How Pandemic-Related Changes in Global Attitudes Toward the Scientific Community Shape “Post-Pandemic” Environmental Opinion

Low public concern about anthropogenic climate change (ACC) – due in part to distrust toward the global scientific community – may decrease demand for policies aimed at mitigating and adapting to the deleterious effects of climate change. Encouragingly, though, recent public opinion research suggests that experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic has elevated trust in scientific expertise worldwide. Consequently, amid the suffering associated with global pandemic, one “silver lining” might be that trust in the scientific community attributable to COVID-19 pandemic response is spilling over to increase public acceptance of other contentious aspects of scientific consensus: such as the reality of ACC. We explore this possibility by turning to globally-representative survey data from 111 countries (N = 119,088) conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that trust medical experts’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic is associated with increased acceptance of ACC, worldwide. These findings hold even when accounting for individuals’ broader trust in the scientific community, and therefore do not appear to be confounded by more-general orientations toward science. Problematically, though, we also show that effect of trust in medical professionals is strongest in countries experiencing the most positive change in attitudes toward the scientific community, which we demonstrate (via multivariate country-level analyses) tend to be disproportionately wealthy, and perhaps less likely to bear the deleterious and unequal effects of ACC. We conclude by discussing how this work helps elucidate the role of pandemic psychology on “post-pandemic life,” and discuss the potentially-far-reaching benefits of improving trust in medical institutions in the developing world.