Should I Do as I’m Told? Trust, Experts, and COVID-19

The success of public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic is sensitive to public trust in experts. Despite a great deal of attention to attitudes towards experts in the context of such crises, one significant feature of public trust remains underexamined. When public policy claims to follow the science, citizens are asked not just to believe what they are told by experts, but to follow expert recommendations. I argue that this requires a more demanding form of trust, which I call recommendation trust. I argue for three claims about recommendation trust: recommendation trust is different from both epistemic and practical trust; the conditions for well-placed recommendation trust are more demanding than the conditions for well-placed epistemic trust; and many measures that have been proposed to cultivate trust in experts do not give the public good reasons to trust in expert-led policy.