Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public health behaviour, we present a dataset comprising of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries. This dataset was collected for the International Collaboration on Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 project (ICSMP COVID-19). This social science survey invited participants around the world to complete a series of moral and psychological measures and public health attitudes about COVID-19 during an early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between April and June 2020). The survey included seven broad categories of questions: COVID-19 beliefs and compliance behaviours; identity and social attitudes; ideology; health and well-being; moral beliefs and motivation; personality traits; and demographic variables. We report both raw and cleaned data, along with all survey materials, data visualisations, and psychometric evaluations of key variables.

How political orientation, economic precarity, and participant demographics impact compliance with COVID-19 prevention measures in a Dutch representative sample

We examine the relationship between individuals' political orientations and their compliance with and attitudes towards COVID-19 prevention measures using a Dutch nationally representative online sample. Due to ideological differences, we predict that people with left-wing and progressive orientations will comply more with and have more favourable attitudes towards COVID-19 prevention measures than people with right-wing, populist, and conservative orientations, while right-wing extremists will have lowest levels of compliance and least favourable attitudes towards prevention measures. Our results support these predictions. Furthermore, we test the effect of individuals' economic precarity and demographic characteristics on compliance and attitudes towards prevention measures. Results show that people experiencing economic difficulties do comply yet have less favourable attitudes towards the measures, while fear of economic loss is related to both lower compliance and less favourable attitudes towards measures. Older citizens have higher levels of compliance and more positive attitudes, whereas gender and education are not consistently related to compliance and attitudes. We further explore how these three sets of factors (political orientation, economic precarity, and demographics) are related to policy preferences for either reducing infection rates or reducing the economic impact of the pandemic. Our results suggest that all three sets of predictors are important in shaping measure compliance as well as attitudes and policy support and should all be considered for a comprehensive understanding of individuals' responses to COVID-19 measures.

Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multinational data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar results were found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, and collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-neglible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic.

Just a Flu? Self-perceived infection mediates the link between conspiracy beliefs and Covid-19 health beliefs and behaviors.

The Covid-19 pandemic has inspired many conspiracy theories, which are associated with detrimental health beliefs and behaviors (e.g. reduced physical distancing; decreased vaccination intentions). We propose a previously unrecognized mediator of these relationships: A self-perceived likelihood to already have experienced a Covid-19 infection. Results from a large sample (N = 9033) revealed that self-perceived infections mediated the link between conspiracy beliefs and health beliefs and behaviors. These findings emerged independently of institutional distrust, and actual infections as indicated by a positive medical test. These findings suggest that conspiracy beliefs shape people's interpretation of the physical signals of their own body.