Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis

Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis. Jim A. C. Everett et al. Nature Human Behaviour, Jul 1 2021. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01156-y

Abstract: Trust in leaders is central to citizen compliance with public policies. One potential determinant of trust is how leaders resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas. Past research suggests that utilitarian responses to dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders: sacrificing some people to save many others (‘instrumental harm’) reduces trust, while maximizing the welfare of everyone equally (‘impartial beneficence’) may increase trust. In a multi-site experiment spanning 22 countries on six continents, participants (N = 23,929) completed self-report (N = 17,591) and behavioural (N = 12,638) measures of trust in leaders who endorsed utilitarian or non-utilitarian principles in dilemmas concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. Across both the self-report and behavioural measures, endorsement of instrumental harm decreased trust, while endorsement of impartial beneficence increased trust. These results show how support for different ethical principles can impact trust in leaders, and inform effective public communication during times of global crisis.

Discussion

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a number of moral dilemmas that engender conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles. Building on past work on utilitarianism and trust, we tested the hypothesis that endorsement of utilitarian solutions to pandemic dilemmas would impact trust in leaders. Specifically, in line with suggestions from previous work and case studies of public communications during the early stages of the pandemic, we predicted that endorsing instrumental harm would decrease trust in leaders, while endorsing impartial beneficence would increase trust. Experiments conducted during November–December 2020 in 22 countries across six continents (total N = 23,929; valid sample for self-report task 17,591; valid sample for behavioural task 12,638) provided robust support for our hypothesis. In the context of five realistic pandemic dilemmas, participants reported lower trust in leaders who endorsed instrumental sacrifices for the greater good and higher trust in leaders who advocated for impartially maximizing the welfare of everyone equally. In a behavioural measure of trust, only 28% of participants preferred to vote for a utilitarian leader who endorsed instrumental harm, while 60% voted for an impartially beneficent utilitarian leader. These findings were robust to controlling for a variety of demographic characteristics as well as participants’ own policy preferences regarding the dilemmas. Although we observed some variation in effect sizes across the countries we sampled, the overall pattern of results was highly robust across countries. Our results suggest that endorsing utilitarian approaches to moral dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders across the globe, depending on the type of utilitarian morality.

We designed our set of dilemmas to rule out several alternative explanations for our findings, such as a general preference for less restrictive leaders (Supplementary Note 7), leaders who treat everyone equally (Supplementary Note 8) and leaders who seek to minimize COVID-19-related deaths (Supplementary Note 9). In addition, all of our results survived planned robustness checks to account for the possibility that local policies related to lockdowns or contact tracing could bias participants’ responses. Post hoc analyses demonstrated that our findings were highly consistent across the different dilemmas for instrumental harm (Lockdown, Tracing and Ventilators) and impartial beneficence (Medicine and PPE).

While the robustness of our findings across countries speaks to their broad cultural generalizability, further work is needed to understand the observed variations in effect sizes across countries. It seems plausible that both economic (for example, gross domestic product or socio-economic inequality) and cultural (for example, social network structure) differences across countries could explain some of the observed variations. One possibility, for example, is that country-level variations in tightness–looseness72, which have been associated with countries’ success in limiting cases in the COVID-19 pandemic73, might moderate the effects of moral arguments on trust in leaders. Another direction for future research could be to explore how country-level social network structure might influence our results. Individuals in countries with a higher kinship index74 and a more family-oriented social network structure, for example, might be less likely to trust utilitarian leaders, especially when the utilitarian solution conflicts with more local moral obligations.

There are several important limitations to the generalizability of our findings. First, although our samples were broadly nationally representative for age and gender (with some exceptions; see Results), we did not assess representativeness of our samples on a number of other factors including education, income and geographic location. Second, while our results do concord with the limited existing research examining the effects of endorsing instrumental harm and impartial beneficence on perceived suitability as a leader37, and held across different examples of our pandemic-specific dilemmas, it of course remains possible that different results would be seen when judging leaders’ responses in other types of crises (for example, violent conflicts, natural disasters or economic crises) or at different stages of a crisis (for example, at the beginning versus later stages). Third, the reported experiments tested how responses to moral dilemmas influenced trust in anonymous, hypothetical political leaders. In the real world, however, people form and update impressions of known leaders with a history of political opinions and behaviours, and it is plausible that inferences of trustworthiness depend not just on a leader’s recent decisions but also on their history of behaviour, just as classic work on impression formation shows that the same information can lead to different impressions depending on prior knowledge about the target person75. Furthermore, we did not specify the gender of the leaders in our experiments (except in the voting task for China and for the Hebrew and Arabic translations, where it is not possible to indicate ‘leader’ without including a gendered pronoun; here it was translated in the masculine form). Past work conducted in the United States suggests that participants may default to an assumption that the leader is a man76, but it will be important for future work to assess whether men and women leaders are judged differentially for their moral decisions. Because women are typically stereotyped as being warmer and more communal than men77, it is plausible that women leaders would face more backlash for making ‘cold’ utilitarian decisions, especially in the domain of instrumental harm. Fourth, because the current work focused on trust in political leaders, it remains unclear how utilitarianism would impact trust in people who occupy other social roles, such as medical workers or ordinary citizens. Fifth, and finally, it could be interesting to explore further the connection between impartial beneficence and intergroup psychology, especially with regards to teasing apart ‘impartiality’ and ‘beneficence’. For example, even holding beneficence constant, a leader who advocates for impartially sharing resources with a rival country may be perceived differently from one who impartially shares with an allied country (and, while speculative, this distinction might explain why Israel was an outlier in impartial beneficence, being a country in a region with ongoing local conflicts).

Our results have clear implications for how leaders’ responses to moral dilemmas can impact how they are trusted. In times of global crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders will necessarily face real, urgent and serious dilemmas. Faced with such dilemmas, decisions have to be made, and our findings suggest that how leaders make these judgements can have important consequences, not just for whether they are trusted on the issue in question but also more generally. Importantly, this will be the case even when the leader has little direct control over the resolution. While a national leader (for example, a president or prime minister) has the power and responsibility to resolve some moral dilemmas with policy decisions, not all political leaders (for example, as in our study, local mayors) have that power. A leader with little ability to directly impact the resolution of a moral dilemma might consider that voicing an opinion on that dilemma could reduce their credibility on other issues that they have more power to control.

To conclude, we investigated how trust in leaders is sensitive to how they resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas during a global pandemic. Our results provide robust evidence that utilitarian responses to dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders: advocating for sacrificing some people to save many others (that is, instrumental harm) reduces trust, while arguing that we ought to impartially maximize the welfare of everyone equally (that is, impartial beneficence) increases trust. Our work advances understanding of trust in political leaders and shows that, across a variety of cultures, it depends not just on whether they make moral decisions but also which specific moral principles they endorse.