National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic (2024)

National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic: Results from 67 nations

2020

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a devastating global health crisis. Without a vaccine or effective medication, the best hope for mitigating virus transmission is collective behavior change and support for public health interventions (e.g., physical distancing, physical hygiene, and endorsement of health policies). In a large-scale international collaboration (N = 46,450 across 67 countries), we investigated why people adopted public health behaviors and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stages of the pandemic (April-May, 2020). Results revealed that respondents who identified more strongly with their nation consistently reported engagement in public health behaviors and greater support for public health policies. We also found a small effect of political orientation, indicating that left-wing respondents were more likely to report public health behaviors and support for public health measures than right-wing respondents. We d...

Are societies in conflict more susceptible to believe in COVID-19 conspiracy theories? A 66 nation study

Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology

Network Analysis of Social Measures, Culture Dimensions, and Covid-19 Related Behavioural Choices

2022

Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning

PNAS Nexus

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, s...

Morality in the echo chamber: The relationship between belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories and public health support and the mediating role of moral identity and morality-as-cooperation across 67 countries

PLoS ONE, 2022

Believing in conspiracy theories is a major problem, especially in the face of a pandemic, as these constitute a significant obstacle to public health policies, like the use of masks and vaccination. Indeed, during the COVID-19 pandemic, several ungrounded explanations regarding the origin of the virus or the effects of vaccinations have been rising, leading to vaccination hesitancy or refusal which poses as a threat to public health. Recent studies have shown that in the core of conspiracy theories lies a moral evaluation component; one that triggers a moral reasoning which reinforces the conspiracy itself. To gain a better understanding of how conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 affect public health containment behaviors and policy support via morality-relevant variables, we analysed comprehensive data from the International Collaboration on the Social & Moral Psychology (ICSMP) of COVID-19, consisting of 49.965 participants across 67 countries. We particularly explored the mediating role of two levels of morality: individual and group-based morality. Results show that believing in conspiracy theories reduces adoption of containment health-related behaviors and policy support of public health measures, but moral identity and morality-as-cooperation significantly mediate this relationship. This means that beliefs in conspiracy theories do not simply constitute antecedents of cognitive biases or failures, nor maladaptive behaviors based on personality traits, but are morally infused and should be dealt as such. Based on our findings, we further discuss the psychological, moral, and political implications of endorsement of conspiracy theories in the era of the pandemic.

Long-term Predictors of Compliance with COVID-19 Guidelines Across Countries: The role of social norms, trust, stress, demographic factors, and moral values

2023

Cross-language Validation of COVID-19 Compliance Scale in 28 Languages

Objective: Although compliance scales have been used to assess compliance with health guidelines to reduce the spread of COVID-19, no scale known to us has shown content validity regarding global guidelines and reliability across a large international sample. Here, we have assessed the validity and reliability of the Compliance Scale developed by the COVIDiSTRESS II Global Consortium, a group of over 150 researchers from across the globe. Methods: We used exploratory factor analysis to determine the most reliable items on the English version of the survey. We conducted a measurement invariance test to determine whether the different language versions of the scale are measuring the same construct with the same measurement structure. Invariance testing indicated that measurement alignment was needed to ensure that the scales are comparable across languages and cultures. After alignment, we employed a novel R code to run MC simulation for alignment validation. Results: We found that al...

A Global Experience-Sampling Method Study of Well-Being During Times of Crisis: The CoCo Project

We present a global experience-sampling method (ESM) study aimed at describing, predicting, and understanding individual differences in well-being during times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This international ESM study is a collaborative effort of over 60 interdisciplinary researchers from around the world in the “Coping with Corona” (CoCo) project. The study comprises trait-, state-, and daily-level data of 7,490 participants from over 20 countries (total ESM measurements = 207,263; total daily measurements = 73,295) collected between October 2021 and August 2022. We provide a brief overview of the theoretical background and aims of the study, present the applied methods (including a description of the study design, data collection procedures, data cleaning, and final sample), and discuss exemplary research questions to which these data can be applied. We end by inviting collaborations on the CoCo dataset.

Moral Identity predicts Adherence to COVID-19 Mitigation Procedures depending on Political Ideology: A Comparison between USA and New Zealand

Reducing the spread of infectious viruses (such as COVID-19) can depend on societal compliance with effective mitigations. Identifying factors that influence adherence can inform public policy. In many cases public health messaging has become highly moralized, focusing on the need to act for the greater good. In such contexts, a persons’ moral identity may influence behavior and serve to increase compliance through different mechanisms; if a person sees compliance as the right thing to do (internalization) and/or if a person perceives compliance as something others will notice as the right thing to do (symbolization). We argue that in societies that are more politically polarized a person’s political ideology may interact with their moral identity to predict compliance. We hypothesized that where polarization is high (e.g., USA), moral identity should positively predict compliance for liberals to a greater extent than for conservatives. However, this effect would not occur where pol...

Reduction in mobility and COVID-19 transmission

Nature Communications, 2021