The worldwide spread of a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) since December 2019 has posed a severe threat to individuals’ well-being. While the world at large is waiting that the released vaccines immunize most citizens, public health experts suggest that, in the meantime, it is only through behavior change that the spread of COVID-19 can be controlled. Importantly, the required behaviors are aimed not only at safeguarding one’s own health. Instead, individuals are asked to adapt their behaviors to protect the community at large. This raises the question of which social concerns and moral principles make people willing to do so. We considered in 23 countries (N = 6948) individuals’ willingness to engage in prescribed and discretionary behaviors, as well as country-level and individual-level factors that might drive such behavioral intentions. Results from multilevel multiple regressions, with country as the nesting variable, showed that publicized number of infections were not significantly related to individual intentions to comply with the prescribed measures and intentions to engage in discretionary prosocial behaviors. Instead, psychological differences in terms of trust in government, citizens, and in particular toward science predicted individuals’ behavioral intentions across countries. The more people endorsed moral principles of fairness and care (vs. loyalty and authority), the more they were inclined to report trust in science, which, in turn, statistically predicted prescribed and discretionary behavioral intentions. Results have implications for the type of intervention and public communication strategies that should be most effective to induce the behavioral changes that are needed to control the COVID-19 outbreak.

Research in political psychology has uncovered "elective affinities" between psychological traits and political ideology. Strong correlations have been found linking psychological variables to political-economic beliefs in Western countries. These results suggest that people's psychological traits influence the development of their ideology, making some ideas, explanations, prescriptions, and ways of understanding the world seem more convincing or satisfying than others. Most such investigations have focused on differences along the liberal-conservative ideological spectrum in the United States, or the left-right divide in Europe and (the rest of) the Americas. Relatively little research has examined psychological elective affinities with neoliberal ideology in particular, and none to our knowledge has been done outside of the West (including Turkey), except for Israel. We report the results of a preliminary investigation into the psychological correlates of neoliberal ideology in Hong Kong, India, and the United States. Our U.S. results replicate earlier research introducing the Neoliberal Beliefs Index, whereas our Hong Kong and Indian results reveal similarities and differences in the psychological traits associated with neoliberal beliefs.From inauspicious beginnings, neoliberalism has become a globally dominant political-economic ideology (Harvey, 2005). Although past research has revealed the structural and ideational factors behind neoliberalism's rise (e.g., Blyth, 2002;Mudge, 2018), until recently little attention has been given to possible psychological contributors. For neoliberal ideology to spread so successfully, it would seemingly need not only a favorable political-economic environment and