In a world barreling down into a worsening climate crisis, negative persuasive attacks to necessary climate policies are major threats to the public's support of governmental mandates to mitigate climate change. To protect against such attacks, here we introduce and investigate the effect and the treatment heterogeneity of the trust inoculation, a psychological inoculation strategy designed around the influence of trust as a key social dimension of persuasion. Across three preregistered studies, in one Swiss state ( 389), in seven European countries ( 2805), and in the United States ( 3586), and in a mega-analysis ( = 6697), we provide evidence that inoculating citizens with the trustworthiness of key energy stakeholders protects citizens' support for renewable energy against multiple negative persuasive attacks (δ = 0.16). Whereas baseline trust in key energy stakeholders did not moderate the effects, the trust inoculation selectively protected the citizens most susceptible to negative persuasive attacks, i.e., participants with high biospheric values. Study 3 showed that the trust inoculation, rather than a simple trust message, is responsible for the protection from incoming persuasive attacks. Our findings demonstrate that the trust inoculation may serve as an easily implementable, and scalable umbrella strategy to engender a modest but significant protection for governmental mandates against multiple negative persuasive attacks.

中文翻译：

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信任接种，以保护公众对政府授权采取的缓解气候变化行动的支持


在气候危机日益恶化的世界中，对必要的气候政策的负面说服力攻击是公众支持政府缓解气候变化任务的主要威胁。为了防止此类攻击，我们在这里介绍并研究信任接种的效果和治疗异质性，这是一种围绕信任作为说服的关键社会维度的影响而设计的心理接种策略。在瑞士一个州 (389)、七个欧洲国家 (2805) 和美国 (3586) 的三项预先注册的研究中，以及在一项大型分析 (= 6697) 中，我们提供了证据，证明公民可以信赖主要能源利益相关者的保护公民对可再生能源的支持免受多重负面说服性攻击（δ = 0.16）。尽管对关键能源利益相关者的基本信任并没有减轻影响，但信任接种有选择地保护了最容易受到负面说服性攻击的公民，即具有高生物圈价值的参与者。研究 3 表明，信任接种，而不是简单的信任消息，负责保护免受传入的说服性攻击。我们的研究结果表明，信任接种可以作为一种易于实施且可扩展的伞式策略，为政府授权提供适度但重要的保护，使其免受多重负面说服性攻击。