How (Dis)trust in Scientic Information Links Political Ideology and Reactions Toward the Coronavirus Pandemic: Associations in the U.S. and Globally

U.S.-based research suggests conservatism is linked with less concern about contracting coronavirus and less preventative behaviors to avoid infection. Here, we investigate whether these tendencies are partly attributable to distrust in scientic information, and evaluate whether they generalize outside the U.S., using public data and recruited representative samples across four studies (N total =37,790). In Studies 1–3, we examine these relationships in the U.S., yielding converging evidence for a sequential indirect effect of conservatism on compliance through scientic (dis)trust and infection concern. In Study 4, we compare these relationships across 19 distinct countries, nding that they are strongest in North America, extend to support for lockdown restrictions, and that the indirect effects do not fully appear in any other country in our sample other than Indonesia. These effects suggest that rather than a general distrust in science, whether or not conservatism predicts coronavirus outcomes depends upon national contexts.

strict lockdowns that went so far as to outlaw mass protests altogether during the pandemic, yielding opposition from more left-wing citizens of Israel (BBC, 2020). These patterns suggest that rather than conservativism promoting lack of concern for contracting coronavirus, such relationships may be informed indirectly through trust in information about the virus.

Trust in Scienti c and Medical Information
One of the strongest predictors of threat perceptions from coronavirus infection, compliance with preventative behaviors, and support for lockdown restrictions, is how much participants trust information from scientists and scienti c institutions (Plohl & Musil, 2020). This trust, in turn, may be related to political ideology. Resistance to change, religiosity, and traditionalism can lead conservatives to distrust scienti c ndings (McCright & Dunlap, 2010;Jost et al., 2003;Azevedo & Jost, 2021). However, such distrust may be localized to particular scienti c areas (e.g., climate change; McCright et al., 2013), and there is also evidence that liberals may also be skeptical of ideologically inconsistent information (Nisbet et al., 2015;Proulx & Brandt, 2017;Washburn & Skitka, 2018). Thus, we here argue that while conservatism may lead to a distrust in scienti c information about the coronavirus, such relationships may not be the inevitable result of core features of political ideology, but rather arise from political group identities and polarized information networks (see Rekker, 2021).
Where such polarization in trust in science is severe, such as the United States (McCright et al., 2013;Nadelson et al., 2014;Nisbet et al., 2015;Rekker, 2021), these implications can be particularly deleterious. American conservatives are distrustful of scientists and scienti c information (Gauchat, 2012;Nadelson et al., 2014;Mooney, 2012) in part because they view scientists themselves as outgroup members owing to a belief that the scienti c community is compromised by a liberal bias (Rekker, 2021;Rooduijn et al., 2016). Thus, we here argue that conservatives in the United States may be less concerned about contracting the coronavirus, and therefore comply less with preventative behaviors, in part because they trust scienti c information about the coronavirus less.
However, these links may not generalize outside the United States, where such alternative media networks are prevalent (Nash, 2014;Oreskes & Conway, 2011;Gauchat, 2012). Here, the case of climate change skepticism may be instructive. Among Americans, conservatism is among the strongest predictors of skepticism in anthropogenic climate change (Dunlap et al., 2016;Mildenberger et al., 2017;Carmichael et al., 2017). Yet, meta-analytic crossnational data reveals that this association is far stronger in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world (Hornsey et al., 2018). Indeed, Hornsey and colleagues (2018) point out that three-quarters of the countries they surveyed displayed no signi cant meta-analytic relationship between conservatism and climate change skepticism, but note that in countries where such a relationship was found, conservative politicians and media frame "green" goals as incompatible with their ideology and spread misinformation about climate change. Rather than an inevitability of conservatism, there is cross-national variation in the link between conservatism and an abstract threat such as climate change (Hornsey et al., 2018). Thus, it is plausible that there is similar variation in the association between conservatism and attitudes toward the coronavirus pandemic, a similarly abstracted threat (Kahn et al., 2021;Edeh & Chang, 2020).

Research Overview
In four studies (N total = 37,790), we examined the association of political ideology with attitudes and beliefs towards the coronavirus pandemic, directly, and indirectly through the mechanism of trust in science. Firstly, we hypothesized that, among Americans, conservatism would indirectly affect concerns about contracting the coronavirus through trust in scienti c authorities and institutions (H1). In Study 1, we utilized public data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2020 Exploratory Testing Study. In Studies 2a-2b, we utilized public, representative data from the ANES 2020 Social Media Study before and after the 202*0 Presidential election. In Studies 3a-3b, we collected two distinct representative samples of Americans both before and after the 2020 Presidential Election, including measures of compliance with recommended preventative behaviors, testing a sequential mediation hypothesis whereby conservatism affects trust in science, which affects concern about viral contagion, thereby affecting compliance with restrictive policies.
In Study 4, we used data from a large, three-wave, cross-sectional study of attitudes and behaviors in the coronavirus pandemic from 21 countries to evaluate how present such relationships are across the world. We hypothesized that relationships tested in H1 would be strongest where reactions to coronavirus are strongly polarized, particularly the United States (H2).

Study 1
In Study 1, we investigated the relationships between concern about conservativism, concern about contracting the coronavirus, and trust in scienti c information using publicly available data obtained from the ANES 2020 Exploratory Testing Survey, collected during April 2020. Speci cally, we explored whether any relationship between conservatism and concern would be mediated through trust in scienti c information. Details about the sampling strategy for this study, and all materials and data, are publicly available here: https://electionstudies.org/datacenter/2020-exploratory-testing-survey/.

Materials and Procedure
From the larger pool of questionnaire items, those relevant to our analyses were measures of political ideology, measures of general con dence in science and scientists, and concerns about personally contracting the coronavirus (COVID-19).
The average of two items ("In general, how important should science be for making government decisions?" and "How much do ordinary people need the help of experts to understand complicated things like science and health?") measured on 5-point Likert scales (1=Not at all; 5=A great deal) was used to index general trust in science and scientists (M=3.41, SD=0.99, a=.69).

Correlations
First, we computed zero-order correlations between conservative ideology, trust in science and scienti c experts ("trust in science"), and concerns about personally contracting the coronavirus. Conservatism was negatively correlated with trust in science, r(3076)=-.222, p<.001, and with concerns about contracting the virus, r(3076)=-.129, p<.001. However, general trust in science was positively correlated with concern about contracting the virus, r(3078)=.235, p<.001.

Discussion
The ANES data used in Study 1 support the hypothesis that, among a large sample of Americans, a relationship between self-described conservatism and concern about contracting the coronavirus is mediated, in part, by trust in scientists for public health, although this relationship does not fully explain the link between conservatism and (relative lack of) concern about personally contracting the coronavirus. However, this sample was not representative of the American population; thus, in subsequent studies, samples without this limitation were examined.
[1] All Tables and Figures designated  For T2 (November 2020) 5,277 participants took part in the survey. In this sample, 2664 participants were male and 2613 were female. In terms of race and ethnicity, 3702 participants identi ed as White, 544 as Black, 647 as Hispanic, and 384 as Asian, mixed, or some other race/ethnicity. The average age was 50.91 years (SD=16.78). Table S1.

Materials and Procedure[2]
From the ANES Social Media Study, the variables relevant to our investigation were a measure of political ideology, concern about contracting the coronavirus personally, and con dence in the CDC (serving as a measure of trust in a speci c source of scienti c information). Political ideology was measured using an identical item as in Study 1, preelection: M=4.07, SD=1.78; post-election: M=4.04, SD=1.81), as was concern about contracting the virus, pre-election: M=2.72, SD=1.21; post-election: M=2.78, SD=1.21. One item, ("How much con dence do you have in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)?"), measured on a 1 ("None") to 5 ("A great deal") Likert scale was used as a proxy for trust in scienti c information sources, M=3.15, SD=1.12; post-election: M=3.34, SD=1.16.

Correlations
As with Study 1, we began by computing correlations, although here, we accounted for sampling weights as per ANES's recommendations for this sample (https://electionstudies.org/data-center/2020-social-media-study/). In the T1 sample, conservatism was negatively correlated with con dence in the CDC, r(5733)=-.253, p<.001, and with concern about contracting the coronavirus, r(5737)=-.336, p<.001. Similar to trust in science in Study 1, con dence in the CDC was positively correlated with concern, r(5741)=.223, p<.001.

Indirect Effect Test
Similar to Study 1, for both the pre and post-election surveys, we conducted tests for indirect effects of conservatism on concern through a proxy for trust in scienti c institutions, here con dence in the CDC, controlling for age, binarized gender (male=1, female=-1), income, and education level.
In Study 2a, we found a signi cant indirect effect whereby conservatism was associated with less con dence in the CDC, which was associated with more concern about contracting the virus, thus conservatism indirectly was linked to less concern through con dence in the CDC, b=-.027, SE=.003, t=-9.99, p<.001 ( Figure 2a). As in Study 1, the direct effect of conservatism on concern remained signi cant, b=-.209, SE=.009, t=-23.08, p<.001.
In Study 2b, we also found a signi cant indirect effect, such that conservatism was associated with less con dence in the CDC, which was associated with more concern about contracting the virus, thus conservatism indirectly related to less concern through con dence in the CDC, b=-.045, SE=.004, t=-11.94, p<.001 ( Figure 2b). Once again, the direct effect of conservatism on concern remained signi cant, b=-.18, SE=.009, t=-19.10, p<.001.

Discussion
Study 2 conceptually replicated the results of Study 1 using a representative sample of American adults in two surveys conducted prior and following the 2020 presidential elections. Rather than general items for trusting expertise in science, these results were found using items about a speci c organization, suggesting a degree of generalizability across contexts and time for the mediating role of trust in information sources.
[2] As the sample collected by ANES was a non-probability sample, with the aim of matching the population of the United States, ANES recommends the use of sampling weights for regression analyses with these data. All analyses in Study 2 were therefore conducted accounting for sampling weights. For this reason, SAS's proc calis was used to construct path models to test indirect effects in Study 2, as Hayes's PROCESS does not permit the use of sampling weights (see https://processmacro.org/faq.html).

Materials and Procedure
Participants were presented with a battery of measures followed by demographic questions. They were then subsequently debriefed about the purpose of the study. For the purposes of the current investigation, were solely interested in measures of ideology, trust in science, concern about the pandemic, and compliance intentions. The same measures that follow were displayed in the same manner and scale across both studies.
Trust in science. Given that both trust in science in general, as well as trust in speci c scienti c institutes was found to be an antecedent of concerns for the coronavirus pandemic, we incorporated both components in our measure of trust in science. These items were preceded by the stem "To what extent do you trust information about the coronavirus if it comes from each of the following information sources?" and were measured on a 1-5 Likert scale (1 = not at all, 5 = very much). These were: (1) The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); (2) Scienti c authorities and professionals (e.g., epidemiologists, virologists); and (3)  Coronavirus concern. A single item was used to measure concern about contracting the coronavirus, "Which, if any, of the following statements describes your feelings toward getting the coronavirus?" measured on a 1 to 4 point Likert scale (I am not at all/not very/ somewhat/ very scared I will contact the coronavirus (COVID-19), in both Study 3a, M=2.73, SD=0.99, and Study 3b, M=2.91, SD=0.97.

Correlations
In both studies, having a more conservative political ideology was associated with less trust in science, less concerns about COVID-19, and less compliance to COVID-19 recommendations. Trust in science was positively associated with more COVID-19 concerns and compliance. Finally, COVID-19 concerns were positively associated with compliance (Table 1)

Indirect Effect Test
To test our full hypothesis in each study, we computed an indirect effect test. We controlled for age, being male (compared to being either female or non-binary, male=1; not male =-1; analyzed thusly as there is evidence that men are less likely to comply with recommended behaviors than other genders; Galasso et al., 2020), income and education level. Results across both studies suggested that conservative ideology was associated with both less trust in science and less concern about the pandemic. Both trust in science and concerns about COVID-19, in turn, were associated with greater compliance. All indirect effects were signi cant across both studies (

Discussion
Studies 3a and 3b further highlighted how in the United States, a conservative political ideology is associated with less compliance with COVID restrictions via less personal fear of contracting the virus and less trust in science. In two nationally representative samples we replicated the associations from Studies 1 and 2 with more comprehensive measures. Importantly, in Studies 2 and 3 we added a measure of compliance with COVID restrictions, nding that conservatism indirectly relates to less compliance to guidelines to reduce the spread of Page 11/28 COVID-19. The two underlying mechanisms of this indirect association were found to be trust in science and personal concerns about contracting the virus.

Study 4
In Study 4, we sought to re-examine our hypothesis across different nations, once again employing representative samples. Our aim was to determine whether the negative link between a conservative political ideology with trust in science and beliefs towards the Coronavirus pandemic (i.e., concern about the pandemic, compliance with COVID-19 recommendations, and support for stricter measures to prevent the spread of the pandemic),is found across nations, or is localized to particular countries, such as the United States, given the relationships between conservative U.S. media ecosystems and coronavirus responses (see Gollwitzer et al., 2020).

Participants
We recruited data across 21 countries and special administrative regions, recruiting a total of 25,159 participants.
These included: Australia, Canada, China, Spain, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, the Republic of Ireland, Israel, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Poland, Serbia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In China and Hong Kong no measure of political ideology was included in the survey because of risks to participants, and thus participants from these countries were excluded from the current investigation, leaving us with a total of 19 countries (N = 20580; Table S1 for country speci c Ns and descriptive statistics). Participants were recruited across three cross-sectional waves: Wave 1: May 4 th , 2020 -May 21 st , 2020; Wave 2: June 15 th , 2020 -June 23 rd , 2020; Wave 3: July 20 th , 2020-July 28 th , 2020, via CloudResearch (Chandler et al., 2019;Litman et al., 2017). Samples sizes were determined based on an a priori power analysis detect interactions between time-point comparisons and cross-country comparisons for a small-to-medium effect size (Cohen's f = .160). Thus, we aimed to recruit at least 300 participants per wave in each country. To approach a more representative sample from each country, data was collected to ll known representative percentages for a variety of demographic characteristics, such as level of education, race/ethnicity, urbanization, religion, age, gender, income. These levels were established through census-level data of each country population.
[4] In the U.S we aimed to recruit truly representative samples, via the same demographic characteristics as above but with a larger number of participants (N=1200) per wave.
While these analyses were not pre-registered, the sampling method was pre-determined for all samples (see https://osf.io/g29z4/).

Materials and Procedure
Participants rst provided consent, and then completed a questionnaire with various measures. After completing all the measures and providing demographic information, participants were asked questions pertaining to any upcoming or recently concluded elections in their country, and were then subsequently debriefed and remunerated.
All measures were rst generated in English. They were then translated/back-translated into applicable languages for each country. In the sections that follow, descriptive statistics and reliabilities capture values across all waves and countries (Table S2 for country-speci c information). Unless otherwise noted, all measures were captured on a 1-9 slider scale.

Political Ideology
An item identical to that utilized in Studies 3a and 3b, measured on a 1-7 Likert scale was used to capture left/right wing ideology (M=3.80, SD=1.57).

Trust in Science
We generated two items to measure trust in science, which preceded by the sentence: "To what extent do you trust information about coronavirus if it comes from each of the following information sources?" ("Scienti c authorities and professionals (e.g., epidemiologists, virologists)" and "Medical professionals (e.g., doctors, nurses, surgeons, EMTs)"). Trust in science was measured with the average of these two items (a=.77, α range =.68-.82, M=7.11, SD=1.64).

Behaviors and Beliefs about the Coronavirus
Concerns about contracting COVID-19. A single-item measure ("Which, if any, of the following statements describes your feelings toward getting the coronavirus? I am not at all/not very/ somewhat/ very scared I will contract the coronavirus (COVID-19)"); this measure was identical to one of three items used to capture COVID-19 concerns in Studies 3a and 3b). This measure was captured on a 1-4 Likert scale (M=2.49, SD=1.10).
Compliance with coronavirus guidelines. A four-item measure was developed to capture the degree to which participants complied with scienti cally-recommended coronavirus (COVID-19) guidelines to reduce the infection of the virus ("How often do you wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds when you enter or exit your home?"; "How often do you stay at least 6 feet (or 2 meters) away from anyone who is not a member of your household when you are outside your home (e.g., social distancing?)"; "Do you avoid social gatherings due to the coronavirus?"; "Have you been cancelling, and are you avoiding, any non-essential travel"). The measure was overall reliable (a=.77, α range =.61-.83, M=7.49, SD=1.51). Support for lockdown restrictions. Seven-items were generated to measure how much participants supported preventative restrictions upon civil liberties during lockdowns (e.g., "National intelligence services should track and collect data from people suspected to be infected with coronavirus;" "The military should be used domestically in order to assist with responses to the coronavirus"). This measure was reliable as well (a=.84, α range =.76-.89, M=6.17, SD=1.80).

Correlations
Political Ideology. We estimated correlations within each country for each wave (Tables S3-S6), between political ideology and: (1) trust in science, (2) concerns about contracting COVID-19, (3) compliance with COVID-19 regulations, (4) support for lockdown restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus. Then, we utilized Goh and colleagues' (2016) methodology to compute meta-correlations across the three waves for each country (Tables S7-S10) that are visualized in Figures 4a-4d.
The United States and Canada alone exhibited signi cant negative meta-correlations between conservative ideology and all outcome variables. For trust in science and concern about contracting coronavirus, their meta-correlations were also larger than those of the other 17 countries (Figures 4a-4b). Also, while there was no signi cant relationship between conservatism and trust in science in 10 of 19 countries, a positive meta-correlation was never observed ( Figure 4a). However, for compliance, Indonesia and Germany exhibited meta-correlations of a similar strength to those of the U.S. and Canada, although the U.S. and Canada were still among the largest across countries ( Figure  4c). With respect to lockdown restrictions, only three countries demonstrated a negative meta-correlation with conservatism: The United States, Canada, and South Korea, whereas the meta-correlations were positive for 10 of 19 countries, with Israel's being the strongest (Figure 4d). Trust in Science. A similar process was used to compute meta-correlations between trust in scienti c information about coronavirus and other outcome variables (Table S11). The meta-correlations we found suggest that while direct associations between conservatism and coronavirus responses might be localized to particular countries, links between trust in scienti c information and outcomes are more consistent. Meta-correlations between trust in scienti c information about coronavirus and concern about contracting the coronavirus were signi cant and positive in 16 of 19 countries (r median =.12, r min =.07, r max =.20, all ps<.05), and were never signi cant and negative ( Figure S1).
Further, both the meta-correlation between trust in scienti c information about coronavirus and compliance with preventative behaviors (r median =.35, r min =.22, r max =.47, all ps<.001; Figure S2) and the meta-correlation between trust in scienti c information about coronavirus and support for lockdown restrictions (r median =.29, r min =.15, r max =.44, all ps<.001, Figure S3) were signi cant and positive in all countries. These meta-correlations suggest that while the role of conservatism and trust in scienti c information may vary across countries, the subsequent relationships between that trust and outcome variables are consistent. Therefore, the extent to which conservatism affects these outcomes should be in uenced by the extent to which conservatism affects trust in scienti c information about coronavirus.

Multigroup Path Analysis
To replicate the indirect effects observed in the previous studies, while adding support for lockdown restrictions as an additional outcome, we conducted a series of path analyses. Again, we allowed all exogenous variables to predict both sequential mediators (i.e., trust in science, concerns about contracting COVID-19), and both sequential mediators to predict both outcomes (compliance and support for lockdown restrictions), yielding a fully saturated model ( Figure 5).
We then compared the path from political ideology to trust in science in the U.S. and Canada (separately) to each other and to each of the 17 other countries in our sample. Findings suggested that the association did not differ between the U.S. and Canada, but were signi cantly stronger in the United States for 15 out of the 17 countries and in Canada for 13 out of the 17 countries (Table 3). Further evidence in these models suggest that this association is strongest in North America, with one exception (Indonesia). The indirect effect of political ideology on concerns about contracting COVID-19 (i.e., ideologyàtrust in scienceàCOVID-19 concern) was only signi cant in one other country (Italy); as was the indirect effect for compliance (i.e., ideologyàtrust in scienceàCOVID-19 concernàCOVID-19 compliance; in Spain), and the indirect effect for support for lockdown restrictions (i.e., ideologyàtrust in scienceàCOVID-19 concernàlockdown restrictions) was only signi cant in two other countries (Spain, the Netherlands), one of which exhibited an effect in the opposite direction (the Netherlands).

Discussion
Study 4 provided further evidence of a sequential pathway whereby, in some countries, namely, the U.S., Canada, and Indonesia, conservative ideology was associated with lower trust in scienti c information about the coronavirus, which in turn was associated with less concern about contracting the coronavirus, which nally led to less compliance with preventative behaviors. Further, Study 4 extended this model by adding support for lockdown restrictions as an additional outcome. Multigroup path analyses further suggested that that the association of political ideology and trust in science is signi cantly stronger in these three countries than in other countries sampled. However, trust in science exhibited consistent correlation patterns across countries, suggesting that its importance in coronavirus responses (see Plohl & Musil, 2020) is consistent across nations. While the presence of negative meta-correlations between conservatism and trust in scienti c information about the coronavirus was expected in the U.S. based on the extreme polarization of scienti c trust in that country (see Rekker, 2021;Gollwitzer et al., 2020) and Studies 1-3, and to a lesser extent in Canada due to a shared media ecosystem with the U.S. (see Taylor & Asmundson, 2021;Bridgman et al., 2021), the emergence of the same pattern in Indonesia was unexpected. However, recent evidence suggests that, like the U.S., Indonesia is experiencing intense political polarization about the coronavirus pandemic in particular (Mietzner, 2020), which may suggest that the pattern in the U.S. has more to do with the severity of polarization about this speci c issue, rather than unique features of American conservatism.
[4] For race/ethnicity, religion and urbanization, we relied on the country-level reports of the CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/references/one-page-country-summaries/ ). For age, we relied on the same source but computed age categories from the raw data. For income, we broke income into percentiles using the latest available data (this varied by country) from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database (Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database): http://www.lisdatacenter.org (multiple countries; 2020-2021) Luxembourg: LIS.

General Discussion
Across four studies, we found strong evidence that among Americans, conservatism is associated with less compliance with recommended preventative behaviors to avoid coronavirus infection, sequentially mediated through trust in scienti c information sources and concern about the threat of personal infection by coronavirus. Studies 1, 2a, and 2b found evidence for indirect effects of conservatism on concern about contracting coronavirus through trust in science, while Studies 3a, 3b, and Study 4 found evidence that this indirect effect sequentially extends to compliance with preventative behaviors and, in Study 4, support for lockdown restrictions. Such ndings are consistent with other studies of American populations (see Calvillo et al., 2020;Christensen et al., 2020;Latkin et al., 2021;Gollwitzer et al., 2020;Shepherd et al., 2020). Beyond replicating these results, however, we also nd crossnational support for the role of scienti c trust in concern about contracting the virus, compliance, and support for lockdown restrictions (Figures S1-S3).
Evidence was more mixed, however, for the hypothesis that the indirect effects we observed would be strongest in, or unique to, the United States, given the extreme polarization of the coronavirus pandemic there and the severity of its impact. On one hand, while other countries did have signi cant meta-correlations between conservatism and coronavirus variables, and some (Canada, Indonesia, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands) even had signi cant indirect effects, negative meta-correlations between conservative ideology and trust in scienti c information about coronavirus, concern about contracting coronavirus, self-reported behavior compliance, and support for lockdown restrictions were consistently stronger in the U.S. than in most other countries sampled in Study 4. Further, no other country had signi cantly stronger indirect effects than the U.S. These ndings are, in a sense, similar to ndings on climate denial in the U.S. compared to other countries (see Hornsey et al., 2018). However, on the other hand, Canada consistently had roughly equivalent meta-correlations between conservatism and these variables, as well as indirect effects, and Indonesia also exhibited signi cant indirect effects consistently.
That Canadians exhibited similar responses to Americans is partly explainable through its proximity to, and shared media ecosystem with, the United States (see Amend & Barney, 2016;Taylor & Asmundson, 2021) and indeed, misinformation about the coronavirus in Canadian social media appears to originate from U.S. media (Bridgman et al., 2021). The same pattern emerging in Indonesia, however, cannot logically be explained by media overlap with the United States. Rather, the emergence of similar indirect effects in Indonesia may be explainable by a similarly extreme polarization around trust in the scienti c consensus, within the context of the coronavirus pandemic (Mietzner, 2020). Nevertheless, a key limitation of our ndings is that we cannot directly test why these three countries in particular demonstrated the patterns we observed compared to the 16 other countries that did not.
That aside, another key implication of these ndings is that across the countries we sampled from, conservatism neither universally nor necessarily predicts non-compliant coronavirus behaviors or even lack of concern in and of itself. While care should be used comparing meta-correlations for conservatism across countries, as its precise meaning can vary cross-nationally (Malka et al., 2014) and across time and cultural groups (Fawcett 2020;Ziblatt, 2017), evidence of political groups clustering along a left-right axis can be used to make cautious statements of patterns (see Noël & Thérien, 2008;Ziblatt, 2017;Waytz et al., 2019). Although there are psychological factors associated with conservatism that may predispose conservatives to generally distrust science more (see Azevedo & Jost, 2021), our results suggest that this association is not an inevitability across the globe, but rather, emergent from speci c national contexts. Nevertheless, that we never found conservatism to positively predict trust in scienti c information about coronavirus, even in Israel, where conservative leadership took a hard line during the pandemic, suggests a tendency may still be present. Nevertheless, it is also worth noting that conservatism was, in many countries, positively associated with lockdown restrictions, perhaps resonating with authoritarian tendencies (see Azevedo & Jost, 2021). That said, the results from the U.S., Canada, and Indonesia also clearly suggest that, under the right circumstances, liberals can be more sensitive to certain threats than conservatives, in line with multidimensional approaches to understanding ideology and threat (Hirschberger et al., 2016, Brandt et al., 2020. The results we observe suggest that part of how political ideology relates to threat perceptions, however multidimensional, operates through trust in information about the relevant threat-in this case, the threat of personal infection with coronavirus. While conservatives and liberals both can be more or less sensitive to threats depending on the type of threat (commission vs omission, see Kahn et al., 2021), what our results suggest is that distrust in warnings about the threat may lessen the degree to which the threat is perceived at all. However, it should be noted that such associations need not inevitably lead to disaster. That Canada and Indonesia, despite sharing the patterns found in the U.S., did not experience the same degree of catastrophic losses from the coronavirus pandemic as the United States hints that, individual differences aside, early, uni ed action by political elites and systemic preparation may help protect against the negative effects instantiated by low trust in science (see Pickup et al., 2020), a possibility supported by ndings that countries with earlier, more restrictive pandemic responses have fared better thus far (see Brauner et al., 2021;Haug et al., 2020;Alfano & Ercolano, 2020). Further, the positive meta-correlations we observe between conservatism and support for lockdown restrictions in many of the countries sampled implies that, perhaps owing to overlap between conservatism and authoritarianism, conservatives will support such measures if they are not positioned as contradictory to their ingroup by partisan media (as in the U.S. and Canada, where the meta-correlations were negative).
Nevertheless, a second limitation of these studies is that while they examine conservatism, as understood by participants, they conceptualize conservatism as a unitary construct (Malka et al., 2014) and they do not examine ideological factors among conservatives that might have divergent effects upon attitudes and behaviors within the coronavirus pandemic, such as right-wing authoritarianism (RWA; see Altemeyer, 1998;Duckitt & Sibley, 2010) or social dominance orientation (SDO; see Sidanius & Pratto, 1999;Ho et al., 2015). While we did not nd, for example, a relationship between conservatism and concern about coronavirus infection in our Australian samples in Study 4, Clarke et al. (2021) found relationships between some speci c dimensions of SDO and RWA, such that they predicted less concern about contracting the coronavirus, similar to the associations with RWA in American samples (Prichard & Christman, 2020). In a similar vein, our single-item measure of unitary conservatism cannot distinguish between laissez-faire conservatism and authoritarian conservatism (see Stenner, 2009). These limitations are particularly important for understanding the positive meta-correlations between conservatism and support for lockdown restrictions that we observe in the majority of countries that we sampled. Thus, further research should examine more speci c elements and dimensions of ideology as well as high-level endorsement of "conservatism" or "liberalism." Future research should also endeavor to gather information on these associations in South America, Africa, India, and other parts of the globe we were unable to reach.

Conclusion
Here, four studies reinforce links between conservatism and attitudes and behaviors during the coronavirus among Americans, while also explicitly highlighting the role that trust in science and scienti c information sources about the pandemic plays in these processes. Apart from conceptually replicating and extending existing research on Americans, Study 4 suggests that Canadians and Indonesians may also exhibit the same polarization of attitudes through trust in scienti c information about the coronavirus. These results suggest that, rather than conservatism per se inevitably leading to skepticism about pandemics, the emergence of such a link is contextual, similar to prior ndings regarding polarizing issues such as climate change skepticism (Hornsey et al., 2018). Therefore, management of future pandemics may hinge upon how well scienti c communicators can manage the contextual framing of the pandemic as it arises, lest the particularly disastrous patterns observed in places like the United States be repeated.

Code Availability Statement
All code/syntax used is available here: https://osf.io/ugde5/?view_only=dc4c3b9d8a79433cab5a2fbc9e663a1d Tables   Table 1. Bivariate correlations for Study 3a (below the diagonal) and Study 3b (above the diagonal). Note: All coefficients are higher than .10 are significant at p < .001, all coefficients below .10 are significant at p < .01  Table 3.