Breaking bad news without breaking trust: The effects of a press release and newspaper coverage on perceived trustworthiness

Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen,Femke De Vries,Wilte Zijlstra

doi:10.30636/jbpa.11.16

Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen, Femke De Vries + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.30636/jbpa.11.16

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Abstract

Can a government agency mitigate the negative effect of "bad new" on public trust? To answer this question, we carried out a baseline survey to measure public trust five days before a major press release involving bad news about an error committed by an independent regulatory agency in the Netherlands. Two days after the agency's press release, we carried out a survey experiment to test the effects on public trust of the press release itself as well as related newspaper articles. Results show that the press release had no negative effect on trustworthiness, which may be because the press release "steals thunder" (i.e. breaks the bad news before the news media discovered it) and focuses on a "rebuilding strategy" (i.e. offering apologies and focusing on future improvements). In contrast, the news articles mainly focused on what went wrong, which affected the competence dimension of trust but not the other dimensions (benevolence and integrity). We conclude that strategic communication by an agency can break negative news to people without necessarily breaking trust in that agency. And although effects of negative news coverage on trustworthiness were observed, the magnitude of these effects should not be overstated.

Highlights

Can a government agency mitigate the negative effect of “bad news” on public trust? To answer this question, we carried out a baseline survey to measure public trust five days before a major press release involving bad news about an error committed by an independent regulatory agency in the Netherlands
Why do we focus on a mistake by an independent regulatory agency (IRA)? First, we think that errors, as opposed to successes, have more influence on public perceptions because media coverage tends to focus on what went wrong (Liu et al, 2010; Jacobs & Schillemans, 2016) and negative information tends to have a stronger effect on judgments (e.g. Olsen, 2015)
We focus on an IRA because these agencies face a somewhat less adversarial media environment than some other government institutions (Maggetti, 2012, p. 400; Van Erp, 2013; Glynn & Huge, 2014; Puppis, Maggetti, Gilardi, Biela, & Papadopoulos, 2014) and citizens may be more amenable to information coming from a relatively independent government agency, as opposed to organizations less independent from politics

Summary

Introduction

Can a government agency mitigate the negative effect of “bad news” on public trust? To answer this question, we carried out a baseline survey to measure public trust five days before a major press release involving bad news about an error committed by an independent regulatory agency in the Netherlands. A week after the pre-test, we carried out a post-test survey in which various treatments were embedded (the press release, three media articles on the AFM and its supervision error, and a control group). Our results show a negative effect of the news media articles on perceived competence of the AFM, and a null effect of the press release on all dimensions of perceived trustworthiness (i.e. competence, benevolence and integrity).

Results

Conclusion