Your Health vs. My Liberty: Philosophical beliefs dominated reflection and identifiable victim effects when predicting public health recommendation compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Philosophers and scientists have emphasized how our responses to global crises are often alarmingly ineffective. For example, people often prioritize a few nearby victims over many victims abroad. We wanted to understand individual differences in responses to public health crises during the COVID19 pandemic. Two experiments investigated how compliance with public health recommendations depended on messaging, cognitive style, and prior philosophical beliefs (Total N = 998). One of the two experiments found that compliance with public health recommendations was slightly improved by messaging about individual victims compared to messaging about statistical victims—i.e., "flatten the curve" graphs. However, both experiments found that beliefs about morality were more potent predictors of compliance than strategic messaging or reflective reasoning. In the second experiment, religiosity and beliefs about science were similarly predictive. This suggests that non-compliance with public health recommendations may not be a matter of ineffective messaging or reasoning, but philosophical differences.

Reactance, morality, and disgust: the relationship between affective dispositions and compliance with official health recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Thus, moral convictions about the importance of individual freedom can also be relevant in this context. In line with this hypothesis, Byrd and Bialek (2020) found that the more participants valued liberty over equality, the less likely they were to comply with official regulations. Thus, we hypothesized that (H3) individuals who build their moral convictions on liberty considerations would be less likely to endorse health recommendations.…”

COVID‐19‐related threat perceptions, political identity, and voting in the 2020 presidential election

“…Social identities are integral components of the ITT (Morrison et al, 2009). In the US, differing social identities, such as race, ethnicity, political identity, and gender, were associated with varying perceptions of COVID-19 health threats (Byrd & Bialek, 2020;DeSalvo et al, 2022;Pew Research Center, 2020;Rothgerber et al, 2020), possibly due to low versus high power group membership. High power groups are motivated to defend their privileged status quo, whereas low power groups are less committed to the norms in place (Kamans et al, 2010;Kteily et al, 2013).…”

“…Within the first month of the pandemic, the Pew Research Center (2020) found that more Democrats than Republicans were concerned with realistic threats. Further, conservative identity was negatively associated with social distancing (Rothgerber et al, 2020), mask wearing, and hand washing (Byrd & Bialek, 2020). Instead, Republicans were threatened by procedures and mandates involving the dismantling of American traditions (i.e., symbolic threats).…”

“…Instead, Republicans were threatened by procedures and mandates involving the dismantling of American traditions (i.e., symbolic threats). For example, conservatives were motivated to protect their individual rights and freedom, even if the virus would spread (Byrd & Bialek, 2020) and interpreted mask mandates as threatening to personal choice (Mallinas et al, 2021).…”