ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
COVID-19 infection induces higher trust in strangers.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Religious markers reduce perceived trustworthiness in a Muslim-majority country.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Vaccine hesitancy in healthcare workers during COVID-19 pandemic: Draw on experience.Journal of preventive medicine and hygiene · 2025Article
- Trust, trust repair, and public health: a scoping review.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- The perceived COVID-19 pandemic risk and mental distress in China: the mediating role of interpersonal trust and the moderating role of social cohesion.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Facial attractiveness does not modify the perceived trustworthiness of ethnic minority men.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Effects of lockdowns in shaping socioeconomic behaviors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The determinants of trust: findings from large, representative samples in six OECD countries.Economica · 2024Article
- Trust in Acquaintances, Strangers and Institutions among Individuals of Different Socioeconomic Statuses during Public Health Emergencies: The Moderation of Family Structure and Policy Perception.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Assessing the effects of pandemic risk on cooperation and social norms using a before-after Covid-19 comparison in two long-term experiments.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Social and political trust diverge during a crisis.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Adaptive Coping Strategies at the Time of COVID-19: The Role of Social and General Trust.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Variation in Public Trust, Perceived Societal Fairness, and Well-Being before and after COVID-19 Onset-Evidence from the China Family Panel Studies.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- COVID-19 infection induces higher trust in strangers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How does the COVID-19 pandemic affect interpersonal trust? Most evidence shows that natural disasters reinforce trust and cooperation, but the COVID-19 virus differs from other calamities, since it spreads through contact with people, potentially increasing suspicion and distrust, as, according to contemporaneous writers' accounts, seems to have been the case with the Black Death, the London plague, and the Spanish influenza. We investigate the link between interpersonal trust and individuals exposed to COVID-19, either vicariously through their community or networks or directly by becoming infected. We rely on an original panel survey, including a survey experiment, with a representative sample of adults in Italy, one of the countries hardest struck by the pandemic. Our experimental findings reveal that priming people about the risk that the pandemic poses to their health leads to a substantial increase in their trust in strangers. Our panel data analysis of within-individual effects shows that those who become infected trust strangers more than those who are not infected. Our findings could be explained by people observing higher than expected altruistic behavior or becoming more dependent on other people's support, consistent with the "emancipation theory of trust." When people recover from COVID-19, however, they drop to trusting strangers as much as those who were not directly exposed to the virus, an indication that the positive effects on trust during the pandemic have an emotional source. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that, in the aggregate, there has been a small but significant increase in trust among the general population relative to prepandemic levels.
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