Abstract
The effectiveness of public health measures to prevent COVID-19 contagion has required less vulnerable citizens to pay an individual cost in terms of personal liberty infringement to protect more vulnerable groups. However, the close relationship between scientific experts and politicians in providing information on COVID-19 measures makes it difficult to understand which communication source was more effective in increasing pro-social behaviour. Here, we present an online experiment performed in May 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic on 1131 adult residents in Lombardy, Italy, one of the world's hardest hit regions. Results showed that when scientific experts recommended anti-contagion measures, participants were more sensitive to pro-social motivations, unlike whenever these measures were recommended by politicians and scientific experts together. Our findings suggest the importance of trusted sources in public communication during a pandemic.
Highlights
During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Lombardy region in Northern Italy was one of the hardest hit areas worldwide
Considering political distrust [38,39], the unpredictable effect of pre-existing performance of national and regional institutions on public compliance [40] and the front-line role played by scientific experts during the pandemic [41], we hypothesized that whenever measures were legitimized by scientific experts, subjects would be more inclined to support them, more interested to have extra information on them, and even more sensitive to the public benefit by donating to COVID-19-related charities
74% of subjects chose to donate to a COVID-19-related charity while 54% asked for additional information on the measures mentioned in the experiment
Summary
During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Lombardy region in Northern Italy was one of the hardest hit areas worldwide. Home to about 10 million people and a sixth of the total Italian population, the region had dramatic peaks of both infections and deaths cases during the first wave of the royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos R. Pandemic, between February and May 2020, i.e. almost half of the 34 000 deaths in the whole country [1]. 2 During the outbreak, the Italian government applied restrictive measures to contain the pandemic in Lombardy and in the whole country, including full isolation of entire areas, the closure of schools, public offices and most commercial activities. Scientific experts were often featured in the public media to explain anti-pandemic measures, while public decision-makers used the opinion of scientific experts to legitimate the imposed measures [2]
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