Trust in government is considered a prominent factor for enhancing public compliance with government policies and instructions. The Coronavirus pandemic demonstrates the crucial role public compliance with governmentally issued health guidelines has in mitigating the pandemic. However, the mechanism explaining the trust-compliance association, particularly in regard to health-behavior compliance, is unclear. This article develops a new theoretical model, the Mediated Trust Model (MTM), for explaining the relationship between trust in government and public compliance with health instructions. The model extends the classic Health Belief Model for predicting health behavior by claiming that the perceptions regarding the instructions' costs, benefits and one's ability to perform them are affected by trust in government and mediate the trust-compliance association. The MTM was tested in four cross-sectional studies performed during the first 20 months of the Coronavirus pandemic in Israel on 3732 participants, for various health instructions. Implications for public health literature, policy compliance theory and policy makers are discussed.

对政府的信任被认为是提高公众遵守政府政策和指示的一个重要因素。冠状病毒大流行表明，公众遵守政府发布的健康指南对于缓解这一流行病具有至关重要的作用。然而，解释信任-合规关联的机制，特别是在健康行为合规方面，尚不清楚。本文开发了一种新的理论模型，即中介信任模型（MTM），用于解释对政府的信任与公众遵守健康指示之间的关系。该模型扩展了用于预测健康行为的经典健康信念模型，声称对指令的成本、收益和个人执行指令的能力的看法受到对政府的信任的影响，并调节信任与合规的关联。 MTM 在以色列冠状病毒大流行的前 20 个月内进行了四项横断面研究，对 3732 名参与者进行了测试，以获取各种健康指导。讨论了对公共卫生文献、政策合规理论和政策制定者的影响。