Backlash against expert recommendations: Reactions to COVID-19 advice in Latin America

Abstract

Public adherence with health recommendations is vital for effective crisis response. During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments faced considerable challenges in persuading the public to adopt new recommendations. Using large-scale survey experiments across 12 Latin American countries, we investigate how respondents’ agreement with health recommendations is affected by their attribution to experts from different sectors. Our results uncover a robust backlash against experts for pandemic-specific recommendations, but not for more general health advice. The backlash does not depend on the type of expert (academic, public or private sector). Our experimental setup allows us to concurrently assess the significance of different factors behind these results. Anti-intellectualism plays a role, since individuals with low initial trust in experts exhibit more negative reactions to expert attribution, although the backlash is also present for those with higher levels of trust, indicating that other factors likely play a role. We fail to find evidence that individual perceptions or personality traits such as social pressure, altruism or reactance contribute to the backlash. Beyond individual characteristics, we find that the backlash is stronger in countries that exhibited a more stringent government response to the pandemic.