As the COVID-19 pandemic lingers, the possibility of 'pandemic fatigue' has raised worldwide concerns. Here, we examine whether there was a gradual reduction in adherence to protective behaviours against COVID-19 from March through December 2020, as hypothesized in expectations of fatigue. We considered self-report behaviours from representative samples of the populations of 14 countries (N = 238,797), as well as mobility and policy data for 124 countries. Our results show that changes in adherence were empirically meaningful and geographically widespread. While a low-cost and habituating behaviour (mask wearing) exhibited a linear rise in adherence, high-cost and sensitizing behaviours (physical distancing) declined, but this decline decelerated over time, with small rebounds seen in later months. Reductions in adherence to physical distancing showed little difference across societal groups, but were less intense in countries with high interpersonal trust. Alternative underlying mechanisms and policy implications are discussed.
Although research on implicit leadership theories (ILTs) has concentrated on determining which attributes define a leadership prototype, little attention has been paid to testing the relative importance of each of these attributes for individuals’ leadership perceptions. Building on socio-cognitive theories of impression processes, we experimentally explore the formation of leadership perceptions based on the recognition of six key attributes in a series of three experimental studies comprising 566 US-based participants recruited online via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our results show that while certain attributes play an important role in the leader categorization process, others are less relevant. We also demonstrate that some attributes’ importance is contingent on the presence of other attributes and on the leadership schema type activated in respondents’ minds. Consistent with the Leadership Categorization Theory, our findings support the premise that individuals cognitively hold a superordinate leadership prototype, which imposes constraints on their more basic level prototypes. We discuss the implications of these results for leadership theory and practice.
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