [between themselves]. But it is not just in here in the islands, you can also hear people in the city saying ‘oh the neighbours had a lot of people on the terrace on Saturday’, and it’s like everybody are kind of suspicious out there …

In the small communities such as those we studied – and even in the city of Stavanger – research participants consistently attempted to avoid the so-called ‘Corona police’, as Katrina jokingly called her neighbours’ exchange of gossip. They did not perceive transgression merely as a matter of personal choice based on rational assessments of risk. Rather, they saw transgression as the often-unjustified introduction of hierarchy and inequality into a usually harmonious field of social relations marked by ideas about solidarity, equality, and common fate. They conformed to and complied with governmental emergency regulations, in other words, due to the underlying aspiration for sameness [likhet] that is a major component in public discourses about citizenship in Norway (Gullestad, 2002; Tvedt, 2009 [2003]; cf. Uslaner, 2002). We now turn to discuss these findings.

4. Discussion

4.1. The structural resonance of social trust

Literary critique Gudleiv Bø (2006) points out that trust had become an important component of Norwegian national identity in the second half of the 20^th Century. He recounts several socioeconomic and political factors for this, including the existence of a stable democracy over a long period of time; a legacy of social egalitarianism and cultural ‘sameness’ (likhet, Gullestad, 2002) derived from the historical dominance of the Norwegian Protestant Church; direct involvement of trade unions and other civil society organisations in labour market policy making, which helps institute low differences across salary levels and mitigate class conflicts; and the small size of the population, which until recently was also quite homogenic ethnically and culturally.

These factors have historically established the structural resonance of trust in the Norwegian popular imagination. We use the term ‘structural resonance’ to emphasise the widespread conviction in Norway that high levels of social trust are structurally given, a stable reality that exists beyond and above political disputes or ideological disagreements. On one hand, the structural resonance of trust takes the form of expressive confidence in decision makers who are seen as honest civil servants working for the people (Bø, 2006; Andreasson, 2017). On the other hand, the structural resonance of trust also constitutes a powerful consensus mechanism, which makes it difficult to rebuke state policies, especially in the areas of education, health, and care (Delhey & Newton, 2005; Svendsen & Svendsen, 2016). Analysing discourses on the Norwegian welfare state model, political scientist Terje Tvedt (2009) used the terms ‘Goodness Regime’ and ‘Goodness Tyranny’ respectively to describe the force of these manifestations of trust in Norway⁸. Seen positively as a ‘regime’, the Norwegian system is popularly described as inherently benevolent, and thus deserving trust. Seen negatively as a ‘tyranny’, however, belief in ‘goodness’ suppresses criticism, which is deemed anti-humanistic or even subversive (Segaard, 2020). This negative aspect legitimises both formal and informal sanctions against those who reproach ‘goodness’, going beyond the ‘hard’ legal ability of the state to enforce the law into the ‘soft’ discursive condemnation of open dissent.

Erna Solberg’s speech quoted above, which the Norwegian Special Committee report also cited (Norges Offentlige Utredninger (NOU), 2021: 23), appealed directly to the structural resonance of trust as a compelling affective sentiment already shared by all Norwegians. Solberg reinforced a sense of cultural intimacy and ‘imagined sameness’ (Gullestad, 2002) that she treated as historically prevailing in times of crisis. Rather than asking Norwegians to trust each other and their government, Solberg reminded them that they have always done so. She thus also tacitly demanded them to comply with any public policy, hinting that decisions would be taken in the best interest of the public. By recollecting trust as a proxy of national resilience Solberg anticipated and thwarted potential resentment towards the government, which instituted some of the most restricting regulation seen in Norway since the Second World War.

Rather than immediately perceiving trust as a ready-made quality that could simply be ‘switched on’ in times of crisis, however, our interviewees experienced trust as a form of interpersonal communication that required maintenance during mundane interactions (cf. Celermajer & Nassar, 2020). As such, trust was mostly seen a as dynamic property of everyday relationships rather than as an automatic form of deference to administrative, bureaucratic, and political power (cf. Abram 2012). Randi’s sister’s refusal to meet Randi and her husband if they would not use masks, which we mentioned above, demonstrates this claim well. Since the wearing of masks was not compulsory in Norway, using them could publicly ‘prove’ one’s moral commitment to others’ safety. Complying with non-abiding recommendations thus turned into an effort to perform the egalitarian myth of Norwegian ‘sameness’, which through the years have become imbued in the structural resonance of trust (Tvedt, 2016).

Covid-19 regulations in Norway thus exposed a discrepancy existing between the common narrative on trust and mundane considerations of trust (Gullestad, 2002). In the first instance, trust signified a suspension of one’s own judgement, which was presented as preceding independent calculations. In the second instance, trust signified the recruitment of an internal moral compass in the consideration of peers. In everyday life, our research participants had to alternate between these two forms of trust; one directed towards the ‘benevolent’ state (with its monopoly on the implementation of the ‘goodness regime’) and the other directed towards friends, family, and neighbours. It is this behavioural gap which generated ‘moral’ dilemmas, wherein on the one hand there was a general guideline, and on the other hand a mundane context in which this guideline was ineffective, irrelevant, or morally problematic. As Torhild’s story about visiting her partner’s mother elucidates, this discrepancy ultimately reproduced an empirical tension between nominal imperatives that individuals were expected to adopt, to the relational moral content of people’s everyday social relationships (Roeser, 2012; cf. Sahlins, 2011).

4.2. Gossip, status, and self-policing

Our ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, then, suggest that gossip and personal reputation played an important role in ensuring compliant behaviour during the pandemic in Norway. Anthropologist Max Gluckman famously argued (1963, p. 308) that in small communities, gossip sustains central social values as it damages the reputation of those maverick individuals who disrespect these values. In parallel, Gluckman argues, gossip also institutes a political channel for negotiations of power and authority between those individuals who do adhere to ethical and legal limitations in their everyday behaviour (Besnier, 2019). In the context of ‘big-eyed’ small communities, as Marit had characterised it, the spread of rumours evidently entailed this double impact, as it both shamed (or stigmatised) those who did not abide by the rules and rewarded (or distinguished) those who did, thus fortifying the moral aptitude of those in the community who performed compliance more than others.

This means that the ongoing efforts people invested in performing compliance have complemented and at times even mirrored the structural resonance of trust in public institutions during the pandemic. If saving face can be seen as a ‘positive’ incentive to comply, talking about others’ behaviour can be seen as its ‘negative’ counterpart. By publicly expressing discontent about individual transgressors, in other words, people hinted that these transgressors were untrustworthy. Social trust was reintroduced from the back door as it was used negatively to shame individuals who acted against the general expectation for collective rule abidance. Yet, in contrast to the idea of trust as the proxy of responsible citizenship, the structural resonance of trust appears here as an issue of social status.

It is precisely this association of status with trust that turned gossip into a major pressure mechanism, which Katrina humorously called the ‘Corona Police’. Gossip had the effect of self-policing because one’s own social status was intimately linked with their image as a trustworthy person. When Katrina and Lars’ neighbours gossiped, they could assume that the rumours would reach those who were spoken of, thus subtly directing the disciplining moral force of the community towards individual transgressors. ‘Self-policing’ thus describes the mundane impact of gossip, which our interviewees claimed was as efficient as governmental risk communication messages in ensuring compliance, if not even more substantial than the formal regulations in determining people’s everyday risk evaluations.

The idiomatic prevalence of self-policing guided our research participants in everyday risk assessment and their choices of consequent behaviour because it was so intimately linked with social status. The participants claimed that they respected COVID-19 routines as part of their conscious moral consideration of family, friends, and neighbours, while also emphasising the importance of a public appearance of trustworthiness. This was for them more important than trust in the authorities or a willingness to accept all the restrictions, as the public outrage against the prohibition on cabin holidays might demonstrate. Some of our interviewees did not in fact bother to monitor media reports on the changing regulations at all, and others occasionally ‘cut corners’ while appearing publicly to be fully compliant with the rules. By shifting the expression of trust away from the space of rule abidance to the space of mundane politics of affection, our research participants tacitly challenged the structural resonance of ‘trust’ as the metaphorical bread and butter of Norwegian national resilience.

4.3. The duality of trust and control

Sociologist Guido Möllering (2005) analysed the relationship between social trust and social control in everyday behaviour. Challenging the idea that trust and control are binary or antagonistic social mechanisms, Möllering argued that nearly every social relation that features strong control mechanisms also includes an element of trust; while every social interaction primarily characterised by egalitarian or ‘trustful’ considerations also includes subtle measures of control. Möllering further argued that this same conclusion can be made for the relations between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. In this scheme, ‘structure’ refers to norms, institutions, sanctions, and conventions used to restrict everyday behaviour, while ‘agency’ denotes the measure of personal freedom people require to interpret the application of these rules (or transgress them). This also relativises the expressions of trustful and trustless behaviour, turning this supposed binary division (or ‘dualism’, as Möllering calls that) into a mutually inclusive expression of emotional and rational behavioural components that can be enacted simultaneously (‘duality’ as Möllering calls that; cf. Freitag & Traunmüller, 2009).

If we assume that performative compliance was prevalent across Norwegian society, we can see how it reflected both deference to governmental authority and the acquisition of individual agency. Kari’s cohorts and Olav’s ‘trick’, for example, enabled them to transgress the official gathering regulations. Both Kari and Olav accepted the new regulations but at the same time they decided to apply a creative interpretation to these regulations, which coincided with the level of risk they were willing to take. In contrast, Torhild fully complied with the restrictions on family visits although she doubted the moral authority of these restrictions. From both directions, then, a measure of control and a measure of agency augmented one another. Compliance could not be seen as totally ‘trustful’ while transgression could not be represented as totally ‘trustless’.

Rather than representing a rift between agnatic familial trust on the one hand and structured state-control on the other hand, the narratives we recorded in Rogaland can therefore be seen as the expression of two parallel ‘structures’ of trust and control in Norway. On one hand, there were the relations of trust between citizens and the state, wherein Norwegian ‘sameness’ was mobilised as a pressure mechanism to encourage compliance, supplemented by official sanctions such as fines. On the other hand, there were relations of trust ingrained in community, family, and neighbourhood social networks, whose appeal to idealised Norwegian kinship intimacy willful legitimated mundane forms of monitoring through gossip, scandal, and occasional production of stigma. As we hinted above, the structural resonance of trust was present in both these trust-control mechanisms simultaneously. This suggests that in Norway individual assessments of risk in everyday life situations were always influenced by the continuous interchangeability of trust and control, in different contexts.

4.4. Policy recommendations

The grassroots narratives on compliance and the related practices we observed in Rogaland indicate that policy makers must adopt a less complacent attitude when contemplating the impact of their choices and policies on public trust. In the past, policy makers have shown similar tendencies to draw simplistic conclusions, for instance with regard to the relationship between transparency and trust (Bouder et al., 2015). One key lesson for policy is that decision makers need to ‘test for trust’ if gaining trust is truly their objective. By this we mean that policy cannot and should not be based on the mere assumption that trust is an ideal that exists in and of itself but should rather be premised on empirical evidence derived from immersion in concrete realities, wherein people explicitly appeal to ‘trust’ in everyday social life. The importance of testing the efficacy of messages vis-à-vis localised notions of trust has of course long been recognised as an effective way of conducting risk communication, including in the case of Covid-19. So far, methodological recommendations mainly involved drafting messages focused on facts, assess the clarity and relevance of draft messages, and repeat as necessary (Fischhoff, 2020). By way of expanding this lesson, and further contributing to the points Renn and Levine (1991) elaborated with regards to enhancing public trust, we suggest that testing should also involve:

1. a combination of simple yet methodologically robust opinion surveys, which focus both on formal and informal notions of trust (e.g., kinship and social intimacy)

2. qualitative interviews that help capture the characteristics of local notions of trust side by side with questions focusing on preferred and rejected forms of control

3. analysis that considers control and trust as continuous behavioural patterns in concrete situations, which thereby also considers the limits of ‘informed refusal’ (Benjamin, 2016)⁹

4. a commitment to take lessons on board and deliver policies that meet local expectations, including the recognition of and proposed solution for moral dilemmas people may encounter when they comply with new regulations

This last issue of recognising moral dilemmas people encounter in their everyday dealings with new regulations is crucial¹⁰. It means, for example, that the authorities must relate to the dynamics of kinship sociability that are often the locus of such dilemmas as they devise contingency plans to combat threats (Slovic et al., 2004; Smith, 2005). This is especially important for regulations that introduce emergency-routines into the sphere of kinship and amity ties (cf. Shapiro & Bird David, 2017 cf. Alaszewski, 2021). Despite the obvious importance of this aspect at the level of grassroots activity, in Norway and beyond, policy makers often consider the morality of emotions a mere irrational tendency, which they thus dismiss as they appeal to rationality and the deployment of informed ‘common-sense’ (Roeser, 2012). As we have shown, however, questions such as ‘what will my neighbours think of me’, ‘am I being considerate towards my friends and family members’, and ‘will my peers still trust me’ play an important role in compliance, self-policing, and public trust. It is the role of these undervalued aspects of morality, affect, and consideration, we believe, which both health risk scholars and policy makers should ultimately strive to address when they design new threat mitigation strategies at scale.

5. Conclusion

Risk communication scholars have in the last two decades become aware of the complex nature of trust relations, including the ‘critical trust’ dimension that can negatively impact compliance (Balog-Way et al., 2020; Poortinga & Pidgeon, 2003). Especially in situations where the risk and its consequences are unclear to people, the demonstration of competence and care on behalf of authorities may be less effective at generating public support (Fersch et al., 2022; Fjaeran & Aven, 2021). In such situations, other factors may be more important, such as the ability to keep track of key factors that influence policy making as well as the values and vested interests of those who make the critical decisions (Svendsen & Svendsen, 2016). In this article we have drawn attention to the impact of yet other factors of compliance that have little to do with policies at all, but rather, with the moral, symbolic, and affective power of everyday sociability.

To begin attending to these factors, policy makers must recognise the collective and affective aspects of grassroots decision-making processes, especially with regards to such emotions as care, worry, and love towards meaningful others. This can and should inform risk-communication policies that do not base themselves only on the abstract demand to ‘trust’ authorities, on the one hand, and which go beyond individual actions to include familial realities on the other hand. Risk messages that address the morality of intimate relationships, and which consider the relational aspect of everyday life in face-to-face communities, might encourage people to conform not because of their fear of others (or the demand to defer value-judgement to professionals and politicians); but based on a deeper consideration of societal benefits. Only then, we argue, might the notion of trust gain substance as a basis of compliance.

Acknowledgment

The research leading to these results received funding from the Norwegian Research Council. Project title: ‘Fighting pandemics with enhanced risk communication: Messages, compliance and vulnerability during the COVID-19 outbreak (PAN-FIGHT)’. Principal Investigator: Kristin Sørung Scharffscher. Grant number: 312767. We thank The Pan-Fight team for their input on earlier presentations of the results, as well as to George Wallace (Kings College London) for his valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Norges Forskningsråd [312767].

Notes

1. The scandals were related to the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in the UK, the use of HIV tainted blood transfusions in France and the Dioxin Chicken incident in Belgium.

2. Dugnad is a feature of responsible citizenship in Norway, which literally means ‘voluntary work for others’ (Moss & Sandbakken, 2021). In this context it delineates risk mitigation measures as an act of national solidarity. We use this term in Norwegian since it cannot be translated precisely into a single term in English.

3. Research title: ‘Fighting pandemics with enhanced risk communication: Messages, compliance and vulnerability during the COVID-19 outbreak (PAN-FIGHT)’.

4. During our observations in public spaces and during our house visits we likewise held free conversations with people from all age groups, as long as they were above 18.

5. We also conducted a quantitative survey on popular compliance in 5 different countries, including Norway (Evensen et al., 2023). We asked the survey responders to leave their details in case they were happy to take part in an interview. This is how we reached the two interviewees living outside Rogaland.

6. Referring to Erna Solberg, the Norwegian prime minister at the time, who breached gathering rules in a birthday party she held at home. The issue attracted much media attention in Norway and Solberg was fined.

7. The term ‘kin’ indicates mutuality between people who feel morally and affectively interconnected, thus becoming ‘members of one another, who participate intrinsically in each other’s existence’ (Sahlins, 2011, p. 2).

8. Tvedt highlights the cultural construction of ‘goodness’ an ideological driving force used widely to legitimise the Norwegian state’s involvement in aid, development, and relief campaigns around the world (Witoszek, 2011).

9. Benjamin (2016) argues that “informed refusal” is a kind of postcolonial “biodefection”, which turns bodies into vehicles of resistance. Criticizing the idea that marginalized populations sometimes reject public health interventions because they “distrust” the ruling authorities or mainstream social institutions, Benjamin contrarily suggest that “informed refusal” is an act of active and conscious negation of biomedical institutional powers.

10. The Norwegian authorities did conduct polls and applied a hands-on policy in determining new rules, as the report with which we opened this article suggests. Yet, they neglected the third and fourth aspects of ‘testing’, assuming instead that ‘trust’ was simply a given and unchanging factor (cf. Evensen et al., 2023).