Governments often make early recommendations about issues that remain uncertain. Do governments’ early positions affect how much people believe the latest recommendations? We investigate this question using an incentivized online experiment with 1900 US respondents in early April 2020. We present all participants with the latest CDC projection about coronavirus death counts. We randomize exposure to information that highlights how President Trump previously downplayed the coronavirus threat. When the President’s inconsistency is salient, participants are less likely to revise their prior beliefs about death counts from the projection. They also report lower trust in the government. These results align with a simple model of signal extraction from government communication, and have implications for the design of changing guidelines in other settings.

各国政府通常会就尚不确定的问题提早提出建议。政府的早期职位会影响多少人相信最新建议吗？我们将在2020年4月上旬对1900名美国受访者进行激励性在线实验，以调查此问题。我们向所有参与者提供有关冠状病毒死亡计数的最新CDC预测。我们将对信息的暴露随机化，这些信息强调了特朗普总统以前对冠状病毒威胁的轻描淡写。当总统的前后矛盾明显时，参与者就不太可能根据预测来改变他们先前对死亡人数的看法。他们还表示对政府的信任度较低。这些结果与从政府沟通中提取信号的简单模型相吻合，