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Introduction
How individuals perceive the safety of their public drinking water supply influences whether they reach for the tap to quench their thirst, or an alternative which can adversely impact their health, welfare and the environment. Mistrust of tap water is associated with decreased water consumption and increased intake of sugary drinks (Onufrak et al., 2014), contributing to obesity as well as decreased oral health (Ogden et al., 2012). Even when consumption is shifted to bottled water, oral health often suffers due to inadequate exposure to fluoridation in bottled sources (Hobson et al., 2007). Reliance on more expensive alternatives to public tap water also increases household expenditure. An increase in expenditure compounds gaps in affordability and broader service accessibility for the disadvantaged, who are already more likely to mistrust their tap water (Abrahams et al., 2000; Dupont et al., 2014). Misconceptions about water quality and safety also harm the environment via increased consumption of bottled drinks (Merkel et al., 2012). In addition to the marginal added air pollution associated with bottled water transport, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimates that only 13% of used water bottles are recycled, with the rest ending up in landfill or polluting public waterways (NRDC, 2008).
A growing literature assesses different factors which influence the general public's perception of water quality. Much of the literature on the determinants of perception, however, is empirically grounded in low- and middle-income countries, where tap water is more likely to be unsafe (for instance, see Spencer, 2011). By contrast, drinking water quality in the United States is generally high, even if disease outbreaks from low-quality water are underestimated (Craun et al., 2010; Hanna-Attisha et al., 2016) and systemic failures such as that of Flint, Michigan become more common. Studies on water perception in the US context, however, have almost exclusively focused on subsets of the population, such as children (Gorelick et al., 2011), residents of under-served communities, most notably colonias along the USA-Mexico border (Leach et al., 1999; Regnier et al., 2015), or on the drivers for preference of bottled water over tap water (Hu et al., 2011). By contrast, our sample is representative of the adult population in the USA, the vast majority of which are served by high-quality public water systems,...