Messenger Effects COVID-19

Previous work by Dolan et al. (2012), Durantini et al. (2006) and Cialdini (1993) has demonstrated that who delivers a message to the public makes a key difference on the ensuing behavioural response to the message. This phenomenon has been aptly named the Messenger Effect. The current research project seeks to explore whether trust in the messenger has an effect on people’s perceptions and beliefs in the message, specifically in the context of Honduras during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many other countries in Latin America, Honduras suffers from decreased trust in its governmental institutions as evidenced by the most recent public opinion report issued by Vanderbilt University’s Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) for the years 2018/2019 (Zechmeister & Lupu, 2019). The report highlighted that in terms of how much the population deemed their country’s basic institutions and processes as trustworthy and respectable on a scale from 0 - 100, Honduras scored an average of 43.3, placing it as the country from those surveyed by the project with the third lowest trust in its institutions. This is of particular importance in COVID-19 times because the ensuing crisis generated by the disease has exposed tears in the country’s already fragile social fabric, with the government currently facing backlash over their response to the virus and corruption allegations. Based on this evidence, we believe that an effect will be observed on the population’s trust and adherence to prevention measures issued by the Honduran government during the pandemic. To test whether messenger effects could exist in this context, we propose an online survey experiment where participants will be separated into two groups, a control and a treatment group. The control group will be viewing a set of social media messages with COVID-19 preventive measures presumably issued by the World Health Organisation, which is an institution familiar to most Honduras and of neutral political standing. The treatment group will view the same messages, but as issued by the Honduran government. Participants will then be asked to rate how much they trust the institutions sending the message, how much they believe in the effectiveness of the preventive measure being prescribed, how often they think this institution tells the truth and how much they intend to follow the recommendation stated by the organisation. This will be followed by a set of demographic questions including age, gender, political views and ethnicity. It is expected that the treatment group who views the message as sent by the Honduran government will on average across messages display less trust in the institution, less adherence to the preventive measure, less belief in the measure, and they will believe this institution tells the truth less often. In terms of demographics, it is hypothesized that men will show more trust than women for both institutions in line with what other studies have found using trust and reciprocity games (Chaudhuri & Gangadharan, 2002). In terms of ethnicity, it is believed that those who identify with Indigenous and African minorities will have a lower level of trust due to the discrimination that these groups have historically suffered in the region (Hooker, 2005; Patrinos, 2000). For age groups, we believe young people (16-34) will be those who will show the lowest level of trust than any other age group, in line with observations that recent protests and unrest across the region have been driven by youth (Groshek & Bachmann, 2014; Valenzuela et al., 2012). In the case of political beliefs, subjects who identify as having right-leaning political ideology will show more trust than left-leaning participants, this is based on the findings that partisan beliefs and associations are linked to trust (Carlin & Love, 2013). The current government in Honduras is right-leaning, this should promote higher levels of trust and belief in people aligned with these views.