A Multi-National Test of the Effect of Age and Sex on Compliance with COVID-19 Public Health Measures (preprint)

Background: The COVID-19 global pandemic has brought far-reaching consequences on individual and societal levels. Social distancing and physical hygiene constitute effective public health measures to limit the spread of the virus. The current study investigates individual age and sex demographics, in interaction with countries’ human development index (HDI), as crucial factors influencing compliance with public health measures in a large multi-national adult lifespan sample.Methods: This report leverages data from a large-scale international collaboration (Van Bavel et al., 2020; https://psyarxiv.com/ydt95/ ) comprising 45,576 individuals from 66 countries/territories collected in Spring 2020. Participants provided self-reports of their compliance with three public health measures (i.e., spatial distancing, physical hygiene, policy support).Findings: Older age, female sex, and lower HDI were independently associated with greater compliance with public health measures. In addition, a significant three-way interaction between participant age, participant sex, and a country’s HDI revealed that compliance was lowest in young males from well-developed countries, while compliance was highest among females across all ages from less-developed countries.Interpretation: Compliance with public health measures is crucial in effectively reducing virus spread. Our findings suggest that age and sex as individual-level demographics, in tandem with HDI as a country-level predictor, affect individuals’ willingness to comply with public health measures. These results highlight the potential of data-driven tailored (i.e., towards specific demographics, countries) health campaigns and public policies in the fight against a global pandemic.Funding Statement: John Templeton Foundation; National Institute on Aging, National Institutes on Health; and Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.Declaration of Interests: All authors declare no competing interests.Ethics Approval Statement: The protocol was approved by the ethics board at the University of Kent.

Aging in an “infodemic”: The role of cognition, affect, and experience on news veracity detection during the COVID-19 pandemic (preprint)

Increasing misinformation spread, including news about COVID-19, poses a threat to older adults but there is little empirical research on this population within the fake news literature. Embedded in the Changes in Integration for Social Decisions in Aging (CISDA) model, this study examined the role of (i) analytical reasoning; (ii) affect; and (iii) news consumption frequency, and their interplay with (iv) news content, in determining news veracity detection in aging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were randomly assigned to view COVID or non-COVID news articles, followed by measures of analytical reasoning, affect, and news consumption frequency. Comparable across young and older adults, detection accuracy was higher for fake than real news unrelated to COVID, and non-COVID fake news detection was predicted by individual differences in analytic reasoning. Examination of chronological age effects further revealed that news veracity detection among more elderly older adults depended on interactions between individual CISDA components and news content. Collectively, these findings suggest that age-related vulnerabilities to deceptive news may only be apparent in very old age. Our findings advance understanding of psychological mechanisms in real and fake news evaluation and empirically support CISDA in its application to news veracity detection in aging.