Why do people flee during Chinese Regular Epidemic Prevention and Control? Exploring trust effect in decision-making under risk and uncertainty

Under Regular Epidemic Prevention and Control, ‘fugitives’ emerged in Chinese society: non-local residents who were in unfamiliar areas, assessed risks upon receiving unofficial information of a sudden COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown, and fled swiftly before official confirmation. This scenario presents a complex landscape of uncertainty and risks: severed familiar networks and undisclosed official information. The question arises: How do people make decisions in such a situation? Grounded in Luhmann’s theory of trust, this study conducted in-depth interviews with 18 participants and identified two mechanisms of trust influencing decision-making. Information, as an explicit carrier, reduces people’s uncertainty by enhancing credibility. The judgment of information revolves around authority transferred to the local source, with reliability and proximity as supplementary factors. However, increasing explicit trust cannot alleviate people’s insecurity, as the implicit social system has been disrupted. People’s distrust of political, legal, and moral orders ultimately led them to flee. The endurance of political order (normativity, stability, effectiveness) rests upon belief in legal order (protectiveness, accessibility), which, in turn, is underpinned by the foundational defenses of moral order (justifiability). Moving beyond fixed variables and linear models, this study offers insights into individuals’ dynamic transition from trust to distrust in socially disordered contexts and proposes a novel and comprehensive trust framework for decision-making.