In the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, public health experts have produced guidelines to limit the spread of the coronavirus, but individuals do not always comply with experts’ recommendations. Here, we tested whether a specific psychological belief—identification with all humanity—predicts cooperation with public health guidelines as well as helpful behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesized that peoples’ endorsement of this belief—their relative perception of a connection and moral commitment to other humans—would predict their tendencies to adopt World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines and to help others. To assess this, we conducted a global online study (N = 2537 participants) of four WHO-recommended health behaviors and four pandemic-related moral dilemmas that we constructed to be relevant to helping others at a potential cost to oneself. We used generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) that included 10 predictor variables (demographic, contextual, and psychological) for each of five outcome measures (a WHO cooperative health behavior score, plus responses to each of our four moral, helping dilemmas). Identification with all humanity was the most consistent and consequential predictor of individuals’ cooperative health behavior and helpful responding. Analyses showed that the identification with all humanity significantly predicted each of the five outcomes while controlling for the other variables (Prange < 10−22 to < 0.009). The mean effect size of the identification with all humanity predictor on these outcomes was more than twice as large as the effect sizes of other predictors. Identification with all humanity is a psychological construct that, through targeted interventions, may help scientists and policymakers to better understand and promote cooperative health behavior and help-oriented concern for others during the current pandemic as well as in future humanitarian crises.

Q&A sites currently enable large numbers of contributors to collectively build valuable knowledge bases. Naturally, these sites are the product of contributors acting in different ways -creating questions, answers or comments and voting in these -, contributing in diverse amounts, and creating content of varying quality. This paper advances present knowledge about Q&A sites using a multifaceted view of contributors that accounts for diversity of behavior, motivation and expertise to characterize their profiles in five sites. This characterization resulted in the definition of ten behavioral profiles that group users according to the quality and quantity of their contributions. Using these profiles, we find that the five sites have remarkably similar distributions of contributor profiles. We also conduct a longitudinal study of contributor profiles in one of the sites, identifying common profile transitions, and finding that although users change profiles with some frequency, the site composition is mostly stable over time.

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