Culture and contagion: Individualism and compliance with COVID-19 policy

Abstract

In the first wave of the pandemic, places where geographic mobility declined more rapidly saw fewer cases of COVID-19. And yet, there is significant variation in people’s compliance with the lockdown measures introduced by governments in order to curb the spread of the virus. In this paper, we show that much of this variation can be explained by different cultural traits. Specifically, we advance the hypothesis that individualism, which puts greater value on personal freedom, makes government intervention harder, whereas collectivism, which emphasises the wellbeing of the group, makes collective action easier. We find support for these ideas across 111 countries, but also when exploiting within country variation in the two largest economies in the world: China and the United States. Across a host of specifications, people were less abiding by the lockdown rules in places with greater prevalence of individualistic cultural traits. We conclude that cultural factors play a critical role in successful policy implementation.

Social capital and the spread of covid-19: Insights from european countries

“…Our dynamic estimates show that the role of social capital is reduced as soon as strict European-style lockdowns are implemented. This is in line with macro-level evidence that countries with democratically accountable governments introduced less stringent lockdowns, but were more effective in reducing geographic mobility at the same level of policy stringency ( Chen et al., 2021 ). From this perspective, our study is also related to a literature analyzing the effects of different Covid-19 containment policies (see, e.g., Engle et al., 2020 , Friedson et al., 2021 , Glogowsky, Hansen, Schchtele, 2020 , Painter, Qiu, 2021 ).…”

You before me: How vertical collectivism and feelings of threat predicted more socially desirable behaviour during COVID-19 pandemic

“…Most previous studies examined collectivism at the country level (Chen et al, 2021 ; Webster et al, 2021 ); thus, our results provide more fine-grained insight into how concern for others and putting their needs ahead of one’s own help to promote group-protecting health behavior and greater support for members of the group. Moreover, both vertical and horizontal collectivism correlated with Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, which are other strong predictors of more desirable behavior during the pandemic.…”

“…For instance, a relation was found between country-level collectivism and adherence to COVID-19 containment measures. Specifically, in more individualistic cultures people tend to comply with containment measures less (Chen et al, 2021 ). Concurrently, analysis of data from 98 countries showed that country-level collectivism was related to a lower number of COVID-19 cases and fatalities (Webster et al, 2021 ).…”

Self- and other-orientation in high rank: A cultural psychological approach to social hierarchy

“…The authors found that participants from China and India assigned to the high rank compared to the same rank condition were more likely to punish group members than their American counterparts. In this particular study, punishment was part of a public goods game, so it is possible and perhaps likely that punishment served a social function to ensure group coherence and order through punishing free-riding and deviant behaviors (see also C. Chen et al, 2021).…”