This text was first published at xphiblog.com on August 8, 2021. It has been slightly updated.
Compliance with health recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic is a divisive topic. Some readily accept measures such as social distancing and mask-wearing, while others frontally reject them. What separates those who comply from those who don’t? Is it trust in science and official organizations? Concern about others vs. liberty? Fear? Aversion to germs?
In March 2020, the WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. That month, I was supposed to go on a ski trip with some friends. As the dates were approaching, the ski trip’s group chat was a succession of moral arguments for cancelling the trip, and pragmatic arguments for carrying on with the plan. In the end, we didn’t go. But as a geek that likes to scrutinize human behavior, I started wondering: Were we convinced by the arguments? Or just confused and scared?
Soon after that, I saw on Twitter that Florian Cova had run a study investigating the relationship between conspiracist mentality and compliance with health recommendations. Brilliant! Instead of just speculating, I should get some data too. I ran a small study and found an effect of moral beliefs regarding care on participant’s efforts to comply with health recommendations, but no effect of anxiety. I showed the results to Florian, and we decided to join forces to get a wider picture of the individual differences associated with adopting health behaviors during the pandemic.
In a first study, we included a total of 17 individual differences measures, which can be classified into three categories: Epistemic (beliefs in pseudoscience / conspiracy theories / political truth, faith in intuition, narcissism), Moral (moral foundations, perspective-taking), and Affective (fear, disgust, empathy, reactance). All these seemed plausible candidates. Those who tend to mistrust science and official organizations are likely to disregard health recommendations. But so is the case for those who think that preserving liberty is morally imperative, or react negatively to attempts to restrict of freedom. Conversely, those who think that caring about others is a very important moral value, tend to take other’s perspective, or share others’ pain, are likely to follow health recommendations to avoid harming others. And those who are prone to fear or disgust will probably adopt health behaviors to avoid getting the virus. What did the results show?
None of the epistemic / conspiracist items significantly correlated with efforts to comply with health recommendations, nor did fear. Regression analyses showed that the best predictors of compliance were care values and disgust sensitivity. Participants who think caring about others is specially important or are easily disgusted reported more efforts to comply with health recommendations. These results replicated in a representative sample of the US population.
In a second set of studies (conducted in late 2020), we used French participants and an indirect measure of compliance with health recommendations: decisions to go voting in the municipal elections that were taking place at that time in France. Arguably, those who follow health recommendations would avoid to go voting (but, as the results suggest, the issue might be more complicated).
This time, regression analyses showed that pathogen disgust and reactance were the best predictors of efforts to follow health recommendations. Both variables also showed a significant effect on voting behavior, with reactance predicting decisions to go voting, and pathogen disgust predicting decisions to not vote. However, and in contrast to previous studies, care values showed no significant effects.
Because the results were somewhat heterogeneous across studies, we conducted (actually, Florian did) a mini-metanalysis to ensure the robustness of our (partial) correlation effects on reported compliance with health recommendations. Results showed a significant effect of reactance, disgust, and care values, hence the title of the paper.1
I still don’t know what made me and my friends not go skiing in March 2020, but it seems that individual differences in moral beliefs, disgust sensitivity, and psychological reactance are more important than conspiracist mentality or fear in driving (lack of) compliance with health recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This might be surprising to some, unsurprising to others. Maybe we should run a study on this divide next!