Encouraged to Cheat? How Federal Incentives and Career Concerns Trigger Under-Reporting of COVID-19 Mortality by Subnational Politicians

Kofanov, Dmitrii; Козлов, В. А.; Libman, Alexander; Zakharov, Nikita

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3726690

Cited by 1 publication

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“…While some countries are developing their own technologies to monitor and analyze data on COVID-19, others still rely on external help with tests, studies and medical equipment (Renzaho, 2020 ). Furthermore, the reliability of data is lower in poorer countries (Muurlink and Taylor-Robinson, 2020 ) and in countries where COVID-19 infections were seriously under-reported, such as Brazil (Freire, 2020 ; Silva and Figueiredo Filho, 2020 ), China (Colson, 2020 ), the US (van Beusekom, 2020 ) and Russia (Kofanov et al, 2020 ; Nechepurenko, 2020 ). As these limitations pose challenges to the development of more comprehensive cross-societal research, we believe these data collection disparities should continue to be substantially integrated into cross-cultural studies on infectious diseases.…”

Section: Cross-societal Differences: Cultural Values and Relational Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Social Lives of Infectious Diseases: Why Culture Matters to COVID-19

2021

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Over the course of the year 2020, the global scientific community dedicated considerable effort to understanding COVID-19. In this review, we discuss some of the findings accumulated between the onset of the pandemic and the end of 2020, and argue that although COVID-19 is clearly a biological disease tied to a specific virus, the culture–mind relation at the heart of cultural psychology is nonetheless essential to understanding the pandemic. Striking differences have been observed in terms of relative mortality, transmission rates, behavioral responses, official policies, compliance with authorities, and even the extent to which beliefs about COVID-19 have been politicized across different societies and groups. Moreover, many minority groups have very different experiences of the pandemic relative to dominant groups, notably through existing health inequities as well as discrimination and marginalization, which we believe calls for a better integration of political and socioeconomic factors into cultural psychology and into the narrative of health and illness in psychological science more broadly. Finally, individual differences in, for example, intolerance of uncertainty, optimism, conspiratorial thinking, or collectivist orientation are influenced by cultural context, with implications for behaviors that are relevant to the spread and impact of COVID-19, such as mask-wearing and social distancing. The interplay between cultural context and the experience and expression of mental disorders continues to be documented by cultural-clinical psychology; the current work extends this thinking to infectious disease, with special attention to diseases spread by social contact and fought at least in part through social interventions. We will discuss cultural influences on the transmission, course, and outcome of COVID-19 at three levels: (1) cross-society differences; (2) within-society communities and intergroup relations; and (3) individual differences shaped by cultural context. We conclude by considering potential theoretical implications of this perspective on infectious disease for cultural psychology and related disciplines, as well as practical implications of this perspective on science communication and public health interventions.

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