Self-control and beliefs surrounding others’ cooperation predict own health-protective behaviors and support for COVID-19 government regulations: Evidence from two European countries

Abstract

In the current pandemic, both self-regulated health-protective behavior and government-imposed regulations are needed for successful outbreak mitigation. Going forward, researchers and decision-makers must therefore understand the factors contributing to individuals’ engagement in health-protective behavior, and their support for government regulations. Integrating knowledge from the literatures on self-control and cooperation, we explore an informed selection of potential predictors of individuals’ health-protective behaviors as well as their support for government regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Aiming for a conceptual replication in two European countries, we collected data in Switzerland (N = 352) and the UK before (N = 212) and during lockdown (n = 132) and conducted supervised machine learning for variable selection, followed by OLS regression, cross-sectionally and, in the UK sample, across time. Results showed that personal importance of outbreak mitigation and beliefs surrounding others’ cooperation are associated with both health-protective behavior and support for government regulations. Further, Swiss participants high in trait self-control engaged in health-protective behavior more often. Interestingly, perceived risk, age, and political orientation consistently displayed nonsignificant weak to zero associations with both health-protective behavior and support. Together, these findings highlight the contribution of self-control theories in explaining COVID-19-relevant outcomes, and underscore the importance of contextualizing self-control within the cooperative social context.

Climate policy support as a tool to control others’ (but not own) environmental behavior?

“…Participants filled in a twelve-item scale ranging from 1 ( do not agree at all ) to 5 ( completely agree ), with five reverse-scored items. The scale was adapted to the environmental context from [ 11 ], e.g., "I support government regulation of individual behavior to tackle climate change"; "When it comes to climate change, I would prefer it if citizens were left to regulate their own behavior, without the intervention of legislators" (reversed; see “Descriptive Statistics and Zero-Order Correlations” for reliability information for all scales). Higher scores indicate higher support for behavioral climate policy.…”

“…To assess participants’ personal importance of climate change mitigation, we asked them to consider "the goal of doing something against climate change in your everyday life." Participants indicated the extent of their agreement with each of five items on a scale ranging from 1 ( do not agree at all ) to 5 ( completely agree ), e.g., "This goal is important to me" (adapted to the environmental context from [ 11 ]).…”

“…This necessity of supplementing self-regulated behavior with external intervention to steer individual action is characteristic of large-scale collective-action problems [ 5 ]. For instance, in the COVID-19 context, collective goal pursuit, that is, pandemic mitigation, similarly requires individual self-controlled behavior in combination with behavioral policy to steer individual efforts (see [ 11 ]).…”

“…Such external regulation of individual behavior may be an attractive means of aligning individual collectively relevant behavior, and it has indeed been shown that individuals may see climate policy as a means of externally regulating and restraining environmental behavior for large-scale behavior change in qualitative studies [ 37 , 38 ]. Recent work on COVID-19 policy substantiates this point, showing that perceiving others as insufficiently compliant with health-protective behaviors is associated with increased support for policy, presumably to regulate such behavior [ 11 ]. This aligns with classic work showing that individuals perceive others as more malleable by social influence than themselves [ 39 ].…”

Increased Risk Perception, Distress Intolerance and Health Anxiety in Stricter Lockdowns: Self-Control as a Key Protective Factor in Early Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Trait self-control correlates positively with tolerance for COVID-19 generated distress (Schnell & Krampe, 2020) and with goal-directed behavior regardless of COVID-19 related uncertainties (Kokkoris & Stavrova, 2021). Self-control moderates the relationship between perceived severity of COVID-19 illness and mental health issues (Li et al, 2020), is related to COVID-19 healthprotective behavior (e.g., social distancing; Wolff et al, 2020), and to supporting governmental regulations during lockdown (Kukowski et al, 2021).…”