skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Trust in Religious Leaders and Voluntary Compliance: Lessons from Social Distancing during COVID‐19 in Central Asia
Abstract What is the relationship between trust in religious leaders and compliance with policies that are costly to the individual? Religious leaders often have the moral authority to affect individuals’ willingness to adopt prosocial behaviors. Yet, that influence can be either positive or negative because religious leaders face mixed incentives to encourage compliance and their leadership is often decentralized. We argue that greater trust in religious leaders will increase compliance in countries with a dominant religion and centralized religious authority because religious leaders will offer a coherent message that aligns with state directives. We test our hypotheses using data from surveys fielded in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We find a positive and significant relationship between trust and voluntary compliance only in Kazakhstan, where religious leaders reduced the costs of compliance by enabling adherents to practice their faith while social distancing. We thus identify an alternative mechanism whereby trust promotes compliance.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1658336
PAR ID:
10472313
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Editor(s):
Dr. Korie Little Edwards
Publisher / Repository:
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
Edition / Version:
0(0):1–20
Volume:
61
Issue:
3-4
ISSN:
0021-8294
Page Range / eLocation ID:
583 to 602
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
COVID-19, religious leaders, trust, voluntary compliance, social distancing.
Format(s):
Medium: X Size: 520.31KB Other: pdf
Size(s):
520.31KB
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; (, PLOS ONE)
    Mukherjee, Amitava (Ed.)
    What influences the adoption of SARS-CoV-2 mitigation behaviors–both personal, such as mask wearing and frequent handwashing, and social, such as avoiding large gatherings and physical contact–across countries? Understanding why some individuals are more willing to change their behavior to mitigate the spread of a pandemic will not only help us to address the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic but also to respond to future ones. Researchers have pointed to a variety of factors that may influence individual adoption of personal and social mitigation behaviors, including social inequality, risk perception, personality traits, and government policies. While not denying the importance of these factors, we argue that the role of trust and confidence has received insufficient attention to date. Our study explores whether there is a difference in the way trust and confidence in particular leaders and organizations affect individual compliance and whether this effect is consistent across different types of mitigation behaviors. Specifically, we utilize an original cross-national survey conducted during the first wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (May-June 2020) to investigate how trust in scientists, medical professionals, politicians, and religious leaders and confidence in global, national, and local health organizations affects individual compliance in 16 countries/territories across five world regions. Our analyses, which control for the aforementioned factors as well as several others, suggest that trust in politicians and confidence in national health ministries have the most consistent influence on whether individuals adopt both personal and social mitigation behaviors. Across our sample, we find that greater trust in politicians is associated with lower levels of individual compliance with public health directives, whereas greater confidence in the national health ministry is associated with higher levels of individual compliance. Our findings suggest the need to understand trust and confidence as among the most important individual level characteristics driving compliance when developing and delivering messaging about the adoption of mitigation behaviors. The content of the message, it seems, will be most effective when citizens across countries trust its source. Trusted sources, such as politicians and the national health ministry, should thus consider working closely together when determining and communicating recommended health behaviors to avoid contradicting one another. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting)
    Trust plays a critical role in the success of human-robot teams (HRTs). While typically studied as a perceptual attitude, trust also encompasses individual dispositions and interactive behaviors like compliance. Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human-like qualities to robots, is a related phenomenon that designers often leverage to positively influence trust. However, the relationship of anthropomorphism to perceptual, dispositional, and behavioral trust is not fully understood. This study explores how anthropomorphism moderates these relationships in a virtual urban search and rescue HRT scenario. Our findings indicate that the moderating effects of anthropomorphism depend on how a robot’s recommendations and its confidence in them are communicated through text and graphical information. These results highlight the complexity of the relationships between anthropomorphism, trust, and the social conveyance of information in designing for safe and effective human-robot teaming. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; (, ACM)
    Microservices are a dominant cloud computing architecture because they enable applications to be built as collections of loosely coupled services. To provide greater observability and control into the resultant distributed system, microservices often use an overlay proxy network called a service mesh. A key advantage of service meshes is their ability to implement zero trust networking by encrypting microservice traffic with mutually authenticated TLS. However, the service mesh control plane—particularly its local certificate authority—becomes a critical point of trust. If compromised, an attacker can issue unauthorized certificates and redirect traffic to impersonating services. In this paper, we introduce our initial work in Mazu, a system designed to eliminate trust in the service mesh control plane by replacing its certificate authority with an unprivileged principal. Mazu leverages recent advances in registration-based encryption and integrates seamlessly with Istio, a widely used service mesh. Our preliminary evaluation, using Fortio macro-benchmarks and Prometheus-assisted micro-benchmarks, shows that Mazu significantly reduces the service mesh’s attack surface while adding just 0.17 ms to request latency compared to mTLS-enabled Istio. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; (, International Journal of Public Health)
    null (Ed.)
    Objectives: An effective vaccine to SARS-CoV-2 cannot be successfully deployed if a significant number of people worldwide are unwilling to accept it. We investigated the relationship between trust in scientists and medical professionals and perceptions of vaccine safety and effectiveness. We also build on past studies by exploring the relationship between confidence in global health organizations and vaccine hesitancy. Methods: We conducted an online survey in seventeen countries/territories across five world regions between May -June 2020. We assessed the relationship between COVID19 vaccine hesitancy, confidence in public health organizations, and trust in key experts and leaders. Results: Our findings strongly suggest that confidence in the World Health Organization combined with trust in domestic scientists and healthcare professionals is a strong driver of vaccine acceptance across multiple countries/territories. Conclusion: We find that hesitancy is widespread, and uptake would be insufficient to achieve herd immunity. There is widespread confidence in how public health organizations have responded to the current pandemic and this is related to vaccine acceptance. Our results also highlight the important role of trust in health care providers and scientists in reducing COVID19 vaccine hesitancy. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, PLOS ONE)
    Vallespin, Mc_Rollyn Daquiado (Ed.)
    Evolution is an important part of biology education, but many college biology students do not accept important components of evolution, like the evolution of humans. Practices that reduce perceived conflict between religion and evolution have been proposed to increase student evolution acceptance. This study investigates college student experiences of conflict reducing practices in evolution education and how these experiences are related to their gains in acceptance of human evolution during evolution instruction. We measured the natural variation in student experiences of conflict reducing practices among 6,719 college biology students in 55 courses and 14 states including (1) their experiences of an instructor demonstrating religion-evolutioncompatibilityby presenting examples of religious leaders and scientists who accept evolution and (2) their experiences of an instructor emphasizing students’autonomyin their own decision to accept evolution or not. We also measured student acceptance of human evolution before and after instruction so that we could test whether any changes in evolution acceptance were associated with student experiences of the conflict reducing practices. Linear mixed models showed that highly religious Christian students accepted evolution more when they perceived more compatibility practices. Further, students from all religious and non-religious affiliations accepted human evolution more after instruction when they perceived more autonomy practices. These results indicate that integrating examples of religion compatibility in evolution education will positively impact Christian students’ views on evolution and that emphasizing students’ autonomy over their decision to accept evolution may be important for students more broadly. If instructors incorporate practices that emphasize compatibility and one’s personal choice to accept or not accept evolution, then these results suggest that students will leave their college biology classes accepting evolution more. Perhaps by using more conflict reducing practices, instructors can help increase evolution acceptance levels that have remained low in the United States for decades. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email