The Impact of Emotion and Government Trust on Individuals’ Risk Information Seeking and Avoidance during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-country Comparison

Abstract

This study examines the emotional mechanisms of how public trust in the governments’ actions to address the COVID-19 pandemic shapes individuals’ risk information-seeking and avoidance. To make cross-cultural comparisons, we conducted a multi-country survey early in the pandemic in South Korea, the United States (US) and Singapore. The results suggest that trust was negatively related to fear, anger, sadness and anxiety, and positively related to hope. These emotions were significant mediators of the effect of trust on information seeking and avoidance, except for anger on avoidance. Importantly, the indirect effects of trust in government varied by country. Fear was a stronger mediator between trust and information seeking in South Korea than in the US. In contrast, sadness and anger played more prominent mediating roles in Singapore than in South Korea. This study offers theoretical insights into better understanding the roles of discrete emotions in forming information behaviors. The findings of this study also inform communication strategies that seek to navigate trust in managing pandemics that impact multiple nations.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ An organization called Hofstede Insights (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison) provides scores in each cultural dimension by country. A team of data technicians and communication professionals in 60 countries continues the work of Geert Hofstede and solves intercultural and organizational culture challenges with a data-driven approach.

² This study has been approved by Institutional Review Board of Nanyang Technological University (IRB-2020-02-022-02)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea, the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A3A2074932), and Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1[M4012065].