A survey question I don't know how to answer

I participate in surveys put together by the Pew Charitable Trusts. They keep asking me to answer their questions, although every time I do, I feel like the worst survey respondent ever. About half their questions make me stop and think, sometimes to such an extent I actually can't finish a survey because a question on it has stumped me so badly. The latest one I took had a good example.

It was largely a COVID-19 survey. There were some easy questions, like overall, how do I think the president is doing and overall, how do I think my state is doing, and overall, how do I think most states are doing. But then the survey wanted to go a level deeper. It asked me if I thought, in the context of the public reaction to the COVID-19 epidemic, that "most people can be trusted to do the right thing."

This brought to mind a Tweet I saw re-posted this week:

Here's why the question flummoxed me: on the one hand, I think "most" people, i.e. more than 50% of people, are probably trying to do the right thing. But there are two reasons I don't think this is really the critical question, nor what the people who wrote the question really wanted to know. Because it takes far less than a majority of people doing the wrong thing to screw things up for everyone. So the question isn't whether more than 50% of people strive to do the right thing, it's whether we're over the limit in our country of the number of people needed to screw it up for all of us.

And even that number of people trying to do the right thing--how hard do they have to be trying? Should we be doing everything in our power to minimize our potential to infect others by minimizing our caloric intake in order to stretch out the food in our houses and avoid extra trips to the store? If we go to the store and buy items we don't need to survive, didn't we just spread our germs to places in the store we didn't have to spread them? What level of doing the right thing do people need to achieve in order to be placed in the "trusted to do the right thing" camp? If you're just going to say it's whatever is reasonable, then you'd probably just be looking at what an average person does, in which case, well, just about exactly half of the people would be doing at least what an average person does or better. So it's a meaningless question.

And then there's the question of duration. How long will people continue to do the right thing? Most people likely don't go buying up toilet paper at a rate far greater than what they need at first, but once a few panic buyers start snatching it all up, others, who wouldn't have done the wrong thing on their own, are likely to follow suit, and before long, you have the quorum of bad actors needed to wreck things for everyone.

A question more to the point than what the survey asked me would be something like this: "Do you think that our society has the ability to act corporately in such a way as to minimize the negative effects of the COVID-19 outbreak?" Because my answer to that question is a lot different from my answer to whether I think the majority of people will try to do the right thing.