Backlash Against Expert Recommendations: Reactions to COVID-19 Advice in Latin America

Facundo Albornoz, Nicolas Bottan, Guillermo Cruces, Bridget Hoffmann and Maria Lombardi

No 17506, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Health recommendations are key to tackling public health crises. We study the effect of attributing health recommendations to experts on agreement using a series of large survey experiments in twelve Latin American countries. We document a robust backlash against experts: agreement with recommendations is lower when these are phrased as originating from an expert. This backlash is only present for the recommendations that are specific to the pandemic and does not depend on the type of expert (academic, public or private sector). For individuals initially reporting low levels of trust in experts, agreement with all recommendations is lower when they are attributed to experts as compared to individuals who trust experts, indicating that anti-intellectualism plays a role in expert backlash but cannot fully explain the differential pattern of expert backlash that we observe across recommendations. We find suggestive evidence that individual traits and perceptions of social pressure could contribute to these backlash effects.

Keywords: Experts; Trust; Public health; Covid-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H4 I1 I3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17506 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Backlash against expert recommendations: Reactions to COVID-19 advice in Latin America (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17506

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17506

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().