An Exploratory Study on the Role of Trust as a Cue to Action in Inducing the Preventive Behaviors in COVID-19 Situation

This study aims to explore the role of trust as a cue to action in inducing preventive behaviors based on the health belief model.It investigated how social trust and government trust influence perceived risk and self-efficacy, major health belief variables, and preventive behaviors during the COVID-19 outbreak.The results showed that while social trust and government trust did not significantly affect perceived susceptibility, one dimension of risk perception, social trust had a significant positive impact on perceived severity, another dimension of risk perception.Additionally, both social trust and government trust had significantly positive impacts on self-efficacy.Moreover, while neither social trust nor government trust had a significant effect on hygiene practices, government trust had a significant negative impact on social distancing.These results suggest that the impact of trust varies depending on the type of trust and the type of preventive behavior, and trust may not act as a direct predictor of preventive behavior but may influence them through self-efficacy, a health belief variable.Therefore, this study can provide a theoretical foundation for eliciting individual preventive behaviors in infectious disease risk situations and offer meaningful implications for effective epidemic management.