Trusting the European Green Deal: investigating the effects of a new trust inoculation on geothermal energy support across seven European countries

Whether for pandemic or climate action, governmental mandates require public support for successful compliance. However, public support is disproportionately susceptible to persuasive attacks and misinformation. Negative persuasive attacks and misinformation are among the greatest challenges to the European energy transition. Here, we introduce the trust inoculation, a new type of psychological inoculations. We will investigate if psychologically inoculating N=2800 citizens from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. about the trustworthiness of governmental actors executing the European Green Deal protects their support for geothermal energy, a renewable energy part of this framework, against multiple negative informational messages. We will test if trust in political institutions and populist attitudes to moderate its effectiveness. Our findings will showcase if the trust inoculation is a promising sociopsychological inoculation implementable to protect governmental mandates from malicious attacks. unknown other