We focus on a context where institutions are perceived as failing, i.e. as badly handling an (economic) crisis or a societal issue most people care about and have strong views on, whilst the situation on the ground is more nuanced. A growing body of literature has shown that in such a context institutional trust invariably tends to be hollowed out, in turn eroding the effectiveness of governance as any policy relies on citizen cooperation and trust to be effective. A small yet growing (experimental) literature is researching the degree to which providing citizens with correct information about institutions and their use (for example the CDC in the US) can bridge the gap between misinformed distrust and evidence-based trust, with positive results. What remains under-researched, is the extent to which underlying negativity and confirmation biases or politically activated group identities in this context can be disarmed by more general information on positive societal developments. This project aims to fill that gap, by investigating whether providing respondents with positive news in general, or specifically linked to societal cooperation, can boost other forms of non-institutional social-attitudes, such as social trust and cooperative norms. The key policy question then becomes if we can bolster social trust and more bottom-up forms of cooperation when institutional trust drops.